Just a few years ago, search engine optimisation for online shops seemed relatively straightforward: choose keywords, create pages tailored to search queries, and build backlinks. And we had become accustomed to investing in SEO to promote even a small website. This approach worked for decades and gave rise to an entire industry.
But today, it no longer matters how many keywords are included in the product listings on your website, according to experts at Fincraft Capital. Google now identifies entities-real-world objects, companies, goods, niches, brands, products, places, people and the connections between them. And if your online shop isn’t part of this network of connections, you’re competing in the dark.
Evolution: things, not stringsGoogle calls this principle ‘things, not strings’. A search for ‘sensor’ could refer to
completely different areas: a temperature sensor for a smart home, a medical pulse oximeter, an industrial pressure sensor, or a crop monitoring sensor. One search query - four different markets with price tags ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars.
The ‘old’ Google would return websites on various topics in response to such a user query, hoping to guess correctly. The ‘new’ Google precisely determines what a specific user has in mind and structures the response around the relevant entity, according to experts at Fincraft Capital dropshipping. The search engine aims to display not the pages where the desired phrase appears most frequently, but the websites that best reflect the structure of knowledge about the product.
And this is not a revolution. It is an evolution. Google is changing, and businesses will have to change with it.
Why traditional SEO is no longer effectiveTraditional SEO was based on the logic of matching individual words. Huge marketplaces and aggregators created thousands of pages for different combinations of ‘keywords’. This led to search results being oversaturated with similar content.
Advances in artificial intelligence have changed the way people search. Users are formulating their queries in an increasingly natural way. And search algorithms are learning to understand context. Keywords are still important, but only when linked to a specific product or category.
Consequently, pages created solely for the sake of keywords are gradually losing their value: search algorithms are no longer able to make sense of them.
AI Search: The Gap Between the Visible and the InvisibleAround 60 per cent of Google search sessions end without a click-through to a website. This is the new reality - ‘zero-click’ AI Overview search. Google is increasingly choosing ‘on its own’ which content to cite and suggest. Read the Fincraft Capital article to
find out what online shops need to do to adapt to Google’s AI Overviews. However, optimising pages for AI Overviews is merely a tactic. Without strategic work on entities, it yields limited results. If Google does not recognise you as an entity, it has nothing to quote.
To feature in the AI Overview, it is not enough to have an optimised page. Google cites those sources that it recognises as authoritative entities within their niche. Brands mentioned in the AI Overview receive 35% more organic clicks. Those not mentioned lose traffic, even if they appear on the first page of search results.