How Google Search Is Changing And How It Impacts Your Website
At its latest event, Google’s Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan showed off some of the new features that the company is bringing to its search engine in the coming months. With Google currently maintaining a 92% market share of the web’s search engine traffic, if your business has a website, you need to be paying close attention whenever Google makes changes that impact how users find you online.
Context Is King
When Google Search first launched in 1997, it was relatively simple. It scraped text from web pages and matched them to search queries from users. Over time, Google Search expanded to include the ability to search images, locations, video, local businesses, online shopping categories and more. However, according to the company itself, the element that has often been lacking in these results is context.
Context is used here to mean additional information about websites alongside the search result itself. For example, a link from a news website might have a “more info” link next to it that gives the user additional context about the news organisation, such as when it was founded, whether it is state run or independent, and how trustworthy Google deems it to be.
For website owners, these changes mean it is more important than ever to keep sending the right signals to Google that demonstrate your site is genuine, safe, and authoritative. Linking your website to your Google My Business (GMB) profile and ensuring that you have accurate, up to date and matching contact information on both the website and the GMB profile is a good start.
Being deemed trustworthy also includes having websites which are free from security vulnerabilities and malware. You can switch to Carden Digital’s web hosting today and get an SSL certificate and daily malware scans bundled with your hosting.
Google Lens Updates
Google Lens is the visual search element of Google. This is a separate from Google Image Search which matches images to a user’s written search query. Google Lens uses your phone’s camera to scan objects in front of you and match them to other images and data on the web that it thinks is related. If you have an Android phone, you can usually access directly from your camera app, if you’re on iPhone, you’ll need to access it through the Google Search app.
Lens can currently help you with tasks like identifying varieties of plants in your garden or translating a restaurant menu into English when you’re on holiday. However, Google has big plans for Lens which includes utilising its Multitask Unified Model AI (MUM) to match users’ visual searches to related products.
As an example, a user could scan their friend’s t-shirt and see product listings for other, similar clothing items. If you run a shop, either online or on the high street, there’s never been a better time to make sure you have a detailed listing of your inventory online, with high quality pictures. As part of Carden Digital’s pay per click shopping ads services, we’ve helped businesses digitise their entire catalogue of products so they can be discovered more easily in searches, and we’ve helped bricks and mortar shops expand into online sales.
The Impact On Google Ads
With the changes listed above, plus more snippets, information cards, AI generated FAQ answers and video clips set to be occupying real estate on the home page; the traditional “blue link” text search result is rapidly losing space to other search features. Meaning that however optimised your website’s content is, it may not even display to many users before they scroll down. Paid ads allow you to leapfrog these new search features and maintain your business’s place at the top of the search results.
As part of Carden Digital’s PPC and SEO services, we proactively research how the digital platforms our clients use are changing and how our marketing services can stay one step ahead. Speak to our team today to learn more about how your company could make the most of digital marketing platforms like Google Search, Google Ads and Google My Business.
