5 Aug 2016
When it comes to promoting your practice online, Google’s artificial intelligence algorithm RankBrain could be a game changer, according to Bash Halow.
Bash Halow
Job Title
Google RankBrain is artificial intelligence designed to learn what words people use in their online queries and which results please them the most. To assist RankBrain with learning, Google is driving more online users to sites with original, compelling content. Today’s veterinary practice doesn’t need an out-of-reach online marketing budget, just a gift for writing about one of the world’s favourite topics of interest – animals – and their well-being.
No one knows precisely what factors contribute to a site’s ranking with Google, but it is widely agreed three things matter most:
No one wants to wait for a site to slowly reveal itself – users will just go elsewhere. Ensure your site loads quickly by skipping fancy video backgrounds and photos larger than 80kbs.
Around 80% of users are viewing your site using a mobile device. Ensure your site resizes to the smaller screen of a tablet or smartphone by using a website building tool, such as WordPress.
This signals a site is contributing something new to the online knowledge base and, subsequently, may be of interest to users. It also provides RankBrain with a chance to learn the relationship between the words people use when searching for a topic and what they ultimately end up liking. Original content that reads as people talk (as opposed to content that’s overstuffed with keywords) gives RankBrain a chance to understand the semantics of online communication (see panel).
RankBrain is great for the cash-strapped, short-staffed veterinary practice. Rife with stories about pets and with a finger directly on the pulse of what topics most interest owners, veterinary professionals are perfect authors for content that’s a feast for online eyeballs. No English degree necessary. No understanding of keywords required. The piece doesn’t even have to be grammatical – it just has to be good and hold the attention of the reader. You and your team can write that story.
In the old days, our practice’s visibility was directly connected to our ability to purchase a ⅛, ¼, ½ or full page ad space in the Yellow Pages. Yet RankBrain means even practices with no budget can be almost as visible as veterinary practices with tons of advertising capital. Further down the timeline, your wealthiest competitors will pay for very effective and targeted online advertising that will compete for the attention of your loyal clients, but to get that advertising in front of the right people, Google must drive users to engaging content, not to a page loaded up with ads.
Provided you commit yourself to a plan of writing great online articles and posting them to your website, your voice and your practice’s visibility can resonate more effectively than it ever has in the past.
Let’s say a pet owner has a question they want answered online about fleas. In the past, when we wanted to drive him or her to our site – and our business – by outlining a solution to flea infestation, we wrote (or paid someone else to write) a blog post about fleas that was optimised for that keyword.
But what if the online user’s flea question is a little convoluted? What if his or her question is phrased “what do I do about those little things that bite my cat?” If Google offers up an original article entitled “bugs you’ll find on your household pet” and measures how users interact with that article (do they spend time reading it, click on its internal links or visit other pages on the site), then RankBrain can begin to understand semantics; it will rise above
the meaning of the words in a sentence and begin to understand those words in their context to one another. It begins to think and understand like a human.
Imagine the advertising sales power of such technology – every time Google learns more about what we like, or what we want, it becomes better equipped to offer up an ad for something we are interested in, or better still, want to buy.
