Mike Arnesen will be speaking on Semantic Search at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
My background continues to crack me up and frequently makes me wonder how the heck I got to where I am.
Back in the early 2000s, I a was just a punk rock kid with a mohawk who reluctantly went to college to get a degree in History. From there, I stumbled my way into a entry-level web development job, learned about this “SEO thing”, and the rest is, as they say, history. I was the lead SEO, then the SEO manager, and finally the agency director at SwellPath for years before I started my own company, UpBuild.
I’ve been working on UpBuild for the past year and it’s been an unbelievable journey. Our team is now five people strong and I’m doing a lot of things I never would have imagined being possible. As the founder & CEO, my challenge is making sure our team is able to do great things for our clients and ensuring that we’re doing what we need to do to grow into the company we want to be long-term. On top of that, I’m speaking at SearchFest for the second time (which will always be a homecoming for me, since I essentially “grew up” on SEMpdx events) and even teaching analytics at PSU.
2) What’s the current state of semantic markup for search and where do you think it’s headed?
The state of semantic markup on the web is really interesting right now. I think we’re at a place where it’s simultaneously more important than it’s ever been, and also something that’s potentially not going to be worth the effort of implementing in years to come.
Right now, search engines are incredibly motivated (dare I say, desperate) to understand the web on a semantic level. It’s been that way for years, really. We’re well past the point where it’s good enough to have search results that are based on keywords; we need truly entity-based search. On Google’s side, they’re working to decipher searcher intent based on when/where/how people are searching, and simultaneously seeking to understand the concepts and entities that web pages discuss (not simply looking at the words, but asking “what do the words mean?!”).
What semantic markup allows us to do as SEOs and webmasters (is that a term we’re all still using?) is assist Google (and other engines, of course) in gaining that understanding. Through applying semantic markup and linking it back to recognized vocabularies, we’re providing clues about the true nature of the entities that our webpages discuss and/or represent.
Most of the data on the websites that marketers are concerned with is already structured. We have navigation areas, footers, paragraphs of text,
s, lists, comments, etc. Semantic markup allows us to connect that data structure to something meaningful by, for example, linking elements on the page to itemprops as defined on schema.org.
The question now is, “How much longer until Google’s AI is smart enough to decipher the meaning of structured datasets without having to rely on our semantic markup efforts?” This is already in progress and has been going on for years with high-authority sites on the web. Just notice the search results for Amazon the next time you’re searching for a product. They all have rich snippets for ratings and price, but guess what? Those pages don’t have any semantic markup (at least not in the SEO sense). Google has figured out how their data is structured on their own. How long until their systems can parse that out of the majority of sites on the web while also being able learn how to do it on new types of sites and platforms?
That said, I think semantic markup will absolutely be an important tool in our marketing toolbox for the next five years or more. Classic yes/no answer.
3) How might semantic markup positively affect both rankings and traffic volume?
Rankings? I can’t say and I don’t necessarily like to speculate. I had a VP of Marketing come to me the other day saying, “I read this article online that said using semantic markup will increase your ranking by four spots!” Four spots? For what search query? In whose results? In what context?
Could semantic markup help your rankings directly or indirectly? I’d say that it likely would. However, it’s by no means a panacea. Semantic markup should not be used with the expectation that it will cause your ranking for X to jump to position Y.
I advocate for structured data and semantic markup not because they’re going to increase your rankings or get you more traffic, but with the goal of getting more qualified traffic. If search engines have a better understanding of what your site offers and whom it serves, they’re going to be able to send you visitors who actually want to be there.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.