Why Marketers Need to Look at Traffic Sources Other Than Google
People are looking for content relevant to their needs, smart marketers are taking advantage of traffic sources other than Google such as Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram to deliver their content.
While Google continues to dominate the search function and is expected to do so as it enters the field of artificial learning with RankBrain, smart marketers would do well not to ignore other potential traffic sources.
Even with the emergence and inroads that machine learning techniques like RankBrain are expected to make on traffic generation, there can be no substituting site architecture principles or organic searches. This is very well evidenced with the increasing popularity of content search sites like Pinterest, SkyNet, YouTube, Yelp, or even Facebook.
RankBrain – Changing the Search Landscape
RankBrain is Google’s proprietary technology for an artificial learning system called machine learning that helps it to process its search results better. Machine learning is an advanced concept that involves machines like computers teaching themselves how to do jobs better rather than the usual process of humans teaching them or implementing detailed and superior programming. While machine learning is technically a part of artificial intelligence, the two terms are often used interchangeably.
According to a NY SEO expert at Walnut Solutions, RankBrain, a component of Google’s search algorithm, helps it to match results to queries better by being able to see which web pages are actually being visited irrespective of issues like page authority or rank.
Factors Affecting Search
The way searches are being performed nowadays is also heavily impacted by a number of other factors such as mobile devices, video, spam, and privacy.
According to experts, the most important issues that are driving online searches today are:
Content
It needs to be appreciated that Google has always preferred to focus on searchers rather than marketers. It remains the responsibility of marketers to understand who the visitors are and what they want so that they can be reached out to with relevant content that satisfies their requirements. Marketers need to ensure a tie-in so that they can benefit from this process. Google makes it clear that it will reward content marketers who make customer experience the cornerstone of their SEO efforts.
Visuals
Now that Google has started to rank images as well, it helps to include visuals that add value to the user experience. Marketers need to figure out the best platform for them, depending upon their requirements. For example, for e-commerce, it is a better idea to focus on sites like Amazon, EBay, Google shopping, and Etsy; for apps, it could be Google Play and iTunes, while for video it could be YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook.
Increasingly Google is getting better in its ability to match returns to the intent of searchers, however, users stand to benefit more than marketers. This new competence makes the use of keywords that match directly far less important. The loss of this competitive advantage is being made up by marketers trying to get better ranks across a larger set of keywords and terms to increase the chances of searchers being able to find them. Thus, more than ever before, the context of the content is critical.
The Emergence of Twitter and the Decline of Google+
According to experts, it is clear that Google+ is heading to its demise and Twitter has taken its place as the primary social result of Google. Initially, Google had termed Google+ as a social network but after not having been able to meet with much success, it started referring to it as a social layer across all of Google’s services. Paying closer attention to the manner in which Twitter is able to exercise influence on keywords and the search engine results page will help marketers to figure out how Google Tweet display is impacted by factors like “recency” and engagement.
Conclusion
In the current context, a good search ranking means that users stick with their first choice. However, Google’s engineers themselves admit that users really do not have the full picture. It may be quite possible that in the future, a number of algorithms may act together to determine the results page. Marketers would do well to concentrate their energies on pages that are performing well, and ensuring that the site performs better by hiding from Google the pages that have high bounce rates.
