This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google Introduces Rich Cards
This Tuesday, Google announced that they’ll be featuring a “new Search result format” for mobile users. They’re calling this new feature “rich cards” and claim that the impetus for this new feature was the success of the rich snippets feature. Initially this feature will only roll out for queries related to recipes and movies, but Google says they’re “actively experimenting with more opportunities to provide more publishers with a rich preview of their content. Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog
PLA’s Now In Google Image Results
Now available to all advertisers is the inclusion of Product Listing Ads on Google’s image search results page. Initial tests for this change began way back in January and has just recently become fully available, although some searchers apparently aren’t seeing them. Experts believe these changes could bode well, since searchers often check the image search results when searching for a style or color for a product. Source: The SEM Post
Mobile-Style Cards Appearing in Desktop Search Results
Over the last couple of years, Google has made a noticeable effort to make their desktop results look more and more similar to their mobile results. Most recently, SEOs around the world have spotted Google testing a mobile card-style layout in the desktop results. The fact that this test seems to be rolled out relatively widely could indicate that Google is strongly considering implementing this layout. Source: The SEM Post
Wider AdWords Ads Appearing in Google’s SERP
Following the increased width of the regular search results column, AdWords ads have also started showing up to fit the increased 600 pixel width. The change seems to make the ads appear less cluttered than usual, with sitelinks being spread out much more significantly than before. These new wider ads appear both on top and at the bottom of the SERP. Source: The SEM Post
20 Percent of Google’s Mobile Queries Triggered by Voice
Earlier this week at Google I/O, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that about 20% of queries on the Google mobile app and on Android are voice searches. While this number is slightly lower than some earlier estimates, it’s clear that voice search is growing rapidly and has already become a major factor in search. Source: Search Engine Land
Additional Commentary
Pro AdWords Editor Tips
Shannon Glass of Hanapin Marketing shares her top AdWords editor tips for PPC veterans and beginners alike. Using keyboard shortcuts can help you quickly bring up various prompts within the editor. These can be found in a AdWords Editor quick reference sheet on Google Support. The author also recommends you check out the Default campaign settings in the preferences tab. Here, you can change the default campaign type when a new campaign is built to avoid accidently launching a campaign of the wrong type. Finally, and most importantly, always always always get recent changes. Analysis: Shannon Glass, PPC Hero
Learn to Love Your Existing Content – 5 Ways to Ge More Visibility
Normally, writers in the SEO community are content to focus their content-related efforts on new content. But in this guest post for Moz, author James Agate takes a unique approach to writing content tips and reveals how you can get the most out of the content you’ve already written. Among his five tips are reach out to people that have shared content similar to yours, look for broken link opportunities, and consider paid promotion. Analysis: James Agate, Moz Blog
