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 Google’s featured snippet update, Google My Businesses best practices and lazy loading. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
Finding fresh, helpful information through featured snippets
Pandu Nayak for The Keyword
Google knows that when you do certain searches, the information you’re seeking is time-sensitive. This doesn’t mean that every question warrants the most recent news or result. They offer two examples, the first is someone searching for income brackets. The most logical answer to this question would be ‘current’ income brackets. This is the newest results and most likely answers the searchers question. If someone searches for “Why is the sky blue?” they probably don’t need the newest result and an older article will do a better job.
A new Google search algorithm update is trying to make this distinction more clear. The goal is to better understand when users need the most recent information.
“As part of our ongoing efforts to make Search work better for you, a new algorithm update improves our systems’ understanding of what information remains useful over time and what becomes out-of-date more quickly. This is particularly helpful for featured snippets, a feature in Search that highlights pages that our systems determine are most likely to have the information you’re looking for.”
Key Takeaway:
- This update is pushing to keep things more and more current for upcoming events, news, and data. For businesses that focus primarily on news, this is going to be an important update and make it crucial for you to stay up to date on the events or news you’re covering.
Google My Business Insights Study
Rosie Murphy for BrightLocal
Google My Business profiles are great ways to give potential customers an inside look at your company. People use these listing to make decisions before they walk through the door. There are some aspects of these listing that can boost your visibility and get more people calling, looking through images of your store, and get more people through the door.
This study by BrightLocal makes some observations about the types of things you can do to get more people to click on your listing.
Native lazy-loading for the web
Google Web Dev Blog
Implementing lazy loading will soon be nativity supported across the web. This will be a huge win for people who are having trouble implementing some of the other, more difficult code.
Chrome is already loading images with different priority but that doesn’t mean the images below the fold are getting loaded later. Priority means that images and other elements are still loading as soon as possible but some take priority over others. With lazy loading, you will be able to tell Google exactly what images you want to be loaded or you can tell it at what point on the page images should be loaded as users scroll.
Key Takeaways:
- The ability to prioritize the way images load will soon be a built-in feature for the web. Telling search engines which images should be loaded first will soon be easier than ever.
App Of The Week: Otter.ai
Otter.ai allows you to generate transcripts of important meetings, presentations, and podcasts. This can help you turn any conversation into another piece of content for you to share across multiple networks. The best part is that there’s a free version that allows you to transcribe up to 600 minutes per month!
Use Cases:
- Record a podcast and quickly turn that into a blog post so you can save time while still producing multiple pieces of content.
- Use this at a lecture or conference so you don’t have to take notes and you can focus on listening.
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.
- 10 Best Readability Tools to Check Your SEO Content
- Google Image Search launches new image preview box
- John Mu says word count is not a ranking factor
- 11 Facebook Case Studies & Success Stories to Inspire You
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!
