A new box now appears on the right side of Google results. Search for a well-known person, a city or a landmark, and in addition to the ten blue links you get a panel with a photo, a few facts, a birth date and related people. On May 16, Google introduced the technology behind it: the Knowledge Graph.
The blog post carried a particularly telling title: "Things, not strings." A string is just a sequence of letters. A thing, or entity, is a person, a place or a business, with facts attached to it and connections to other entities.
For now, the feature appears designed for general-knowledge questions: who is prime minister, how tall a mountain is. All indications are that it will also concern businesses, and sooner than most owners expect.
What does the Knowledge Graph change?
Until now, Google has mostly matched words. A search for "taj mahal" returned pages containing those words, without Google knowing whether the monument or the musician was meant. Google used exactly that example in its announcement.
The Knowledge Graph is a large database of entities and their relationships. According to Google, it already holds more than 500 million objects and more than 3.5 billion facts and relationships. Much of it comes from Freebase, a project Google acquired when it bought a company called Metaweb in 2010, along with Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. For now, it is available only in US English.
Google can therefore now determine that a search is about that entity and display facts about it directly. It is beginning to recognize entities rather than simply matching words.
For a small business owner, this may seem distant. It is not. Your business is an entity. It has a name, an address, a phone number, hours, a category and an owner. The question is whether Google knows that entity clearly, or holds five vague, partly contradictory versions of it.
Why use exactly the same business name everywhere?
This is the practical side of the change. Google already keeps a record of local businesses in Google Places. Your Places page is the version of your business it trusts most, and that trust rests partly on whether the rest of the web agrees: your website, your Facebook page, the tourism office listing, Yelp, TripAdvisor, the chamber of commerce directory, the local paper that wrote about you.
If all of these sources show the same name, address and phone number, Google becomes more confident that it is a single business. Consider a bakery back home. If one listing says "Boulangerie du Lac", another says "La Boulangerie du Lac Inc.", a third shows the old phone number and a fourth the address from before the move, Google has to guess, and it sometimes guesses wrong.
In local search, this is called NAP consistency, for name, address, phone. The task is tedious, but it is one of the least costly corrections a small business can make.
For dive centres here, the situation is often more complex. In Bali, an address can consist of a street name, a village and an indication such as "near the temple". Choose one way of writing yours and use it everywhere.
How can you quickly check your information for consistency?
Search for your business name in quotes, then your phone number in quotes. Open the first two pages of results and note every version of your name, address and number. Correct the ones you control and contact those responsible for the others. This takes an afternoon, perhaps two. It is also the first check we carry out in any local SEO engagement, before any more complex work.
How does structured data help Google understand who you are?
Last June, Google, Bing and Yahoo jointly launched schema.org, a shared vocabulary for marking up web pages so machines can read them. You add a short piece of code that states, in effect: "this is a LocalBusiness, its name is this, its address is this, it opens at 7".
Almost no small business sites use it yet, and most web designers we speak with are not familiar with it. The effort may seem to offer no immediate benefit.
We recommend it nonetheless. Structured data provides Google with the facts about your business directly, rather than relying on it to infer them from your paragraphs: opening hours, prices, reviews, events, courses. If Google is building a database of entities, it is logical to supply your information in the format it has defined. Some WordPress plugins are beginning to add part of this, but their output should be checked, as it is often incomplete. This work is part of technical SEO, invisible to visitors but beneficial to all.
What role does Wikipedia play in the Knowledge Graph?
A clarification is needed here, as some businesses may spend time on this unnecessarily.
Much of what Google knows about well-known entities comes from Wikipedia. Wikimedia has also announced a project called Wikidata, a structured database intended to support Wikipedia, so this connection is likely to grow stronger.
However, most small businesses will never have a Wikipedia article, and should not try to obtain one. Wikipedia applies notability criteria that a local bakery or dive shop generally does not meet. Writing your own article usually leads to its deletion and to friction with the encyclopedia's volunteers.
What you can do is ensure that the information around you is accurate. If your town, your region or your trade association has a Wikipedia page and there is a real, documented reason to mention you, that mention is legitimate. Otherwise, your Places page, your own site with structured data and consistent listings form your own Knowledge Graph.
What developments should be expected?
Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S last fall. When asked for a good place to eat nearby, it answers with restaurants drawn from Yelp: not a list of web pages, but actual businesses, with ratings and addresses.
Combined with the Knowledge Graph, this approach clearly indicates the direction of search: a question, and an entity in response, rather than ten links. To achieve this, the machine must know which businesses exist, where they are, whether they are open and what people say about them. It will draw this information from the same sources: business listings, structured data, reviews and consistent information across the web.
A business that Google understands clearly will be well positioned. A business with three names and two phone numbers circulating on the web will be absent, or described inaccurately.
Google's post introducing the Knowledge Graph is short and worth ten minutes. It may read like science fiction, but that impression is unlikely to last.