New advertising option for local businesses

Google’s been testing Ad Suggestions since January 2017 in the UK and US markets; it's now being rolled out to accounts here.

You’ll see the new ads on the Recommendations page in your AdWords account, and may be alerted via email (depending on your notification settings). You can opt out completely from the program, although making sure that you have at least three active ads in every ad group should also do the trick.

If you are interested in seeing what Google comes up with, simply review the ad suggestions and choose whether or not to let them go live. Do nothing, however, and the ads will be automatically enabled two weeks after they are first proposed.

Read more…

An interesting recap on a panel session at the recent SMX West conference about optimising for voice search and virtual assistants.

By 2020 it’s expected that 30-50% of all searches will be by voice.

Much of this growth will be driven by the mass uptake of AI services like Google Assistant which is currently available on over 400 million devices, such as Google Home speakers.

According to Google, people use voice quite differently from the way they use traditional search. The commands tend to be far more action-oriented and 70% of all voice queries are in natural language format.

Clever as Google Assistant is, accessing recipe content using voice search through Google Home is only possible if the site with the recipe has implemented structured data markup.

The growth in voice search highlights the increasing need to implement structured markup on websites and make them future proof.

Read more here...

It's finally happening.

After one and a half years of testing Google is starting the rollout of mobile-first indexing. At this stage, only sites deemed by Google to “follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing” are being included.

Included sites are getting notification messages in their Google Search Console accounts. These sites will see significantly increased crawl rate from the Smartphone Googlebot.

A quick way to identify if a site has been included in mobile-first indexing is that the mobile version of pages will show in Google Search results and Google cached pages.

Contrary to popular misconception, Google doesn't have a “mobile-first index” that’s separate from their main index. Google continues to have one single index for search results.

The big difference is that increasingly Google will switch to indexing the mobile versions of websites, rather than the desktop version which historically is what has been indexed.

For most websites using responsive design that shouldn't be an issue. But if you have a separate standalone mobile site you may have issues.

Check out the Google announcement here...