Why Do We Need Knowledge Graphs?

In this post, you will read what a Knowledge Graph brings to SEO, content marketing and how small to midsize businesses can begin building one.

• Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Search and Your Content
• What Knowledge Graphs Are Already Doing for SEO and Content Marketing 
• Where Do Knowledge Graphs Grow and How To Get One?
• From Understanding The Benefits Of A Knowledge Graph For Content And SEO To Reaping Them

Search has changed. In less than 20 years, we moved (check this SERP timeline) from web pages to the web of data. Now we are getting ready for a web where end-users know and do more thanks to an ever more sophisticated search engine technology – the semantic search.

“In a digital world where search has meaning, content needs to as well, and that
requires your business also to be able to deliver real meaning in what it does that
goes well past the product and its sales pitch.”

David Amerland. Google Semantic Search.

Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Search and Your Content

We live and work in the time of the semantic search, where content marketing and SEO require orchestrated efforts to build a rich network of informational, educational and other content, meeting the customer’s needs at the different stages of their buyer journey.

This is the time of the semantic search: content marketing and SEO require orchestrated efforts to build a rich network of content and meet the customer's needs at the different stages of their buyer journey. Click To Tweet

This rich network can be built and managed using a Knowledge Graph.

The very strategic edge of Knowledge Graphs for website and other content management is the possibility to take your content marketing and SEO to the next level by unambiguously defining content for search engines on the one hand and the other by building immersive environments of information around products and services for your leads and customers.

Knowledge Graphs are the architectures that, once built, can feed search engines and other interested machine parties, like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, with your first-party published data. They are also the architectures behind your content that help you build (many times automatically) well-contextualized and interlinked articles containing rich, relevant information.

To know how we got to the Linked Data in SEO and why you need to build a Knowledge Graph side-by-side with your website to stand out in search results, read our article.

What Knowledge Graphs Are Already Doing for SEO and Content Marketing

When it comes to small and mid-sized businesses, Knowledge Graphs have already proven instrumental. We can tell from experience that building Knowledge Graphs:

• Improves internal content creation workflows;
• Improves visibility;
• Improves Internal linking;
• Clarifies value proposition in terms of entities.

Specifically, several organizations from different verticals have been working with us, investing in building SEO-friendly Knowledge Graphs. The benefits their Knowledge Graph brought to content and SEO:

A knowledge graph for better navigation

We worked with the most extensive databases with B2B information, including information about business people and companies to sales, marketing and recruiting professionals. They aimed to enhance the user experiences on the website and to provide better journeys across the content.

In this case, building a Knowledge Graph helped our client improve the content on their website and redesign the user journey on it, making navigation more accessible and more immersive.

A knowledge graph for semantic search

One application of Knowledge Graphs for websites is semantic search. Case in point, we worked with a community helping developers learn and grow. They used their Knowledge Graph to link content assets across different sites and eventually build a new semantic search experience.

A Knowledge Graph for increased ads income

Linking data helped a client of ours, a product discovery platform with millions of users worldwide, to increase ad engagement and income. Building a massive Knowledge Graph of products, reviews, and articles helped the platform achieve three figures growth year over year and almost double their ads income.

A Knowledge Graph for richly connected records

Knowledge Graphs are handy when it comes to connecting records from disparate sources. A client of ours, a company helping consumers access and connect their healthcare records, needed to serve their clients more efficiently. Now the company uses a Knowledge Graph – the most significant health-related graph (partially linked back from Wikidata), to serve customers better and help them save money and have access to better services by connecting data about hospitals, doctors and medical services with health content and patient education.

While each of these Wordlift’s clients took a different approach, a common thread ran across their way of applying the Knowledge Graph technology. And that thread is vital for it it is a combination of two twisted, working together cables – data and content.

This particular interplay of data and content is paramount to SEO and content marketing success in the age of semantic search. It increases traffic, gets more qualified leads and ultimately amplifies online presence, broadening brand impact.

Where Do Knowledge Graphs Grow and How To Get One?

Google’s Knowledge Graph has millions of connected data pieces describing real-world entities like people, places, and things and forming the graph’s nodes. In the same way, a smaller Knowledge Graph would have thousands of connected data pieces that include the architecture of your content and data.

Below we briefly explain howdy, outlining the practical steps of getting a Knowledge Graph.

STEP 1: Semantic Audit: Checking what you already have 

As a first step towards connecting content and data in a Knowledge Graph, we start by looking at the informational architecture of the website. It is what we call a semantic audit.

A semantic audit is a procedure to extract the main topic and the primary entities from the web pages.

STEP 2:  Building the Knowledge Graph

The next step is building a connected structure of linked content and linked data resources. This is where content (in more detail, the entities it is made of) gets semantic markup. Semantic markup is about adding pieces of code to define the concepts used in the article.

It is also the stage where entities are identified in your existing content and planned to be created. Both the current and the planned entities will further make for the structure of your Knowledge Graph.

STEP 3: Curating the Knowledge Graph: AI-powered Content Briefs

Once created, the Knowledge Graph is a work in progress. This is what the curation of the Knowledge Graph is – constantly improving the interlinking and the breadth of the entities.

One part of the curation of the Knowledge Graphs is about analyzing the top 10 results of the primary search intents around a topic and providing a list of the entities most frequently mentioned in the top 3 results. Further, the analysis serves the content team as a list of topics to be covered, enriched or created anew.

Conclusion: From Understanding The Benefits Of A Knowledge Graph For Content And SEO To Reaping Them

Having walked these steps of building a Knowledge Graph, you will also be stepping on the road to increased engagement, traffic and visibility.

In more detail, the immediate benefits of building a Knowledge Graph of content and data are:

• Automated internal links to boost rankings by robust topical linking;
• Smart content recommendation to enhance user experience and navigation;
• Richly connected content to provide better SERP results;
• Combined content from multiple platforms to enhance search.

As a Knowledge Graph simultaneously enriches the experience of your users with content and your efforts in creating content, it alleviates the path of your message to the customer. And your message, in the age of semantic search, will travel smarter with structured data markup as search engines would understand it better.

If we are to answer the question “Why do we need Knowledge Graphs”, the fundamental reason is the foundational purpose they serve: to define what is.

When a Knowledge Graph underpins our content, search engines know what our business is about; they understand what each article is about and what concepts we are operating with. And just like learning a new language gives you access to new possibilities, a Knowledge Graph opens up the possibility of communicating with all sorts of humans and machines.

Let’s take your omnichannel strategy to another level.
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