What’s New in Search?

How destinations can leverage new search trends

Background

Cornell University School of Hotel Administration

TravelCLICK, Director of Sales

Milestone Internet Marketing, Regional Director of Sales

Sercius

Meanwhile…

What SEO Isn’t

Even Gmail knows this is spam!

Let’s get specific on these trends

Penguin/Panda algorithmic changes

Google+

Authorship

Knowledge Graph

Google+

Some Perspective

*http://mashable.com/2012/09/18/google-has-400-million-members/, September 2012

Google+ has 400 million users, 100 million active*

Facebook has 1 billion users

Why does Google+ matter?

Since search is becoming semantic in nature, you need a social component

Bing has Facebook and Twitter, so they don’t need Bing+

Google needs more social information to complete the picture

Is Google+’s audience all you need for marketing? No. Does it still matter? Yes.

Personalized Search

Several of the socialized results appear within the SERP’s, but Google has much more info than they’re showing.

Action Item: Focus on growing your online network to mirror your offline network.

Personal Site

Personal Site

Personal Site

Where to start on Google+? Merge Local and Business Listing.

Action Item: Update your listing with as much useful information as possible.

Book through OTA’s or hotel directly

Greater emphasis on photos with ability to

leave comments

More social

Reviewers use real names. You can still respond to reviews.

More social

Impact

G+ Getting Organized

Organize your contacts into circles

Segment circles in a similar way to email marketing

Share targeted content with your circles

Try Hangouts with your fans and tell them about upcoming events.

Use Ripples to Find Influencers

Looks at ripples from your posts

Look at ripples from your competitors posts

Authorship

What does Authorship look like?

You know you want to click on this one.

Authorship Influence on Rankings

Opportunity for sites with poor visibility to create valuable content and get visibility

Search is becoming more social. Credibility is tied to an individual, not just a company.

Links shared on Google+ are crawled and indexed very quickly

Authorship Set-up

You need to complete a circuit of verified trust between Google and your published content. There are several methods to configure this.

Resource: plus.google.com/authorship

Test: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Knowledge Graph

Knowledge Graph

What is the knowledge graph? Announced in May, the knowledge graph provides users with semantic search driven results.

It’s this thing!

What does it mean for SEO?

Carousel introduced in August

Action Item: Ensure that you are providing useful content about these top attractions, written for people, not the search engines.

How is it devised?

Essentially based on a collection of databases including Wikipedia, Freebase, Google Maps, and Google Shopping

What can you do with it?

Action Item: Correct your information. Algorithms and human review determine if a fact should be corrected.

Knowledge Graph and SEO Implications

When content is available in a structured format then the probability of it being visible in the Knowledge Graph and in the SERP’s increases.

Content expressed as microdata makes it even easier for it to be understood by the search engines.

When this clear, structured content gets shared by authority sites (think social!), it gains more credibility and traction.

Where to start?

Start the conversation with factual, structured content

Write the kind of content that you see Knowledge Graph using

Fluffy content won’t get you UGC and engagement

Use Google+ to share targeted content to your segmented circles

• Post• Share others useful posts• Link to useful information on your site• Add your site to your ‘Contributor To’ section