- Social Discovery
- How Facebook Will Incorporate New Types of Social Advertising
- Contextual Discovery
- Capitalizing on Contextual Discovery
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Capitalizing on Contextual Discovery
Because contextual discovery is all about providing useful content to users, a marketer who wants to capitalize on it will need to create such content. Doing so fits nicely into the most effective philosophy for both SEO and social media: “Content is king.” That’s an old adage, but it has become more true than ever with the rise of social media and Google’s recent algorithm updates. When you have a landscape where the dominant search engine is focused on promoting valuable websites, and the dominant social media site is focused on people recommending valuable websites, there is pretty much no choice but to put your time and energy into creating something...well, valuable.
To give you an example of a website that is truly useful to people, look back at Figure 3.5, where Google’s Chrome browser offers a menu to its user while the user is looking at a restaurant site. The winner in that equation is the site that is offering the menu. They are getting a traffic boost from Google’s referencing their site. Why? Because they provide something with real value—an informational aid. If your site is a high-quality review site, news site, guide, or anything else in the category of a “resource,” it has the chance to be used by Google in its contextual discovery product.
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Because most resources generally don’t make money, I do not advocate creating a superb guide to such-and-such solely to receive a traffic boost. The correct course of action is to make your site, which sells products or services of some kind, into the authority in its niche. Supplement what you sell with a resources section, and place ads on all the pages in that section that lead people back to the place where they can make a purchase. For instance, suppose you sell flowers. Apart from your main product pages, which show pictures of the types of flowers you sell, have a Flower Guide, and spend a while making it one of the best resources about flowers out there, with crisp pictures, detailed descriptions, and other fun extras. The last part is the most important. If you simply list hundreds of flower types and write a sentence about each one, people would have no reason to come to your site; they could go to Wikipedia instead (which, by the way, will be the ultimate recipient of traffic from contextual discovery for obvious reasons). But let’s say you included on the page for each flower a special section that describes the occasion each flower type works for best. Maybe daisies are great for graduations and daffodils are best to say you’re sorry. Who knows? You do, if you make a guide. And if Google sees sites linking to it and people +1ing (i.e. “liking”) it, it will be used by contextual discovery and bring your site a windfall of traffic.
Because contextual discovery is closer to local and mobile search than it is to web search or social media, the companies that should care most about optimizing for it are the ones who serve local economies or aggregate local information. TripAdvisor, Fodors, Yelp, and Zagat are the most prominent examples in the space. If your company serves a local market or is intended to be viewed on mobile phones, you should care about contextual discovery.
And, at the risk of repeating myself, like social discovery, contextual discovery will rely on people’s recommendations. If you hear from people that they love the information provided on your company’s website or app, you will be positioning yourself to get new business from many different sources.