Are you offering facts and figures which people regularly search on? Does it drive traffic to your site?

Let’s give an example: what is the height of St Paul’s cathedral?

As you can see, the information the searcher requires is (partially) in the search engine listing. However, the likelihood is that this is enough to pique the interest of the searcher, who will then click on the site to find out more information.

However, Google announced Google Squared during the summer of last year, possibly in response to Wolfram Alpha, which is a knowledge engine rather than a pure search engine.

Now, using Google Squared, results in the SERPs are likely to generate very different results for search terms if Google Squared assumes it is a research term. The potential is that the entire answer to the search is held within the SERPs.

In plain English, this means that a searcher may well find their answer on Google, in the SERPs, and will not actually visit your website at all.

It has long been known that users search the internet in different ways eg to shop, to research or to socialise, and this latest addition to Google searches is an indication of the recognition of those differences.

Go play! All of a sudden, the SEO industry cannot refer to a particular set of results to show off its prowess or portfolio, because as personalisation and search intelligence kicks in, you are likely to see very different results than your neighbour, even with similar keywords.

There is a problem here though. If Google endeavours to feed all the information to searchers, without any requirement to visit your site at all, where does that leave your carefully crafted website? Or your PPC campaign if the answers are within the organic results provided by Google?

The fun has begun!

Tags: facts, Google, knowledge, Search Engine Optimisation, Search engine results page, traffic, Web search engine, wolfram alpha