KNOWING WHAT IT MEANS
DIGITAL ADVERTISING – online material – is transforming the persuasion business from all things creative to most things numerical. Visuals and concepts are giving way to performance metrics, algorithms and data mass. This is part of a drive to make advertising people more accountable: to generate extra pay-back from promotional budgets.
In the wake of this supposed culpability, however, are we losing the purpose of advertising: offering products and services to people in the market for the same? It cannot be claimed that this welter of metrics and numbers has helped us to understand what consumers really want.
Thankfully, the advertising industry is adding the meaning of words into the monitoring mix, through increased use of semantics.
Linguistic semantics involves the study of the sense or interpretation of words, phrases, sentences and other expressive forms. It is not about words as such, but the way in which we use them.
For digital advertising, deployment of semantics is opening up new streams of information, above and beyond the routines of a majority of search marketers.
THEY’RE STILL MACHINES
Typically, search marketing is about data obtained from navigations, without consideration of the intent behind this activity. It is easy to overlook the fact that search engines such as Google are machines. In spite of rapid improvements, they do not have the brainpower to consider the precise context of queries being made.
There is over-reliance on keyword frequency without evaluating the meaning, resulting in adverts appearing on pages that have little or no significance.
Identifying a piece of text containing the word ‘Cat’ does not lead to knowing if this refers to a furry animal or a heavy truck. Should adverts for catteries be offered, or, maybe, plant hire firms?
Semantic search technology improves the accuracy and relevance of search results by interpreting viewers’ real intentions. For example, someone searching for information on a Volkswagen Caddy van can be presented with adverts for that vehicle’s parts and accessories, rather than for items to do with golf. Consideration of semantics is contributing to a better search experience.
More and more, urged on by the prevalence of ad-blocking, the value of relevance is being recognised (and then rewarded). Adverts should offer specific value and targeted propositions to consumers. Then you can expect active responses from recipients. Yes, they might want to buy from you.
SEMANTIC MARKUP
Providing extra context for search engines in the form of semantic markup can be most helpful, too. A positive move is to insert additional lines of code that sit in the HTML source code of a web page.
This extra data, invisible to users, provides Google & Co with information about the relationship between different pieces of content.
Semantic markup is a buzzy activity, not surprisingly. Location information is a prime example. Be aware that just because you have a contacts page does not mean that search engines know where you are located. If someone in Sheffield searches for a chiropodist there is no value in providing a link to a foot-sure site in Southampton.
Similarly, it could be useful to add product descriptions, availability, prices, special offers and delivery conditions.
A further use of semantic markup is to link content to external, third-party testimonials, reviewing them in the search engine results within your pages listing. Different plaudits can be displayed per page.
These pages should earn more click-throughs – even where your listing doesn’t rank as highly as a competitive outfit without a semantics strategy. Bereft of structured data and semantic markup, their organic search listing is unlikely to be as attractive as yours.
Now is the perfect time to put space between you and the competition. Help search engines to find your content more readily; to make results stand out; and to make indexing easier.
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