The cross-pollination between search, the private domain and applications

Guest blog by Romano Groenewoud of SEOgeek

It is an unavoidable development in the digital world: the cross-pollination between Search, your private domain and the apps you use. The boundaries between these digital domains are blurring and search engines are eager to use them. Search engines are therefore better able to determine what you are looking for and can thus display the most optimal search result.

Mobile use is playing an increasingly important role in this fusion of digital worlds. Optimizing content for mobile use is therefore becoming increasingly important. In the optimization strategy, this subject may deserve the highest priority. With Android Marshmallow 6.0, Google is introducing a number of functionalities that reinforce this suspicion.

Current trends we've seen for a while:

• An increasing proportion of searches are done via mobile devices
• The 'look & feel' of websites via smartphones and tablets has been one of the most important ranking signals for some time
• Google focuses more and more on the search intention instead of the search query (see this article about RankBrain Update)
• Smartphone users want to be able to find information quickly and easily wherever they are.

Google shows a number of (future) developments that are closely related to the above cross-pollination. A very appealing feature is the new Now on Tap search function. The search screen of your smartphone or tablet is indexed and then this information is used to display search results. This happens without you actively giving a keyword search. This function responds to the wish of users to have the correct information quickly and easily. How handy is it that while you are chatting about a trip to Germany, you immediately get information about flights and train journeys to your destination?

Other interesting developments are the introduction by Google of a private index per person. And what about the possibility to find the content of apps in your search results?

Same search multiple individual answers

How does this work? Google is working on a personal index. This index stores information, both on your smartphone and partly in the Cloud. In this way the Cloud bundles information per account instead of per device. There is an interaction between your search history, your photos, your music and other available information. Google combines the information from different devices and can therefore display an individual, personalized search result. In addition, Google becomes 'smarter' by extracting relevant information from your private index if, for example, you search for 'my contacts' or 'my calendar appointments'.

What does the above mean for the findability of your website? Search results from a user's private index appear at the top of the results overview. It is therefore important that your website is listed here. To achieve this, there are a number of strategies:

1. Ensure high quality from you content. This increases the chance that a visitor will view multiple pages of your website and that this will occur more often in his search history. This again increases the chance of ending up higher in the results of this user.
2. Distribute high quality content by, for example, sending e-mail messages. The content of e-mails is also indexed by Google and is therefore very interesting and useful as a tool to influence the private index.
3. Ensure interaction on your website. Encourage users and customers to actively participate, for example by having their contact details entered.

Use apps without installing them

Automatically opening an app to view a link is already possible. Suppose you are looking for a flight from an airline and you also have the app from this airline on your phone then you will be asked if you want to open the link in the app.

However, Google is currently experimenting with content that appears exclusively in apps, without this information being available on the internet. If you want to see this content, the required app opens without you actually having it installed (the app is being streamed). This is still an experiment. The pilot includes nine Google apps and is only available via the English versions of Android 5 and 6. Google does show that this will be the future when it comes to searching the internet and the resulting consequences for it. search optimization strategies. Apps with high-quality content and that are very user-friendly will be rewarded with a high ranking in the search results. Google wants to improve the user experience by building a bridge between apps and content on the worldwide web.

Do you want to be found?

If you want to be found by your users and (potential) customers, take the following into account: search results on Android devices will become a combination of different sources. Think about:

• The private index of a person
• Content from apps that is streamed on smartphone or tablet
• Google search results created by cross-pollination

The ultimate goal of this mix is to show the user the best possible search result.

Besides Google, the competitor is of course not standing still either. In addition, there are other technological developments that integrate into the digital search world, such as speech recognition and speech-driven searches. Optimizing mobile use is very likely to become the core of future optimization strategies.

This guest blog was written by Romano Groenewoud van SEOgeek