SEO Wash-up Monday 3rd May

Google Updates

Google Ads lead form now gets triggered on headline click – Back in 2019, they had launched lead form extensions as a beta, which has been expanded more over the years. They also beta tested a type of lead forms via Google Ads back in 2011. Google mentions that you can now show a lead form when people tap the headline of your Search ad rather than guiding them to a landing page.

In order to get started, simply add a lead form to a Search campaign. Then go to the campaign’s settings and select the option to “always show the lead form when someone interacts with my ad.” So after a potential customer submits a lead form, they can choose to visit your site or return to the search results page.

Google search scroll to text on free product results – The search giant is expanding the scroll-to-text feature it has on featured snippets and some other search elements to the free top product listings boxes. A few users have actually seen this for a search on ‘bluetooth headphones’. The scroll to text feature is when you click on a search result in Google, it then takes you to the web page and scrolls you down the page to the specific passage and highlights the relevant block of text.

Google search movie release date countdown Timer – On search you can see a countdown timer widget in the movie search results. If you search for some upcoming movies, Google will give you a countdown timer as to when it will be released.

Google My Business messaging support has now been added to desktop interface – They are rolling out to some businesses with the ability to respond to Google My Business messaging through your desktop browser. Before businesses could only able to manage it from your mobile phone and before that, through SMS.

Bing

Bing Estimated Reading Time In Search Result Snippets – They seem to be testing displaying the estimated reading time for some of the search results. Within some search result snippets, Bing is adding “estimated reading time” under the snippet. This can be pulling from some structured data or Bing can be using other methods for this.