Have you ever sent a text that you thought was very innocent, even friendly, and found yourself in the middle of a massive misunderstanding? As our lives and conversations become ever more filtered by the written word, tone and intonation, and most of all intent, become harder and harder to convey. First email, and now text, has created a barrier to communication that we seek to bridge with the use of extensive emojis, sideways smiley faces, and the liberal application of exclamation marks to ensure that the reader knows we’re friendly!
The intent behind words matters. And so it goes for online searches, where search engines have to not only interpret the literal words that we enter in the search bar, but also have to interpret the intent behind the words. Anyone who has ever yelled at Siri understands the difficulty that machine intelligence sometimes has in understanding what it is we really want.
Semantic Search
Products like Google Now (also known as OK Google) and Siri for Apple ushered in the age of “semantic search” in which search engines and virtual assistants tried to integrate all of the information they had available in order to aggregate that information into user-friendly, on-demand information for users of Android and Apple mobile products. In order to do that, however, these systems had to figure out how to understand and interpret the intent behind the queries from users.
So for example, if you are trying to use a virtual assistant device to find a restaurant for lunch, the assistant needs to take into account the time of day, the location of the query, and perhaps even a history of your personal preferences in order to understand and correctly interpret the information you need. It then also needs to figure out what content to provide in response to that query. Giving you a search result for the corporate headquarters of your favorite restaurant won’t do you much good when your stomach is rumbling and you just want to find out the nearest location and its operating hours.
So what does this mean to you? It means that SEO is no longer just about the “right” title tag or keyword stuffing your content. Now, the content needs to be long enough to encourage the “thinking” search engine to correctly understand, contextualize, and interpret a user search and apply your content to it. As the search engine becomes more sophisticated in its ability to understand what really meets users’ needs, your content has to keep up and become more sophisticated in the ways that it speaks to users and the kind of information it provides.
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