Context Is King! Everything You Need to Know About the New Era of SEO

Google is trying to change the game of the results and focus more on the user, as we’ve heard multiple times before and seen it into action with its various updates and algorithm changes. What do users want? What are they searching for? What do they need? What is the context of their search?

Search has changed dramatically over the years and that is natural. And websites should keep up with all these changes if they still want to rank in top positions; even if that means to decipher Google’s algorithms and patents. No worries though, as we’re going to help you understand Google’s updates, as knotty as they might seem.

1. Why Context Is King

Context is something beyond the keywords. The benefits of contextual search include helping the user get faster and more accurate results based on their query.

For instance, if you’re searching for “Batman” in October, most likely you’ll be shown websites selling Halloween costumes. If you’re searching for “Batman” while you are in Turkey, you will probably be redirected to info related to the city of Batman.

For a long period of time, content was considered king. At this moment, context is king, as experts named it. Some other experts think otherwise:

Google is focusing on user intent for more accurate and personalized results. The contextual results are based on the user intent. The search engine optimization process will need to make room for the new approach Google desires to command.

Focus on the user, the user intent and how to steal their heart so to convert them.

When a piece of content is crafted, it is very important to consider the keywords related to the topic. There might be various suggestions, depending on the user intent. If you relate to those words, it will help you match context with content and identify numerous content ideas and offer personalized results to the user.

2. Will Google Replace Keywords by Topics?

Google is making some efforts to offer search results based on topics. For example, if you were to look for sports, you should see results on topics regarding sports, such as:

• Type: basketball, football, lacrosse, etc.;
• Level: professional, college, high school, etc.;
• Location: Stanford, South Florida, Syracuse, etc.;

You can see exactly how Google’s behavior tends to change in the future from the next example of a hierarchy of topics and subtopics:

Google gives a lot of explanations and examples related to the topical results in the Context-based filtering of search results patent. After we saw what Google wants to change in the search result, we understood the reason for focusing on concepts and topics. The user had to perform lots of web searches or look through a lot of results to find out the relevant piece of information. The search engines must be more intuitive and offer more precise results for the user.

The topical search results sought after should look as it is represented and exemplified in the patent through the next picture:

3. Google’s Patents for Context Search Results

Google’s patents for results based on context come to rescue. They are designed to show results based on different topics based on the searcher’s query.

The patent is used to find and categorize information by subsequent inputs of text which concludes with a list of terms related to the topic. To create context, we need to have a natural language and vocabulary.

4. Does Google Have Limitations on the Conventional Keyword Search Results?

Google discovered that the conventional keyword search has some limitations and wanted to understand concepts to offer better results. Even if the user is adding secondary keywords to narrow down the search, at this moment there isn’t a combination of words to exclude all the irrelevant pages.

On a conventional keyword search, the search engines will return only the homepage of a web site that contains the keyword.

5. Google Is Learning Context from Knowledge Bases for More Accurate Results

Google wants to learn and act like a human. That’s how the patents appeared. It relies on people crowdsourcing information for understanding topics and concepts to offer topical results instead of keyword search based results. The contributors from Wikipedia or Freebase have a crucial role in the process.

6. Is Context Vector the New RankBrain for Search Engines?

As we know by now, RankBrain is one of the top 3 ranking factors, besides links and content. It uses artificial intelligence to determine which websites are the best for the searcher by sorting through the billions of pages Google knows and find those that are most relevant to the particular queries. Similar to the RankBrain, the patent tries to act like humans.

RankBrain uses vectors, too. The vectors refer to the way words and phrases can be mathematically connected.

7. How Should Your Content Look Like in the Latent Semantic Indexing Era?

Since the focus falls on context and semantic content, you should know what you need to do and what the user wants by the searches they made.

Google always encourages quality content, valuable information that responds to the need of the user. At the moment, Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to understand if your content is related to a search query.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content. The contents of a webpage are crawled by a search engine and the most common words and phrases are collated and identified as the keywords for the page. LSI looks for synonyms related to the title of your page.

8. How Does Browser Helper Object Interfere With the Context-Based-Search Result?

A complex implementation that appears in the User-context-based search engine patent is the Browser Helper Object (BHO).

Conclusion

It’s good seeing Google making all these steps. The future of contextual search engine seems to have a good impact on the user because it will offer personalized results and more relevant information. Yet, it will come as a downside for business owners and webmasters because it will get even harder to rank on Google.