Google has recently changed three elements in its search and rankings algorithms that change the way results pages are displayed for all users. While it’s great news for searchers, it may not necessarily be the best news for you, the website owner.
Longer snippets, fewer visitors
For queries consisting of three or more keywords, Google will now show extended snippets instead of the previous very short snippets that might not show enough information to help the searcher choose a site. The rationale is that users are inputting longer, multi-word queries in an attempt to make their searches more complex and targeted. Sound reasoning when one is searching for something specific and doesn’t want to waste time being shown irrelevant content.
The longer snippet shown contains more information for the searcher. Google provides more relevant information to the searcher and the information in that longer snippet could very well contain the complete response to the user’s query. The result might affect you as follows:
Users might get answers to their query in the snippet itself and not bother to click through to your website
Users might begin to use even more long tail keyword searches and complex key phrases in order to get more detailed result snippets, bypassing the keywords you’ve created for your page
Longer snippets in the search results will take more space on the page and on the screen moving the later results down and decreasing the number of results the user can see at first glance, thus making very high ranking even that much more important
To make matters more challenging, Google also ignores meta tag descriptions when it creates these longer snippets, so you must have a call to action in your page titles.
More Related Searches Below Results
Google displays other related searches that might help users refine their queries at the bottom and sometimes at the top of each page of the search results. If you test for, e.g, “water testing,” each page will display “water testing kits,” “water testing labs,” “pool water testing,” and a host of other terms at the end of the list of results on that search page. Therefore, once again the importance of optimizing your pages for different keywords and more targeted and relevant key phrases is critical.
Do not concentrate on only one single keyword. If you do not cover a wide range of relevant key phrases, Google will not see your page as completely relevant to the topic and certainly not if a complex, targeted key phrase was used in the search to at the beginning. The more relevance your page can show, the more likely you can entice visitors to click through to your site.
Local Results for local IP Addresses
Google now targets its results for some keywords based on the searcher’s IP address so that a search for “Italian restaurants” for example would produce a list of restaurants near that user’s location rather than results from another city or state.
The good news: you should be able to more easily get higher rankings for local searches. While getting listed high in the rankings for your topic may be difficult if you’re competing with all national listings for your product, you may get a much better ranking if you only need to compete with relevant results in your local area.
Be sure to submit your website to Google Maps. With that feature, searchers in your local area can find you quickly.
If you are primarily a local business, ensure that your page’s title tag also includes the business name, your search category, and your city.
Optimize, maintain relevant key phrases on your pages, and make it easy for users to find you through Google maps and good inbound links. Get your best possible rankings by giving Google the best tools to point users your way.
