You know when you go to Google and search for “how tall is Tom Cruise” and a nice little box pops up with the answer? That’s the Knowledge Graph hard at work. In 2012, Google released this feature that allowed queries to be answered right in the search results. That meant changes in the way users interact with search engines. While it doesn’t typically display for adult searches, and it’s not directly related to sex bloggers, it’s still good to know. These are some best practices for writing while keeping Knowledge Graph in mind.
What Is The Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine search results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources1. Knowledge Graph delivers answers to search queries faster and displays them within the search results.
Knowledge Graph displays these instant answer boxes in approximately 30% of factual queries2 within its organic search results. Although tracking your visibility in instant answers from Knowledge Graph is pretty difficult at the moment unless you’re using specific tools, capturing this position can result in a higher click-through rate to the cited page.
Google is constantly changing and testing things, but at the moment, it looks as though following these parameters make it more likely for your website to show up in these instant answers:
- The query is a factual question. These can range from dates, weather, and math equations to recipes and individual answers on a website’s FAQ page.
- The website is already ranking on the first page of Google (position doesn’t seem to matter as long as it’s already on the first page of results. Google just needs to determine that your site is already valuable to users).
Right now, Knowledge Graph answers are extracted snippets from the website. This means that copy that has with factual, user-focused questions in mind is more useful. Content types that have been pulled into the Knowledge Graph include charts, tables, maps, forms, and snippets. While there’s guaranteed way to get pulled into these results, a few things can help:
Ask the Question on the Page
The best example of this is an FAQ page. The question itself is present on the page and can help search engine crawlers understand the content better than if the answer existed without the question’s context.
Answers are only shown for factual queries. Opinion-based or otherwise non-factual queries can’t be answered from Knowledge Graph because the answer isn’t definitive and concrete.
|
Factual Queries |
Non-Factual Queries |
|
Who is the Queen of England? |
Where’s the best pizza place near me? |
|
How tall is the Empire State Building? |
Who is the best doctor in Phoenix? |
|
How far is Earth from the Sun? |
What is the best hotel in Tallahassee? |
| Who invented the printing press? |
Who is going to win the next World Cup? |
Place the Answer at the Top of the Page
Crawlers are able to sift through content on a whole page, but crawlers do tend to consider information higher up on the page to be more important.
Bing and Yahoo also have their respective instant answer technology3 but in the US Google still holds the majority of the search engine market share4. Ensuring that on-page content is clear and that questions are articulated in the content, near the top of the page will increase the likelihood of a website being included in Knowledge Graph results in all search engines.
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Sources
1: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Graph)
2: Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/study-rich-answers-showing-up-for-8-6-more-google-queries-this-year-234058)
3: Boost Blog (http://blog.boostability.com/google-bing-yahoo-whats-the-difference/)
4: ComScore (http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Releases-October-2015-U.S.-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings)