Implic­it search, in which fac­tors like loca­tion, device and search his­to­ry influ­ence results even if they are not explic­it­ly includ­ed in a query, could bring new oppor­tu­ni­ties for SEOs and mar­keters alike as more and more con­nect­ed devices con­verge in the Inter­net of Things.

Here are 13 search experts on how to best opti­mize for implic­it search now – and in the not-so-dis­tant future.

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Nick Papagiannis, Vice President and Search Director at Cramer-Krasselt

Implic­it search or seman­tic search has been inte­grat­ed into the major search engine algo­rithms over the past few years. It basi­cal­ly offers a more refined search result based on a user’s intent. In the past, Google would just pro­vide a stan­dard result page for a term regard­less of try­ing to dis­cern what the user’s intent was. So now, if a user search­es for “bears,” the results are not always about the ani­mal. Seman­tic search takes into account var­i­ous fac­tors to dis­cern if some­one may be search­ing for the foot­ball team, etc.

Since Google is offer­ing a more refined search result, it not only pro­vides search users a bet­ter expe­ri­ence, it pro­vides brands an oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­cept a more qual­i­fied user and poten­tial­ly a high­er con­ver­sion. Brands can take advan­tage of seman­tic search by look­ing at the con­tent they’re offer­ing on their sites.

Brands should con­sid­er the types of con­tent that a user may be look­ing for through­out the pur­chase fun­nel. Some search phras­es indi­cate intent to pur­chase well ahead of the search, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the research phase. Brands will have to cre­ate con­tent with those terms to rank for those search results.

They should also look to lever­age social data to iden­ti­fy what con­tent peo­ple are seek­ing out dur­ing the intent phase, and cre­ate con­tent around that since Google will most like­ly pro­vide search results around the con­text of that lan­guage.

Search query reports in Google Search Con­sole offer engage­ment sta­tis­tics in Google Ana­lyt­ics. For high-vol­ume search­es that have low engage­ment or high drop-off rates, brands should con­sid­er run­ning a results page based on loca­tion and some oth­er fac­tors. If a brand’s con­tent doesn’t match the type of results show­ing up in the results, brand should con­sid­er tweak­ing it accord­ing­ly.

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Matt Bentley, CEO of CanIRank

Implic­it search is the con­ver­gence of tech­nol­o­gy – IoT and ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing with com­put­ers in cars, refrig­er­a­tors, watch­es and every­where else. And with improv­ing voice recog­ni­tion, improv­ing nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, improv­ing per­son­al­iza­tion and rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithms — all of that is now com­ing togeth­er.

There are dif­fer­ent ways of inter­act­ing with implic­it search, just as with mobile. So when my fridge runs out of milk and wants to order milk, it’s a search – what to get, where to buy it from – using an algo­rithm about which one I usu­al­ly buy (organ­ic 2%) and how much I pay. It’s the same thing when I do a search to find a mechan­ic. It’s not explic­it­ly web search­es in the sense we’re used to, but they do involve some­thing very, very sim­i­lar to search, so it’s a very inter­est­ing time for SEOs because milk com­pa­nies, mechan­ics, and the rest want to be the ones who are vis­i­ble.

I think a lot of implic­it search right now is dri­ven by same algo­rithms every­one is famil­iar with. The imme­di­ate to-dos are to opti­mize for those things and the same sorts of con­sid­er­a­tions that go into SEO and local opti­miza­tion. Longer term, we’re going to see much more sophis­ti­cat­ed tools that are basi­cal­ly machines study­ing machines. SEO is pret­ty com­plex already, but we will kind of man­u­al­ly decon­struct algo­rithms and fig­ure out what’s going on, and once we have hun­dreds or thou­sands of algo­rithms, it’s going to require very sophis­ti­cat­ed tools to fig­ure out how you can make your var­i­ous pres­ences online – like your web­site and Ama­zon store…[rise to the top].

I think the best thing brands can do right now would be to start to pay atten­tion to the dif­fer­ent ver­ti­cals and search engines that pop up. One exam­ple would be if you’re in elec­tron­ics, take a look at how a search on Ama­zon ranks and returns results for your prod­uct and what fac­tors go in. If you’re a local busi­ness, take a look at Yelp and Google Places. We already have great ver­ti­cal search engines – like Hotels.com and Tri­pAd­vi­sor — and spe­cial­ized algo­rithms that hint at what’s to come, like review data and veloc­i­ty of sales. They’re the same sort of data points that implic­it search algo­rithms will be look­ing at and using. Ulti­mate­ly… if you’re well-opti­mized for Ama­zon, you’re prob­a­bly putting your­self in a good posi­tion for when your fridge is order­ing milk.

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Amanda Murray, Content Marketing Specialist at seoplus+

Brands can best take advan­tage of implic­it search­es by pro­vid­ing cus­tomized, high qual­i­ty con­tent that is craft­ed specif­i­cal­ly with search con­text in mind. You can’t just spit out con­tent stuffed with key­words and expect to rank well in search­es. Instead, you need to have a deep under­stand­ing of the queries that are dri­ving traf­fic to your site and the con­text of those search­es. From there, you can cre­ate con­tent and design pages that appeal to the most valu­able con­text per­sonas that are more like­ly to lead to con­ver­sions and have a high life­time val­ue.

As it stands now, you can say what­ev­er you want about your­self on your site. You have com­plete con­trol of the sto­ry told on your web­site, and there are few ways for the Inter­net to ver­i­fy that what you are por­tray­ing is accu­rate or true. With the cur­rent lim­it­ed abil­i­ties of AI and IoT, busi­ness­es and prod­ucts could like­ly get by with this and rank in implic­it search. How­ev­er, as the realm of AI and IoT con­tin­ues to devel­op, it will become smarter and more intu­itive.

With this, I pre­dict that not only will qual­i­ty, con­sis­tent con­tent be a high pri­or­i­ty, but also the amount and qual­i­ty of links you have point­ing back to your site will become a major fac­tor in rank­ing above your com­pe­ti­tion through implic­it search. The best way to build these con­nec­tions online is through hard work, grass­roots out­reach and PR to net­work and build rela­tion­ships and links.

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Paul Berry, CEO of RebelMouse

Peo­ple no longer search for con­tent – or not the way they used to. It does hap­pen, but user behav­ior has shift­ed from ‘lazy led’, to ‘social plus mobile’ and is dri­ven by sig­nif­i­cant news sto­ries, or some­thing real­ly cool I’m inter­est­ed in.

I now expect con­tent to come to me and so actu­al­ly we’re liv­ing in an era in which the rea­son it comes to me is because of all the pages I fol­low. Implic­it search is built into each piece of con­tent… the search you do as a cre­ator because peo­ple are have instant expec­ta­tions. It maps back to what you’re say­ing across the board, and there are going to be all these events that hap­pen – busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties – that are trig­gered by pas­sive search. We set up sig­nals to the AI, which is Google, Face­book, Tes­la and soon our refrig­er­a­tors, and the more we give sig­nals, the more oppor­tu­ni­ties there are in con­tent and retail and e‑commerce or reorder­ing because it’s out of the same par­a­digm that media com­pa­nies are going through – win­ning in search sim­ply isn’t enough any­more.

I think peo­ple will under­stand new dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods are hap­pen­ing as a result of how you get out to peo­ple and com­pa­nies that under­stand that for their own sec­tor and how, for some, under­stand­ing how Alexa works with Echo and how a brand gets to be rec­om­mend­ed. And obvi­ous­ly Ama­zon is set­ting them­selves up with AI to be #1 rec­om­men­da­tion engine for com­merce.

What we see on the mar­ket­ing lay­er now, and on the CMO-lev­el lay­er, is that ad block­ing is a real­i­ty an we have to cre­ate con­tent worth shar­ing. Great mar­keters will under­stand new implic­it dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works. It doesn’t mean just spend­ing on Face­book, but under­stand­ing how organ­ic works on Face­book — which in turn is under­stand­ing implic­it search.

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Phil Buckley, Director of Technical Search at Adapt Partners

When I set out to explain implic­it search to a non-search nerd, I usu­al­ly com­pare it to a con­ver­sa­tion you have with a nor­mal human.

“Have you tried that new Ital­ian restau­rant in town?”

Some­times it’s flow of con­ver­sa­tion, “Who was pres­i­dent in 1982?” fol­lowed by “Who was his first wife?”

In both cas­es, you need con­text to answer the ques­tions. Geo-aware­ness for the first and an under­stand­ing of the first ques­tion to answer the sec­ond with “Jane Wyman.”

