Insights

The Google Knowledge Graph Unpacked

It’s undeniable that Google has been upping their game year after year to make sure that people can find exactly what they want right when they want it. With an astonishing 97% of people searching online to find a local business in 2019, it’s safe to say that your company’s online visibility is more important now than ever. Recently, Google’s knowledge graph has been getting serious attention from marketers and businesses around the globe as a major visibility booster.

What Is a Google Knowledge Graph?

Not to be confused with Google my business listings, the knowledge graph is an entity of its own and it has to be worked for or “earned” so to speak. Likely, you’ve noticed that when you make a search, occasionally a detailed box featuring a person, place, or thing will appear in the upper right hand of the search results page – behold the knowledge graph.

Take this Michael Jordan search for example:

As you can see from the above example, this is Google gathering all the information that it can find about something and compiling it into a panel. This is different than the google my business listing because the information in the graph can’t be directly edited, although you can provide feedback for Google to review. The graph has the capacity to hold a lot of info, but it typically has the most fundamental facts, an image or company logo, and a “People also search for” feature.

Why Is This Graph Significant?

Whatever you can do to make your company stand out from others in search results is a plus, whether it’s appearing higher up in results, using captivating language, or being featured in a local map pack or rich snippet. The knowledge graph has the capacity to do great things for SEO purely because of its dominating size, but it is also informative and highly credible.

Companies are increasingly expressing their interest in achieving knowledge graphs to boost presence on a search page. The tricky part here is that in order for one of these sought after graphs to be created, there must be enough information on the web for Google to accumulate and deem credible. However, some of these graphs are more detailed than others, and even when one is achieved, there’s steps to get Google to add more facts – the more info, the better.

How Do You Achieve a Knowledge Graph?

While there’s nothing you can do to earn yourself or company a graph overnight, there are certainly steps worth taking that have been known to accelerate the process and have helped our agency.

5 Steps to Take:

1. Add Structured Data to Your Website

Structured data, such as schema markup and JSON-LD, are pieces of code that get added to a site or individual webpages to greater inform Google what they need to know. By adding specific, organized data to your site, search engines are then able to get what they need faster, more accurately, and more efficiently. In turn, your site’s content will have an advantage in the search results, eventually appearing in those highly-coveted rich snippets and even in a knowledge graph.

2. Get Listed on Wikipedia

Getting a wikipedia page published is an important step in getting featured in a graph, yet it proves to be the most difficult. Not only is it a hunk of work to write and gather sources for your article, but the editing and approval process is rigorous (to say the least). Most of the information that gets pulled into a graph comes directly from wikipedia and the summary that appears on your graph is pulled verbatim from wikipedia. As seen in the below example, again with our friend MJ.

3. Get Listed on Wikidata

Wikidata is another open-source platform that uses massive amounts of data in the form of “items” to organize information across the web. The process of creating an item is far less time consuming than writing a full-blown wikipedia page and working days and nights to get it published. 

4. Set Up a Youtube Channel

By setting up a youtube channel, this gives Google another platform to gather information about your company and also an opportunity to feature you videos in rich results and on the graph itself. While youtube isn’t the easiest channel to jump into from scratch, you likely have some pre-existing videos that can be added.

5. Optimize Your Site’s Content

It’s a good idea to make sure that the actual content on your site is optimized for search. We suggest using in-depth content that’s designed to answer all the questions that a visitor on your site is likely to ask. Make use of a variety of content pieces such as infographics, videos, images, blogs, and whitepapers to reach people in a meaningful way. Simply making sure the logistics of your site is on-point goes a long way.

Final Steps: Be Dedicated, Patient, and Persistent

While achieving a knowledge graph isn’t necessarily easy, it is possible when you take the right steps and stick with it. So along with the 5 steps above, there’s 3 more steps that will take you even further on your mission.

  • Be Dedicated – own the mission to attaining a graph and set goals
  • Be Patient – realize that this process takes time and stay cool
  • Be Persistent – keep editing that wikipedia page and don’t let up

For an SEO strategy that will boost your site’s traffic, contact our SEO team. We take the friction out of all things digital.

share
RELATED POSTS