13 Search Marketers on Optimizing for Implicit Search

Implic­it search is an area is still devel­op­ing and brands haven’t opti­mized their efforts around it. Here are 13 search experts on how to best opti­mize for implic­it search now – and in the not-so-dis­tant future.

Lisa Lacy By Lisa Lacy. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Implic­it search, in which fac­tors like loca­tion, device and search his­to­ry influ­ence results even if they are not explic­it­ly includ­ed in a query, could bring new oppor­tu­ni­ties for SEOs and mar­keters alike as more and more con­nect­ed devices con­verge in the Inter­net of Things.

Here are 13 search experts on how to best opti­mize for implic­it search now – and in the not-so-dis­tant future.


Nick Papagiannis, Vice President and Search Director at Cramer-Krasselt

Nicholas Papagiannis Cramer Krasselt

Implic­it search or seman­tic search has been inte­grat­ed into the major search engine algo­rithms over the past few years. It basi­cal­ly offers a more refined search result based on a user’s intent. In the past, Google would just pro­vide a stan­dard result page for a term regard­less of try­ing to dis­cern what the user’s intent was. So now, if a user search­es for “bears,” the results are not always about the ani­mal. Seman­tic search takes into account var­i­ous fac­tors to dis­cern if some­one may be search­ing for the foot­ball team, etc.

Since Google is offer­ing a more refined search result, it not only pro­vides search users a bet­ter expe­ri­ence, it pro­vides brands an oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­cept a more qual­i­fied user and poten­tial­ly a high­er con­ver­sion. Brands can take advan­tage of seman­tic search by look­ing at the con­tent they’re offer­ing on their sites.

Brands should con­sid­er the types of con­tent that a user may be look­ing for through­out the pur­chase fun­nel. Some search phras­es indi­cate intent to pur­chase well ahead of the search, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the research phase. Brands will have to cre­ate con­tent with those terms to rank for those search results.

They should also look to lever­age social data to iden­ti­fy what con­tent peo­ple are seek­ing out dur­ing the intent phase, and cre­ate con­tent around that since Google will most like­ly pro­vide search results around the con­text of that lan­guage.

Search query reports in Google Search Con­sole offer engage­ment sta­tis­tics in Google Ana­lyt­ics. For high-vol­ume search­es that have low engage­ment or high drop-off rates, brands should con­sid­er run­ning a results page based on loca­tion and some oth­er fac­tors. If a brand’s con­tent doesn’t match the type of results show­ing up in the results, brand should con­sid­er tweak­ing it accord­ing­ly.


Matt Bentley, CEO of CanIRank

Matt Bentley CanIRank

Implic­it search is the con­ver­gence of tech­nol­o­gy – IoT and ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing with com­put­ers in cars, refrig­er­a­tors, watch­es and every­where else. And with improv­ing voice recog­ni­tion, improv­ing nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, improv­ing per­son­al­iza­tion and rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithms — all of that is now com­ing togeth­er.

There are dif­fer­ent ways of inter­act­ing with implic­it search, just as with mobile. So when my fridge runs out of milk and wants to order milk, it’s a search – what to get, where to buy it from – using an algo­rithm about which one I usu­al­ly buy (organ­ic 2%) and how much I pay. It’s the same thing when I do a search to find a mechan­ic. It’s not explic­it­ly web search­es in the sense we’re used to, but they do involve some­thing very, very sim­i­lar to search, so it’s a very inter­est­ing time for SEOs because milk com­pa­nies, mechan­ics, and the rest want to be the ones who are vis­i­ble.

I think a lot of implic­it search right now is dri­ven by same algo­rithms every­one is famil­iar with. The imme­di­ate to-dos are to opti­mize for those things and the same sorts of con­sid­er­a­tions that go into SEO and local opti­miza­tion. Longer term, we’re going to see much more sophis­ti­cat­ed tools that are basi­cal­ly machines study­ing machines. SEO is pret­ty com­plex already, but we will kind of man­u­al­ly decon­struct algo­rithms and fig­ure out what’s going on, and once we have hun­dreds or thou­sands of algo­rithms, it’s going to require very sophis­ti­cat­ed tools to fig­ure out how you can make your var­i­ous pres­ences online – like your web­site and Ama­zon store…[rise to the top].

