What You Need To Know About Google’s Latest Updates

When it comes to marketing, Google is definitely without a doubt the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

Everyone using the internet has undoubtedly heard of Google. It is undoubtedly impossible to ignore, and if you can get Google on your side, you will benefit more than if you tried to ignore it.Every marketer out there knows that Google’s algorithm is proprietary, and just for that reason, using Google as a marketing tool can be complicated. You have to calculate the best way to find out what will work for you.

With that said, Google will release information to marketers about their updates every once in a while.

That is what happened in May and again in mid-July 2019

What happened in May 2019?

Google announces various new marketing updates all at once.

What happened in July 2019?

The month of July was all about Chrome, Google developers, and browser security settings.

We will cover more about this later in the blog.

First things, first!

Now, what you need to know about the updates in May 2019.

Local Campaigns

Let’s start with the update that is likely to be of great importance for your local businesses.

Google named this “Local Campaigns”. Local campaigns are designed to help your small business by using Google advertising to attract walk-in traffic. As a local business owner, you would already know that increasing your customer sales can be harder than getting customers through your doors.

However, how does this work?

In order to create a Local Campaign, the very first thing you need to do is give Google the store location that you are promoting. All you need to do is to link your campaign to your Google My Business. If you have multiple locations, you could select the affiliate locations.

In addition to your store locations, you will need to provide a campaign budget and ad assets. (What is an Ad asset? Ad assets can be copy, images, videos or anything that you are going to use to promote your business)

Once you’ve entered the required information, Google uses machine learning — what we all so fondly call ‘the algorithm’ — this will automatically do the following:

• Optimise your ads in the best combinations.
• Optimise your keyword bids.
• Optimise your ad placemen

Local Campaign ads will appear throughout Google’s properties, which will include the Google Search Network, Google Display Network, YouTube, and even on Google Maps.

Simply put, Google’s taking a lot of the guesswork out of local marketing by creating an automatic system for marketers and small businesses to use and escalate store visits.

Discovery and Gallery Ads

The next Google update that is pretty cool is called Discovery Ads. What you need to know about this update:

A recent Google study shows that 76% of consumers enjoy making unexpected discoveries when out on a shopping spree. Not only that, but 85% of consumers will take a product-related action within 24 hours of discovering a product – comparing prices, purchasing the product, reading product reviews, sometimes this will be done all at once!

Google Discovery Ads allows local businesses the opportunity to ensure that people who are shopping online have access to their best content without having to search for it. These ads are different from traditional Google ads. Below are the three different but critical ways:
1. They use relevant and rich content you provide to inspire consumers while displaying your brand or products. The content you provide appears in a ‘swipeable’ image carousel that’s “rendered natively across each Google property.”
2. They anticipate your customers’ wants and needs (and meet them), thus giving local advertisers better results from their campaigns.
3. They can help you reach a broad audience with one campaign since they appear across multiple Google properties, that includes the YouTube home feed, Gmail Social tab, Gmail Promotions tab and the feed-in Discover. (This is Google’s new name for the Google feed.)
Track your results easily and see which content is performing the best based on your budget.

A related update that is set to come towards the end of 2019 will focus on Gallery ads – a new search ads format that sends more of your original content to Google’s search results page and shows what your business has to offer.

Frictionless Mobile Experiences

Do you already have an app for your business?

If you do, then Google’s new frictionless mobile update will be a welcome one.

Frictionless mobile is designed to help local businesses to encourage mobile interaction with their customers by removing obstacles or friction when using mobile apps and shopping. For example:
• Mobile-friendly text is used to optimise your landing pages for mobile users.
• Mobile-optimised versions of your landing pages are provided.
• It allows you to peek at your competitors’ mobile sites to get ideas.
• Speeds up page loading times.
• Popups and other interstitials that can discourage buying are removed.
• Mobile shopping is streamlined by providing “sign in as a guest” shopping and one-click purchasing options.
Even if you don’t have a mobile app, your mobile store may see an increase in sales if you use frictionless mobile to improve the user experience.

Structured Data for Organic Search

The last and big update you need to know about is that Google is now allowing local businesses to use ‘structured data’ to control the way their content appears in organic searches.

One of the best ways to use ‘structured data’ is to include it in your FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions). If you manage it properly, you can identify Featured Snippets that will be visible when people search your keywords or look for your business online.

The most significant advantage of featured snippets is that they appear right at the top of Google’s search results. They’re highlighted in a way that draws the users’ eyes to them and gives your local business a boost by increasing its visibility.

For the past two years, ‘featured snippets’ have been the key to growing your exposure on the Google SERP. Neil Patel, in his article ‘9 Tips for Ranking in Google’s Featured Snippets’ states that you need to be up to date with Google’s features all the time.

Now, want an idea of how much-featured snippets can boost your marketing results? According to a study from Ahrefs about featured snippets:

• “They can “steal” traffic from the #1 ranked site. Without a featured snippet appearing above it, the top-ranked site on the search page gets about 26% of the traffic. With a featured snippet, that number drops to 8.6%, with the second page getting more than 19% off the traffic”.
• “The number of clicks on any SERP drops from 74.2% to 70.2% when there’s a featured snippet there. That makes sense, since the goal of a featured snippet is to give searchers the answer they want without clicking.
Plus, because only about 12% of sites use structured data, you can get a leg up on your competitors by taking advantage of this new Google feature”.

Google will continuously change, but these new Google marketing updates represent a significant opportunity for your local business to improve your marketing game and to attract the lion’s share of traffic.