The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
In this episode, we talk about how people interact with Google search results, use cases for structured data, and Facebook’s API contribution to Google. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
We Surveyed 1,400 Searchers About Google – Here’s What We Learned
Lily Ray for Moz
The way Google has displayed search results has seen tons of changes over the past few years. We are seeing more in-line results in our SERP’s like featured snippets and seeing less organic results. The way searchers interact with these results is fueling these types of changes. Moz surveyed 1,400 searches to see how they interact with Googles results and how well they trust the less organic information.
“When it comes to the trustworthiness of featured snippets, most users are on the fence: 44.5 percent of users consider the information “semi-trustworthy,” and continue searching for answers to their questions. However, age once again plays a role in the results.”
Key Takeaways:
- Searchers tend to trust organic searches more than results populated by Google in the form of knowledge panels or snippets. While ranking for featured snippets are important, be mindful of the queries you rank for and make sure it aligns with the searcher’s intent. You wouldn’t want them to head to a different resource.
- Even when a searchers question is answered in a snippet, almost 60% of users will continue to search through the other results on the page. This means that creating topical authority for a search is very important. Knowing that users tend to continue searching to get more than one opinion it might make sense to create a pillar – cluster content model to cover all aspects of a valuable search.
- As users continue to search the SERP for relevant content, this will put an emphasis on your title tags. Users will be searching for a relevant and helpful title that they think will help them achieve their goal. If you are trying to climb the ranks for a particular query, do some testing on title tags variations.
Enriching Search results Through Structured Data
Google Webmaster Central Blog
Google has been suggesting that sites implement structured data to their website for some time now. For those who don’t know, structured data is a series of code that helps lift the important pieces of your content so Google can easily display it in search results. Google outlines a few ways you can use structured data to increase brand awareness, highlight content, and highlight product information.
“Over the years, we’ve seen a growing adoption of structured data in the ecosystem. In general, rich results help users to better understand how your pages are relevant to their searches, so they translate into success for websites.”
Key Takeaways:
- Structured data can help you promote your company in search results by adding site links and updating your Google My Business listing. These two things can help your users feel more comfortable because you have a more powerful presence when they do a search around your company.
- If you have a cooking website and want to highlight a certain recipe, you can use structured data to pull important information from your article/blog and use it in a search result.
- If you have a retail website and want to show different prices in an image search, you can use structured data to beat out the competition and get users to buy from you.
Facebook makes its first browser API contribution
Frederic Lardinois for Tech Crunch
Facebook is making its first API contribution to Google. Facebook is helping Google improve the user experience by shortening the “time between a click or keystroke and the browser reacting to that.” This contribution relates to a change in how search engines handle Javascript execution. The image below shows different types of Javascript execution with the addition of the “Best of Both” that they plan on rolling out with the next Google Chrome Update.
“The code, like so much of Facebook’s work on web tools and standards, focuses on making the user experience a bit smoother and faster. In this case, that means shortening the time between a click or keystroke and the browser reacting to that.”
Key Takeaways:
- This is currently on a trial basis and will likely have to go through a few rounds of development work. Once all of the bugs have been worked out, developers will be able to utilize this within their code.
App Of The Week
Lumen5
Lumen5 is a tool that helps you turn your blog posts into videos in minutes. Their software picks stock videos that align with the content within your article to create a cohesive and easily shareable video. They have templates for all social platforms so you can share across all networks. As an example, we turned one of our blog posts into the video below. Keep in mind that this video hasn’t been edited. All I did was past the blog URL into Lumen5 and their software did the rest.
“It took about 3 minutes from start to finish to create a good-looking video that I would feel comfortable sharing on my social networks. With no editing!”
@sylvestrer1
Use Cases:
- If you have a high performing blog post, you can turn it into a video that captures the key takeaways and share it on social media. This creates an easily digestible version of your content for your users.
- Social platforms favor content that keeps users on your website, by creating a video like this, you can promote your content without providing a direct link back to your site.
- Include a video like this in an email with custom images to help promote an event or piece of content to your database in a new and creative format.
The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Facebook Testing New Font Style Options for Posts
- Google starts showing more images in the web search results
- Instagram hides like counts in leaked design prototype
- Enjoy Youtube Music free on Google Home Speakers
- Shining the light on dark traffic
- How to Audit Your Internal Links
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