I think the best thing brands can do right now would be to start to pay atten­tion to the dif­fer­ent ver­ti­cals and search engines that pop up. One exam­ple would be if you’re in elec­tron­ics, take a look at how a search on Ama­zon ranks and returns results for your prod­uct and what fac­tors go in. If you’re a local busi­ness, take a look at Yelp and Google Places. We already have great ver­ti­cal search engines – like Hotels.com and Tri­pAd­vi­sor — and spe­cial­ized algo­rithms that hint at what’s to come, like review data and veloc­i­ty of sales. They’re the same sort of data points that implic­it search algo­rithms will be look­ing at and using. Ulti­mate­ly… if you’re well-opti­mized for Ama­zon, you’re prob­a­bly putting your­self in a good posi­tion for when your fridge is order­ing milk.


Amanda Murray, Content Marketing Specialist at seoplus+

amanda-murray-seoplus

Brands can best take advan­tage of implic­it search­es by pro­vid­ing cus­tomized, high qual­i­ty con­tent that is craft­ed specif­i­cal­ly with search con­text in mind. You can’t just spit out con­tent stuffed with key­words and expect to rank well in search­es. Instead, you need to have a deep under­stand­ing of the queries that are dri­ving traf­fic to your site and the con­text of those search­es. From there, you can cre­ate con­tent and design pages that appeal to the most valu­able con­text per­sonas that are more like­ly to lead to con­ver­sions and have a high life­time val­ue.

As it stands now, you can say what­ev­er you want about your­self on your site. You have com­plete con­trol of the sto­ry told on your web­site, and there are few ways for the Inter­net to ver­i­fy that what you are por­tray­ing is accu­rate or true. With the cur­rent lim­it­ed abil­i­ties of AI and IoT, busi­ness­es and prod­ucts could like­ly get by with this and rank in implic­it search. How­ev­er, as the realm of AI and IoT con­tin­ues to devel­op, it will become smarter and more intu­itive.

With this, I pre­dict that not only will qual­i­ty, con­sis­tent con­tent be a high pri­or­i­ty, but also the amount and qual­i­ty of links you have point­ing back to your site will become a major fac­tor in rank­ing above your com­pe­ti­tion through implic­it search. The best way to build these con­nec­tions online is through hard work, grass­roots out­reach and PR to net­work and build rela­tion­ships and links.


Paul Berry, CEO of RebelMouse

Paul Berry RebelMouse 2-1

Peo­ple no longer search for con­tent – or not the way they used to. It does hap­pen, but user behav­ior has shift­ed from ‘lazy led’, to ‘social plus mobile’ and is dri­ven by sig­nif­i­cant news sto­ries, or some­thing real­ly cool I’m inter­est­ed in.

I now expect con­tent to come to me and so actu­al­ly we’re liv­ing in an era in which the rea­son it comes to me is because of all the pages I fol­low. Implic­it search is built into each piece of con­tent… the search you do as a cre­ator because peo­ple are have instant expec­ta­tions. It maps back to what you’re say­ing across the board, and there are going to be all these events that hap­pen – busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties – that are trig­gered by pas­sive search. We set up sig­nals to the AI, which is Google, Face­book, Tes­la and soon our refrig­er­a­tors, and the more we give sig­nals, the more oppor­tu­ni­ties there are in con­tent and retail and e‑commerce or reorder­ing because it’s out of the same par­a­digm that media com­pa­nies are going through – win­ning in search sim­ply isn’t enough any­more.

I think peo­ple will under­stand new dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods are hap­pen­ing as a result of how you get out to peo­ple and com­pa­nies that under­stand that for their own sec­tor and how, for some, under­stand­ing how Alexa works with Echo and how a brand gets to be rec­om­mend­ed. And obvi­ous­ly Ama­zon is set­ting them­selves up with AI to be #1 rec­om­men­da­tion engine for com­merce.

What we see on the mar­ket­ing lay­er now, and on the CMO-lev­el lay­er, is that ad block­ing is a real­i­ty an we have to cre­ate con­tent worth shar­ing. Great mar­keters will under­stand new implic­it dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works. It doesn’t mean just spend­ing on Face­book, but under­stand­ing how organ­ic works on Face­book — which in turn is under­stand­ing implic­it search.


Phil Buckley, Director of Technical Search at Adapt Partners

phil-buckley

When I set out to explain implic­it search to a non-search nerd, I usu­al­ly com­pare it to a con­ver­sa­tion you have with a nor­mal human.

Have you tried that new Ital­ian restau­rant in town?”

Some­times it’s flow of con­ver­sa­tion, “Who was pres­i­dent in 1982?” fol­lowed by “Who was his first wife?”

