Smart Traffic Review on the new Google SERPS: Crowded or Useful
Combine page title, website address and a handful of relevant description. Mix in rich, creamy snippets and juicy site links. Sprinkle in some +1 buttons. Add colorful Images and a little bit of Videos to spice up the flavor then serve with steaming hot Instant Preview on the side. Voila! You now have the new Google search results interface.
Since the rise of universal and real time search, people might think that this has led to a crowded search results page. In the recent years, a lot of things have been integrated to the interface.
Let me name a few: ads, instant preview, +1 button, sitelinks, image results, video results, news articles, rich snippets, Places listing, related searches, shopping results, author markup, Google+ profile link, bulleted snippets, star ratings etc.
From an SEO perspective, this poses a greater challenge for campaigns since there will be less space for the regular results lists. However, on the other side of the coin, this actually opens up new opportunities.
Today, we’re going to focus on this hodge-podge of innovation now available on Google search.
Optimise for Image/Video Promotion
Imagine that someone looking to buy a new bag saw an image of a very stylish purse in page 1. There’s a big possibility that the searcher will click on that image instead of going through the regular results.
Also note that multiple images coming from the same website (as long as they are relevant to the searched term) can rank well on image search. Therefore, you can make Google SERP an instant product gallery.
Localised Search Optimisation
We’ve all heard about Social Media Optimisation and how it can help your business reach out to a large group of consumers. However, it is not always for everyone. Local search optimisation is the service particularly beneficial for small businesses.
When a future customer uses Google to search for a product or service in a particular location, it is most likely that they end up seeing a results page that contains Google Places listings.
Oftentimes, people who indicate a location on their search terms are those that have high chances to avail of your products or services. Thus, Places optimisation when done properly can send your business not just at the top of the results page but as well as provide you with valuable traffic.
Maximise click-through rate through snippet optimisation
Snippet Optimisation is strategically constructing your site’s page title and description so that when it shows up on Google SERPS it will catch user attention. This can increase your organic search traffic even if you’re not ranking high enough. This strategy is useful in situations where you have a low chance of outranking strong competitors like an established brand’s official page or a government website for certain keywords.
This may seem like an underappreciated art, however, major search engines now support structured data markup. Therefore, you should definitely go ahead and utilise rich snippets.
There are still other areas that we can take advantage of but for now these three are what we believe will define a whole new wave for the field of search engine optimisation. Overall, the new Google SERPS structure is beneficial for both common users and businesses for the delivery of fast and reliable information.