The rea­son search engines need to mas­ter this is because we’re lazy humans. We want to speak our queries and not have to repeat our­selves. We’ve spent the last 200,000 years per­fect­ing how we relate to each oth­er, then we changed every­thing for a while when we had to fig­ure out how to Google and now Google is final­ly catch­ing up.

My advice is sim­ple: Find out how peo­ple are talk­ing about your com­pa­ny. Do they call you the car repair place next to Cost­co? Then add that to your web­site.

Like most search-relat­ed things, the names are more con­fus­ing than the actu­al day-to-day usage.

As far into the future as I can see, which isn’t very far, implic­it search will remain a work in progress that will feed into the next gen­er­a­tion of IoT. Our cur­rent IoT world looks like the 1945 com­put­ers — a great start but the future looks like an entire­ly dif­fer­ent ani­mal.

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Jordan Bell, CMO of FansAgency.com

The big dif­fer­ence with implic­it search is that Google now presents results per­son­al­ized for your loca­tion, device, brows­ing his­to­ry, behav­ior and, most recent­ly, the ques­tions it thinks you as a user would ask next. From a brand per­spec­tive, it becomes impor­tant to con­sid­er not just the basic infor­ma­tion your com­pa­ny pro­vides, but now also to have indi­vid­ual pages for each of the top­ics that your cus­tomers are look­ing for answers on.

So for IoT if you think about how Ama­zon has those but­tons that you toss on your appli­ances that reorders spe­cif­ic brands, then Ama­zon has rela­tion­ships with those brands.

It will be a lit­tle dif­fer­ent with search as the entire pur­pose of search is to under­stand the implic­it ques­tion a user has and then pro­vide and answer. The only con­nec­tion this would have to AI and IoT is if your intel­li­gent things were some­how con­nect­ed to a search as opposed to an auto­mat­ed shop­ping expe­ri­ence. This brings me back to the orig­i­nal point which is that regard­less of how the IoT advances, search mar­keters need to devel­op their sites to answer the ques­tions that are being asked. Whether it is a user that is pos­ing the ques­tion or the device the user owns.

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Luke Rees, Digital Marketing Lead at AccuraCast

With implic­it search – which per­son­al­izes results based on fac­tors like user loca­tion, device and brows­ing his­to­ry – the key to suc­cess is show­ing up in the moments that mat­ter, rather than being #1 for one or two main key­words. Search­ing for a restau­rant near­by, pulling up a recipe, look­ing for replace­ment head­phones – these are the moments when deci­sions are actu­al­ly being made.

To under­stand the moments that mat­ter most to cus­tomers, mar­keters will need to build sol­id cus­tomer jour­neys using his­tor­i­cal cus­tomer data, pin­point the most impor­tant touch­points and use these insights to opti­mize their pages accord­ing­ly. Things to con­sid­er would be:

• Rather than hav­ing a gen­er­al ser­vices page, each ser­vice should have its own ded­i­cat­ed page that is opti­mized with longer-tail key­words based on searcher intent;
• Each local list­ing must be up to date with loca­tion infor­ma­tion. Whilst enter­pris­es will also need to cre­ate a unique page for each local branch, small­er busi­ness­es should sim­ply put it in the foot­er of each page;
• Reviews should also fac­tor into the strat­e­gy — mar­keters will need to decide whether they want to opti­mize their list­ings on review sites or whether they want reviews/testimonials on their web­site to rank high­er.

With paid implic­it search, mar­keters will again need to refer to the data in their typ­i­cal cus­tomer jour­neys to decide which moments to tar­get. Always spec­i­fy the loca­tion and pref­er­en­tial device (if you’re pro­mot­ing an app, for exam­ple), and use remar­ket­ing lists for search ads (which is essen­tial­ly per­son­al­iza­tion based on his­tor­i­cal data). Google also announced…[it] would be intro­duc­ing some­thing called “Sim­i­lar Audi­ences for Search,” which means mar­keters will be able to remar­ket on search to peo­ple who have pre­vi­ous­ly been served an ad and who may have not actu­al­ly vis­it­ed the web­site.

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Jason Parks, President of The Media Captain

Brands and mar­keters need to invest more time and resources in qual­i­ty con­tent through­out their entire site. The infor­ma­tion should be infor­ma­tive and not only intend­ed to close a sale or bring on a new client, but to pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion to your site vis­i­tor.

If you own a paint­ing com­pa­ny, don’t just list out the prices for your ser­vices but write con­tent on the most pop­u­lar col­ors for the sum­mer of 2016. This type of rich con­tent through­out your site will be very ben­e­fi­cial for the trend of implic­it search.

With implic­it search, search engines know more about vis­i­tors and are able to cater search results more specif­i­cal­ly for the user. These search queries have got­ten more long tailed.

By invest­ing more time and resources in qual­i­ty con­tent, vis­i­tors will be more like­ly to find your site ear­li­er in the mar­ket­ing fun­nel. They might not be look­ing to pur­chase right away, but your brand will become top of mind.

When arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence fur­ther devel­ops, just like a brand now wants a cur­rent or prospec­tive cus­tomer to sign up for its email list, brands will want this per­son to make ref­er­ences that they are a brand advo­cate.

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Jessica Elle, Digital Marketing Practioner at Forest Giant

To bet­ter con­trol how a web­site ranks through implic­it search, you’ll need to put on your think­ing cap and research. Implic­it search tends to rear its head the strongest through local­ized search­es — busi­ness­es and ser­vices that are com­mon­ly tied to a spe­cif­ic city, state or region. Use tools such as Google’s Key­word Plan­ner to test vari­a­tions of your tar­get­ed key­word groups by loca­tion — what are the most pop­u­lar queries in your area relat­ed to your busi­ness? Are there sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences on search queries by loca­tion? By dig­ging deep into region­al search data that Google pro­vides, you’ll be able to ana­lyze on a gran­u­lar lev­el how users dis­cov­er your busi­ness and apply the find­ings to your SEO strat­e­gy.

I don’t believe implic­it search will play a big role through AI and IoT — at least not at this stage… implic­it search is very much depen­dent on the search engine, as rank­ing fac­tors are var­ied among the field­’s play­ers such as Google Search, Face­book Graph Search and A9. If you’re rank­ing #1 for a spe­cif­ic search term on Google, that will in no way guar­an­tee you the same spot on anoth­er search engine for the same term.

I don’t believe reorders can be swayed by implic­it search, nor should they…there are too many fac­tors that go into a pur­chase deci­sion and mar­keters should­n’t be able to affect it, at least not when it’s auto­mat­ed.

While implic­it search for IoT is fea­si­ble, it’s not prac­ti­cal. Sure, it’d be a mar­keter’s dream to sim­ply opti­mize a prod­uct in order to gen­er­ate auto­mat­ed sales, but is it ben­e­fi­cial for the user? That’s the dilem­ma with mar­keters and why dis­ci­plines like SEO exist. We can try to game the process all we want, but in the end we need to focus on the user. It’s the eth­i­cal thing to do.

Here’s anoth­er exam­ple of a poten­tial IoT implic­it search sit­u­a­tion. Imag­ine you’re in a dri­ver­less taxi­cab in a new city. You’re hun­gry, so you ask your Google-inte­grat­ed taxi to take you to a restau­rant — any restau­rant. Tell me: how pissed would you be if you end­ed up at a high­ly expen­sive, four-star bistro just because they had the bud­get to hire mar­keters to opti­mize the site? What if it was a fast food eatery? Either way, you’re not the one mak­ing the call in that instance.

In a nut­shell: Implic­it search does not equate to implic­it intent. Implic­it search attempts to under­stand user intent, but all the tech­nol­o­gy in the world won’t be able to tell you exact­ly what I’m think­ing and hop­ing for. And it should­n’t.

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Kendall Kilander, SEO Specialist at One Click

Implic­it search is cer­tain­ly shift­ing the way we think about SEO and, in par­tic­u­lar, empha­sis on key­word research. Here are my top two tips for how brands can best cap­i­tal­ize on implic­it search:

1. Pro­vide Google with more infor­ma­tion about your brand through meta info.

The more Google knows about your com­pa­ny, the bet­ter it can decide when and how to show in the SERPs. For exam­ple, if Google knows your loca­tion and your hours, you might be more like­ly to show up in the SERPs for a spe­cif­ic geo­graph­ic loca­tion or dur­ing the hours when your busi­ness is open. You can think about it this way: If you search ‘Deliv­ery restau­rants’, Google will auto­mat­i­cal­ly show you restau­rants avail­able for deliv­ery in your area even though you did­n’t search for your city or zip code. The more info you can pro­vide about your com­pa­ny through meta infor­ma­tion, the bet­ter. Exam­ples of this include: com­pa­ny address, prod­uct offer­ings, prod­uct pric­ing info, etc. You can imple­ment Schema.org struc­tured markup to send these sig­nals to Google.

2. Cre­ate very spe­cif­ic, tar­get­ed and rel­e­vant pages

With the shift from explic­it to implic­it search, it’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant to cre­ate more spe­cif­ic, tar­get­ed and rel­e­vant con­tent. For exam­ple, cre­at­ing one catchall page with infor­ma­tion on sev­er­al of the products/services you offer might not be enough. Instead, you should cre­ate indi­vid­ual pages for each of your products/services. Your con­tent will be more rel­e­vant to a small­er sub­set of search­es and should help to increase your chances of being shown in the SERPs, even with implic­it search.

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Brittany Maroney, Director of Communication and Public Relations at ZOG Digital

As search engines have got smarter, they began iden­ti­fy­ing [and] cat­e­go­riz­ing users. This allows implic­it search crawlers to build a social pro­file of you based on where you work and play on the web. One of the best exam­ples of implic­it search is how mobile search func­tion­al­i­ty has changed the way we search.

Mobile search is dif­fer­ent to desk­top search because we gen­er­al­ly search for broad­er key­words and we use two types of key­words: explic­it and implic­it. So a mobile search for a restau­rant or a retail item is an implic­it search because it does not state a loca­tion. There­fore local SEO is most­ly based on implic­it key­word intent. With the increase of devices also comes an increase in mobile web search: 16 to 25 per­cent of all Google search­es are now on mobile, mean­ing that more and more peo­ple are car­ry­ing out implic­it search­es. Local SEO is more impor­tant than ever before.

Some tips to ampli­fy your local search func­tion­al­i­ty, and there­by your implic­it search, is to have name, address and tele­phone reflect­ed on sev­er­al plat­forms such as social media, and the foot­er of your web­page. You also should con­sid­er your user expe­ri­ence and ensure that maps, text and pho­tographs all shape your con­tact page. Reviews, trust and author­i­ty also build a strong local­ized rank­ing and will help your click-through rate.

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Joey Baird, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Sparxoo

Make sure your web­site is mak­ing use of struc­tured data. This allows Google to under­stand the basic details of your web­site more eas­i­ly and is there­fore more apt to serve it in search results that do not explic­it­ly state what they are look­ing for. It is also impor­tant to make sure it is opti­mized for local SEO and opti­mized for mobile. This is because many implic­it-type search­es are peo­ple search­ing for ser­vices near them, which are local in nature and done from mobile devices.

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Evan Calafates, Search Marketing Manager of ECG Group

Implic­it search real­ly took hold with the Hum­ming­bird Algo­rithm Update from Google in 2013.

It was real­ly excit­ing as Google began tak­ing into account things like loca­tion of the query to fac­tor in what gets indexed. This end­ed a long his­to­ry of local-based busi­ness­es com­plain­ing that they didn’t rank for very broad key­words. Since then, for these types of busi­ness­es, we run our rank­ing reports down to spe­cif­ic zip codes to see how we rank local­ly.

I think the biggest refine­ment that I would be curi­ous to test is dig­i­tal aware­ness impact­ing organ­ic rank­ings. I’ve heard a lot on brows­ing his­to­ry affect­ing the results now via implic­it search. So how do we impact our audi­ences’ brows­ing his­to­ry? I think the next step is to sell in dig­i­tal aware­ness cam­paigns such as dis­play and video, with the added val­ue of impact­ing rank­ings. If a ban­ner is clicked, or a user hears a com­pelling video on YouTube, these actions could then increase the brows­ing his­to­ry of your tar­get audi­ence to assets you own. If you’re close­ly track­ing rank­ings as I sug­gest­ed above, you should see if there is an added impact to your dig­i­tal aware­ness cam­paigns (this strat­e­gy wouldn’t be lim­it­ed to dig­i­tal aware­ness, but it’s eas­i­er to track).

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What are your thoughts on how brands can opti­mize for implic­it search?