In both cas­es, you need con­text to answer the ques­tions. Geo-aware­ness for the first and an under­stand­ing of the first ques­tion to answer the sec­ond with “Jane Wyman.”

The rea­son search engines need to mas­ter this is because we’re lazy humans. We want to speak our queries and not have to repeat our­selves. We’ve spent the last 200,000 years per­fect­ing how we relate to each oth­er, then we changed every­thing for a while when we had to fig­ure out how to Google and now Google is final­ly catch­ing up.

My advice is sim­ple: Find out how peo­ple are talk­ing about your com­pa­ny. Do they call you the car repair place next to Cost­co? Then add that to your web­site.

Like most search-relat­ed things, the names are more con­fus­ing than the actu­al day-to-day usage.

As far into the future as I can see, which isn’t very far, implic­it search will remain a work in progress that will feed into the next gen­er­a­tion of IoT. Our cur­rent IoT world looks like the 1945 com­put­ers — a great start but the future looks like an entire­ly dif­fer­ent ani­mal.


Jordan Bell, CMO of FansAgency.com

Jordan Bell FansAgency.com

The big dif­fer­ence with implic­it search is that Google now presents results per­son­al­ized for your loca­tion, device, brows­ing his­to­ry, behav­ior and, most recent­ly, the ques­tions it thinks you as a user would ask next. From a brand per­spec­tive, it becomes impor­tant to con­sid­er not just the basic infor­ma­tion your com­pa­ny pro­vides, but now also to have indi­vid­ual pages for each of the top­ics that your cus­tomers are look­ing for answers on.

So for IoT if you think about how Ama­zon has those but­tons that you toss on your appli­ances that reorders spe­cif­ic brands, then Ama­zon has rela­tion­ships with those brands.

It will be a lit­tle dif­fer­ent with search as the entire pur­pose of search is to under­stand the implic­it ques­tion a user has and then pro­vide and answer. The only con­nec­tion this would have to AI and IoT is if your intel­li­gent things were some­how con­nect­ed to a search as opposed to an auto­mat­ed shop­ping expe­ri­ence. This brings me back to the orig­i­nal point which is that regard­less of how the IoT advances, search mar­keters need to devel­op their sites to answer the ques­tions that are being asked. Whether it is a user that is pos­ing the ques­tion or the device the user owns.


Luke Rees, Digital Marketing Lead at AccuraCast

Luke Rees AccuraCast

With implic­it search – which per­son­al­izes results based on fac­tors like user loca­tion, device and brows­ing his­to­ry – the key to suc­cess is show­ing up in the moments that mat­ter, rather than being #1 for one or two main key­words. Search­ing for a restau­rant near­by, pulling up a recipe, look­ing for replace­ment head­phones – these are the moments when deci­sions are actu­al­ly being made.

To under­stand the moments that mat­ter most to cus­tomers, mar­keters will need to build sol­id cus­tomer jour­neys using his­tor­i­cal cus­tomer data, pin­point the most impor­tant touch­points and use these insights to opti­mize their pages accord­ing­ly. Things to con­sid­er would be:

  • Rather than hav­ing a gen­er­al ser­vices page, each ser­vice should have its own ded­i­cat­ed page that is opti­mized with longer-tail key­words based on searcher intent;
  • Each local list­ing must be up to date with loca­tion infor­ma­tion. Whilst enter­pris­es will also need to cre­ate a unique page for each local branch, small­er busi­ness­es should sim­ply put it in the foot­er of each page;
  • Reviews should also fac­tor into the strat­e­gy — mar­keters will need to decide whether they want to opti­mize their list­ings on review sites or whether they want reviews/testimonials on their web­site to rank high­er.

With paid implic­it search, mar­keters will again need to refer to the data in their typ­i­cal cus­tomer jour­neys to decide which moments to tar­get. Always spec­i­fy the loca­tion and pref­er­en­tial device (if you’re pro­mot­ing an app, for exam­ple), and use remar­ket­ing lists for search ads (which is essen­tial­ly per­son­al­iza­tion based on his­tor­i­cal data). Google also announced…[it] would be intro­duc­ing some­thing called “Sim­i­lar Audi­ences for Search,” which means mar­keters will be able to remar­ket on search to peo­ple who have pre­vi­ous­ly been served an ad and who may have not actu­al­ly vis­it­ed the web­site.


Jason Parks, President of The Media Captain

Jason Parks Media Captain

Brands and mar­keters need to invest more time and resources in qual­i­ty con­tent through­out their entire site. The infor­ma­tion should be infor­ma­tive and not only intend­ed to close a sale or bring on a new client, but to pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion to your site vis­i­tor.

