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

Guest blog by Romano Groenewoud from SEOgeek

It's an inevitable 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 take advantage of this. Search engines are therefore better able to determine what you are looking for and can thus display the most optimal search result.

In this amalgamation of digital worlds, mobile use is playing an increasingly important role. Optimizing content for mobile use is therefore becoming increasingly important. In the optimization strategy, this topic perhaps deserves the highest priority. Google introduces a number of functionalities with Android Marshmallow 6.0 that reinforce this suspicion.

Current trends we've been seeing for a while:

• An increasing share of searches is 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 now
• Google focuses more and more on the search intent instead of the search (see this article on 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 imaginative 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 having actively provided a search query with keywords. This function responds to the desire of users to have the right 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, but also partly in the Cloud. In this way, the Cloud bundles information per account instead of per device. Your search history, your photos, your music, and other available information interact. 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 you search for 'my contacts' or 'my calendar appointments', for example.

What does the above mean for the findability from 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. There are several strategies to achieve this:

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 appear more often in his search history. This increases the chance of finishing higher in the results of this user.
2. Distribute high-quality content by, for example, sending e-mail messages. The content of emails is also indexed by Google and thus is very interesting and useful as a tool to influence the private index.
3. Provide interaction on your website. Stimulate users and customers to actively participate, for example by having their contact details filled in.

Using 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 company and you also have the app of this company on your phone, you will be asked if you want to open the link in the app.

At the moment, however, Google is experimenting with content that appears exclusively in apps, without this information being available on the web. If you want to see this content, the required app will open without you actually installing it (the app will be 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 is showing that this will be the future in the field of Internet search and the resulting consequences for it. search optimization strategies. Apps with good 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 bridging apps and content on the world wide web.

Do you want to be found?

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

• A person's private index
• Content from apps 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. In addition, there are other technological developments that integrate into the digital search world, such as speech recognition and voice searches. Optimizing mobile usage will most likely become the core of future optimization strategies.

This guest blog is written by Romano Groenewoud van SEOgeek