Why Marketers Need More Branding Because of RankBrain

By: TJ Salopek -Digital Marketing Manager, Charter Spectrum Reach & UMSL Marketing Advisory Board
What is RankBrain?
Courtesy of Searchengineland.com “RankBrain is Google’s name for a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that’s used to help process its search results, as was reported by Bloomberg and also confirmed to us by Google.”
2fddc77.jpgHow Does RankBrain Work with Hummingbird?
My Theory: Why Marketers Need to Brand Because of RankBrainRankBrain is the recent addition to the Hummingbird algorithm update that started in 2013, which was tasked with ranking searches by rich, conversational content.  It was Google’s reaction to users generating more long-tail searches and looking for quick answers on their mobile devices. Hummingbird looked for the context of the search plus user intent to deliver the most relevant results.
Overtime, RankBrain will begin to consolidate and refine searches for the user.  This will create more single answer SERPs, which limits the ability for marketers to establish SEO and SEM efforts. As marketers, we must begin to think of Google as a media provider that is tasked with giving their consumer real-time news and answers to their queries.RankBrain.jpg
There are 3.5 billion searches per day and that number is likely to rise. Google’s priority is to its searching customers, so they do not care if RankBrain disrupts a marketer’s organic search traffic. We must come to the realization that organic search traffic to web sites may fall because customers no longer will need to click on your content to receive their answers; Google will just give them the answers.
It is well established that traditional mediums like TV drive an increase in web traffic for companies. In a VAB study, 82% of brands saw an increase in web traffic after serving ads on TV.  The only way to survive the ever-changing search landscape is to drive branded search, so your brand comes to mind when a user needs help answering a question.