If you own a paint­ing com­pa­ny, don’t just list out the prices for your ser­vices but write con­tent on the most pop­u­lar col­ors for the sum­mer of 2016. This type of rich con­tent through­out your site will be very ben­e­fi­cial for the trend of implic­it search.

With implic­it search, search engines know more about vis­i­tors and are able to cater search results more specif­i­cal­ly for the user. These search queries have got­ten more long tailed.

By invest­ing more time and resources in qual­i­ty con­tent, vis­i­tors will be more like­ly to find your site ear­li­er in the mar­ket­ing fun­nel. They might not be look­ing to pur­chase right away, but your brand will become top of mind.

When arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence fur­ther devel­ops, just like a brand now wants a cur­rent or prospec­tive cus­tomer to sign up for its email list, brands will want this per­son to make ref­er­ences that they are a brand advo­cate.


Jessica Elle, Digital Marketing Practioner at Forest Giant

jessica_elle

To bet­ter con­trol how a web­site ranks through implic­it search, you’ll need to put on your think­ing cap and research. Implic­it search tends to rear its head the strongest through local­ized search­es — busi­ness­es and ser­vices that are com­mon­ly tied to a spe­cif­ic city, state or region. Use tools such as Google’s Key­word Plan­ner to test vari­a­tions of your tar­get­ed key­word groups by loca­tion — what are the most pop­u­lar queries in your area relat­ed to your busi­ness? Are there sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences on search queries by loca­tion? By dig­ging deep into region­al search data that Google pro­vides, you’ll be able to ana­lyze on a gran­u­lar lev­el how users dis­cov­er your busi­ness and apply the find­ings to your SEO strat­e­gy.

I don’t believe implic­it search will play a big role through AI and IoT — at least not at this stage… implic­it search is very much depen­dent on the search engine, as rank­ing fac­tors are var­ied among the field­’s play­ers such as Google Search, Face­book Graph Search and A9. If you’re rank­ing #1 for a spe­cif­ic search term on Google, that will in no way guar­an­tee you the same spot on anoth­er search engine for the same term.

I don’t believe reorders can be swayed by implic­it search, nor should they…there are too many fac­tors that go into a pur­chase deci­sion and mar­keters should­n’t be able to affect it, at least not when it’s auto­mat­ed.

While implic­it search for IoT is fea­si­ble, it’s not prac­ti­cal. Sure, it’d be a mar­keter’s dream to sim­ply opti­mize a prod­uct in order to gen­er­ate auto­mat­ed sales, but is it ben­e­fi­cial for the user? That’s the dilem­ma with mar­keters and why dis­ci­plines like SEO exist. We can try to game the process all we want, but in the end we need to focus on the user. It’s the eth­i­cal thing to do.

Here’s anoth­er exam­ple of a poten­tial IoT implic­it search sit­u­a­tion. Imag­ine you’re in a dri­ver­less taxi­cab in a new city. You’re hun­gry, so you ask your Google-inte­grat­ed taxi to take you to a restau­rant — any restau­rant. Tell me: how pissed would you be if you end­ed up at a high­ly expen­sive, four-star bistro just because they had the bud­get to hire mar­keters to opti­mize the site? What if it was a fast food eatery? Either way, you’re not the one mak­ing the call in that instance.

In a nut­shell: Implic­it search does not equate to implic­it intent. Implic­it search attempts to under­stand user intent, but all the tech­nol­o­gy in the world won’t be able to tell you exact­ly what I’m think­ing and hop­ing for. And it should­n’t.


Kendall Kilander, SEO Specialist at One Click

Kendall Kilander One Click

Implic­it search is cer­tain­ly shift­ing the way we think about SEO and, in par­tic­u­lar, empha­sis on key­word research. Here are my top two tips for how brands can best cap­i­tal­ize on implic­it search:

  1. Pro­vide Google with more infor­ma­tion about your brand through meta info.

The more Google knows about your com­pa­ny, the bet­ter it can decide when and how to show in the SERPs. For exam­ple, if Google knows your loca­tion and your hours, you might be more like­ly to show up in the SERPs for a spe­cif­ic geo­graph­ic loca­tion or dur­ing the hours when your busi­ness is open. You can think about it this way: If you search ‘Deliv­ery restau­rants’, Google will auto­mat­i­cal­ly show you restau­rants avail­able for deliv­ery in your area even though you did­n’t search for your city or zip code. The more info you can pro­vide about your com­pa­ny through meta infor­ma­tion, the bet­ter. Exam­ples of this include: com­pa­ny address, prod­uct offer­ings, prod­uct pric­ing info, etc. You can imple­ment Schema.org struc­tured markup to send these sig­nals to Google.

