What is a knowledge graph? It’s a big block of information that appears on the right, after searching for a specific term. The knowledge graph card or panel contains relevant and context-specific information on your search term.
It may come in the form of companies (shown in image below), Non-profit Organizations (NPOs), influential people, local business, media, nutritional information, products.
In the early days, most search results are static, but with great demands and technology advancements, knowledge graph are useful as they help reinforce brand authority and visibility.
Are knowledge graph results the same as rich results?
There’s a difference between a knowledge graph and search results categories. It may be hard to distinguish visually between a rich result and a knowledge graph result.
The key difference between the two is the level of control over the content.
There isn’t much control over rich results but we can suggest changes to knowledge graph results especially on your brand identity, positioning and information.
It can interlink and combine results in carousels. However, these are limited to only non-commercial, informational queries that don’t represent an advantage in search engine optimization.
Do local businesses stand out from knowledge graph?
Local businesses stand out compared to other forms as this information is crucial to a searcher and depicts a brand identity and authority.
If your information is easily available, Google automatically packs all these data into a card. Such information includes:
1. Customer reviews
2. Critic reviews
3. Daily hours
4. Popular timing
5. Reservation options
6. Phone numbers
7. Directions
8. Images
9. Link to websites
10. And many more
These options will help a searcher better evaluate your business credibility and better understand your business at a quick glance.
How to influence knowledge graph?
There is no sure way in providing and influence it in google. Even if you have all the right mark-ups, Google doesn’t respect it or include in SERPs.
We can always practice it right in hope that Google will better pick your information and provide holistic information to searches.
We should leverage on schema mark-up in our webpages. Specifically, the main page of our website.
This will ensure proper elements are being picked up by Google knowledge graph. To ensure that our schema mark-up is valid, we utilise Google structured data testing tools to evaluate and understand what Google picked up based on the website.
Get listed at wikidata.org and Wikipedia will be another smart option to get your business noticed exponentially.
Google often relies on Wikipedia for official website addresses as well and pulls additional information from wikidata to make sure that information is properly mapped and are in accordance. Do make sure to include your business in wikidata and Wikipedia.
Optimization on Google Maps, business hours, social media accounts, reviews and earn local citations. These will help improve your credibility. Always ensure that all your social media accounts are properly verified.
Conclusion
Knowledge graph used to be the only rich results in google searches. Today, it’s featuring carousels, snippets, rich snippets, AdWords and many more.
While we can argue that Google is getting smarter and faster in today’s world but how do we ensure to stay visible in front of customers and searches for our products and services?
The answer to that question still lies in the power of knowledge graph. Always ensure your information are updated, linked, verified and kept up to date.