SEO Wash-up Monday 23TH October
Google rolls out a new online-to-offline feature for the coming holiday shopping season
As Google has been focusing on the local search for a couple of years, businesses are expecting local search traffic to play a big role for retailers this coming holiday. Google has come up with new shopping features and reporting capabilities that is ready for the holiday shopping season.
Kishore Kanakamedala who is the director of product management for online-to-offline solutions has announced the ways for retailers with brick-and-mortar locations to drive and measure more store visits from Google properties. Bearing in mind that the use of mobiles is now the anchor of the customer journey, Google’s research shows that mobile ads generate 160 percent more store visits compared to desktop visits and that local ad efforts such as local inventory ads drive an 80 percent higher rate of incremental store visits.
As voice searching has become more popular for more consumers, Google has been trying to tie local inventory data into results provided by Google Assistant. So for example if a user asked their mobile devices or Google home, “Google, Where can I buy shoes nearby?” Google will then show a list of local inventory results on their mobile devices. However, in order for retailers to be eligible for inclusion in Google’s local inventory search, retailers will need to upload their local inventory feeds to Google Merchant Center.
Google local results now allows businesses to sign up to add booking buttons
Google now has a feature that lets you easily add a ‘book online’ button to your local business on Google Maps or Google Search. Google added booking buttons in July to some local panel results and now they are opening that up to more local businesses by integrating with their “scheduling partners” from the Google My Business console.
As you sign in to your Google My Business, you will see a new button in the console named “sign up for bookings” next to the “accept bookings on Google” section. If you click on the button then you will be taken to a page to choose your booking provider. You will then be able to check how well you are doing with your booking integration specifically with Google. However some local listing may not qualify for this new feature.
Parallel tracking is to be rolled out by Google AdWords to speed up mobile landing page delivery
Google has been seamlessly working to speed up mobile web experiences on numerous fronts and AMP is the most visible of these efforts. Google announced that there will be a change to the way it will handle tracking parameters appended to AdWords landing page URLs.
The processing of tracking codes can negatively impact page load time and affect your campaign performance. So instead of processing the tracking with the landing page, Google has rolled out the parallel tracking to process the tracking URL, redirects that may me in the background and the AdWords click tracker as the user goes straight to the landing page.
The current tracking URL, AdWords click tracker and any redirects load before the user sees the landing page will see the change that help improve page load times by several seconds for users on slower networks.