  1. Cre­ate very spe­cif­ic, tar­get­ed and rel­e­vant pages

With the shift from explic­it to implic­it search, it’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant to cre­ate more spe­cif­ic, tar­get­ed and rel­e­vant con­tent. For exam­ple, cre­at­ing one catchall page with infor­ma­tion on sev­er­al of the products/services you offer might not be enough. Instead, you should cre­ate indi­vid­ual pages for each of your products/services. Your con­tent will be more rel­e­vant to a small­er sub­set of search­es and should help to increase your chances of being shown in the SERPs, even with implic­it search.


Brittany Maroney, Director of Communication and Public Relations at ZOG Digital

Brittany Maroney Zog Digital

As search engines have got smarter, they began iden­ti­fy­ing [and] cat­e­go­riz­ing users. This allows implic­it search crawlers to build a social pro­file of you based on where you work and play on the web. One of the best exam­ples of implic­it search is how mobile search func­tion­al­i­ty has changed the way we search.

Mobile search is dif­fer­ent to desk­top search because we gen­er­al­ly search for broad­er key­words and we use two types of key­words: explic­it and implic­it. So a mobile search for a restau­rant or a retail item is an implic­it search because it does not state a loca­tion. There­fore local SEO is most­ly based on implic­it key­word intent. With the increase of devices also comes an increase in mobile web search: 16 to 25 per­cent of all Google search­es are now on mobile, mean­ing that more and more peo­ple are car­ry­ing out implic­it search­es. Local SEO is more impor­tant than ever before.

Some tips to ampli­fy your local search func­tion­al­i­ty, and there­by your implic­it search, is to have name, address and tele­phone reflect­ed on sev­er­al plat­forms such as social media, and the foot­er of your web­page. You also should con­sid­er your user expe­ri­ence and ensure that maps, text and pho­tographs all shape your con­tact page. Reviews, trust and author­i­ty also build a strong local­ized rank­ing and will help your click-through rate.


Joey Baird, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Sparxoo

Joey Baird Sparxoo

Make sure your web­site is mak­ing use of struc­tured data. This allows Google to under­stand the basic details of your web­site more eas­i­ly and is there­fore more apt to serve it in search results that do not explic­it­ly state what they are look­ing for. It is also impor­tant to make sure it is opti­mized for local SEO and opti­mized for mobile. This is because many implic­it-type search­es are peo­ple search­ing for ser­vices near them, which are local in nature and done from mobile devices.


Evan Calafates, Search Marketing Manager of ECG Group

evan calafates-1

Implic­it search real­ly took hold with the Hum­ming­bird Algo­rithm Update from Google in 2013.

It was real­ly excit­ing as Google began tak­ing into account things like loca­tion of the query to fac­tor in what gets indexed. This end­ed a long his­to­ry of local-based busi­ness­es com­plain­ing that they didn’t rank for very broad key­words. Since then, for these types of busi­ness­es, we run our rank­ing reports down to spe­cif­ic zip codes to see how we rank local­ly.

I think the biggest refine­ment that I would be curi­ous to test is dig­i­tal aware­ness impact­ing organ­ic rank­ings. I’ve heard a lot on brows­ing his­to­ry affect­ing the results now via implic­it search. So how do we impact our audi­ences’ brows­ing his­to­ry? I think the next step is to sell in dig­i­tal aware­ness cam­paigns such as dis­play and video, with the added val­ue of impact­ing rank­ings. If a ban­ner is clicked, or a user hears a com­pelling video on YouTube, these actions could then increase the brows­ing his­to­ry of your tar­get audi­ence to assets you own. If you’re close­ly track­ing rank­ings as I sug­gest­ed above, you should see if there is an added impact to your dig­i­tal aware­ness cam­paigns (this strat­e­gy wouldn’t be lim­it­ed to dig­i­tal aware­ness, but it’s eas­i­er to track).


What are your thoughts on how brands can opti­mize for implic­it search?

Lisa Lacy

Written by Lisa Lacy

Lisa is a senior features writer for Inked. She also previously covered digital marketing for Incisive Media. Her background includes editorial positions at Dow Jones, the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, AOL, Amazon, Hearst, Martha Stewart Living and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

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