For those who have grown up with social media, the world of statuses, tweets and snaps makes sense. But how about for older generations, who are entering unfamiliar territory when they sign up for Facebook or Snapchat?
We sat down with some Mashable employees and friends to hear their best stories of parents and grandparents on social media, and the answers did not disappoint. Read more...
More about Mashable Video, Stories, Funny, Nana, and Grandparents
Posted by tallen1985
Have you taken a look at Google Shopping recently? Okay, so it isn't quite the ecommerce monster that Amazon or eBay are, and yes, it's only filled with sponsored posts. Playing around with it, however, proves that it provides a decent experience.
And that experience got me thinking. What if, instead of being sponsored ads, Google Shopping completely replaced organic search results for transactional queries? Would this be a better user experience? I would have a comparison of products from multiple retailers without even having to visit a website. Would this be a better experience than just "ten blue links?"
In this post I want to share why I think Google Shopping could replace organic search results in the future, and how websites can begin to prepare for this.
We've already seen evidence of Google trying to keep users within their search engine with local packs, flights, knowledge graphs, and instant answers. What's to say shopping isn't next? Google have already been using Google Shopping ads within search results for a while now, and they recently started testing Showcase Shopping ads, increasing the level of product exposure in a search result.
Check out this Google Shopping result for “red shoes” below:
On first impression, this could easily be an organic shopping result.
Google doesn't make it crystal clear that these are paid ads, only displaying a small notification in the top right. Do users clearly understand that these products and brands are paying to appear here? As the potential customer, does it even matter, as long as I find the red shoes I'm looking for?
If this had been my search result instead of the typical organic search result, it wouldn't have been a disappointing experience. In fact, Google would be putting me closer to my desired action of actually researching/purchasing red shoes, without me ever needing to leave Google.
Why do I think the long-term plan could be to use the layout of Google Shopping as a replacement for the current organic result? For me, the Google Shopping landing pages offer:
This plugs perfectly in with the development and improvements of voice search and the use of compound search queries, which Tom Anthony and myself discussed in Distilled's Searchscape series.
Here's a previous example of a compound query that Tom Anthony shared at SMX Munich:
I thought I'd test this same process out by trying to find a pair of red shoes using just voice search. The results weren't perfect and, at this time, not a great user experience. However, compare this to Google Shopping results and you'll see where we could be heading in the future with organic results.
Below is how the current search results look for a mobile voice search (on the left) versus search results if you click through to Google Shopping (images on the right).
Yup, those are definitely shoes. So far, so good for both results!
| Current SERPs | Shopping SERPS |
 |  |
Not quite under £40, but they are shoes within a reasonable price range. Google's organic results have dropped product listings and are now showing sales pages for shoe stores.
| Current SERPs | Shopping SERPS |
 |  |
Organic search now lists red shoe landing pages. However, the ads seem way off target, displaying bikes. Google Shopping, on the other hand, is getting pretty close to the product I may be looking to purchase.
| Current SERPs | Shopping SERPS |
 |  |
Organic continues to show me predominantly men's shoes page results, despite a very specific search query. Compare that to Google Shopping, which now matches the majority of my criteria except price.
| Current SERPs | Shopping SERPS |
 |  |
While the above search shows the organic SERPs aren't producing high-quality results for conversational queries, you can be confident that these types of results will continue to improve. And when they do, the Google Shopping result will produce the best answer to the user's query, getting them to their desired action with the fewest number of clicks.
Time and again we've seen Google attempt to reduce the number of steps it takes for a user to get their answer via features such as car insurance, flight comparison, and instant answers. This seems the logical next step for shopping, as well, once search results are dependable.
Initially, yes, the user will have to click through to your page in order to purchase. Currently, Google Shopping allows users to find more information about a product within Google before clicking through to a landing page to complete their purchase.
But in the long run, Google could facilitate the transaction for your business without a user ever hitting a website. We saw Google testing this within paid search back in 2015. And while at the time Google stated they have no intention of becoming a retailer (and I still believe this to be true), we certainly know that Google wants to get the user to complete their goal as quickly and easily as possible, ideally remaining within the Google eco-system.
Google Shopping testing instant purchase
A change such as this could be a double-edged sword for businesses. If Google decided to rank your product more prominently than competitors, its ease of use could see an uplift in sales. The downside? If Google decided to monetize this feature, they could look to take a cut from any sales, similar to Amazon and eBay.
Secondly, we would have to refine the way we measure traffic to our site (or not). It's likely that measurement would have to be based on impressions and conversions rather than sessions. Based on the current reporting format available for Google Shopping, users may have access to clicks and click-through rate, but as no actual data is being passed to Google Analytics this would likely be reported within Google Search Console.
Of course, we'd still want ranking reports, as well. Rank tracking companies such as GetStat and SEMRush would have to adapt their products to track product listings in the same way that we've seen them improve tracking for local packs and structured data over the last 12 months.
Preparation for a world where Google looks like this falls into two buckets: what you should do if you own the physical products, and what you should do if you don't (for example, if you're an affiliate site).
If you own the product (for example, you stock and sell TVs), then you should be looking to give Google as much information about your products as possible to ensure they have the optimal opportunity to appear within search engine results. Ensure product pages are well-optimized so Google understands the product being displayed. Most importantly, we recommend you get structured data in place (Google's current preference is for webmasters to use JSON-LD).
There may also be immediate benefits, such as getting more rich snippets within search results and an increased opportunity of being featured in answer boxes (and leapfrogging competitors), but this will help future-proof your site.
Want to know more about JSON-LD? I recommend taking a read of the following resources:
Additionally, we need to start looking higher up the funnel and creating content that will make users come back. I know, I hate saying it, but we have to produce great content! I'll discuss how The Wirecutter has been approaching this in just a moment.
Further down the pipeline, if Google decided it can handle processing user transactions within Google itself, you'll want to consider opening up your checkout as an API. This was a requirement in Google's paid experiment and, as such, could be a necessity to appear here in the future.
Ranking for both transactional and information search queries could become even more difficult. It may even become impossible to rank for very specific long-tail search terms.
The recommendations don't differ too much from above. We should still get structured data in place to reap the rewards now and start producing great content that sits higher up the funnel.
Will Critchlow recently introduced me to The WireCutter as one of his go-to websites. This is a site that's taken product research to an extreme. With extremely in-depth articles about which products users should buy, they take the thought process out of "which product should I buy?" and instead, based on my needs, say, “Don't worry about doing any more research, we've done it for you. Just buy this one."
I've recently purchased a range of products from pens to printers based on their recommendations. They've created useful content - which, after numerous purchases, I now trust - and as a result encourages me to return to their site over and over again.
To finish up, I'd love to hear your thoughts:
Reach out to me in the comments below or over on Twitter - @the_timallen.
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Are you wondering how your business can use Facebook Live? Looking for examples to help you get started? Using live video will improve your Facebook reach and it can take less time than writing individual posts. In this article, you'll discover six ways your business can succeed with Facebook Live video. #1: Address Blog Comments One [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
What do you do when you're generating leads and customers with Facebook campaigns, but the volume isn't where you'd like it to be? You may be experiencing high traffic campaign cost, and/or low conversion volume. This is a problem everyone has, whether they're just starting to advertise on Facebook or are spending thousands of dollars a day.
There are four ways to fix the high conversion cost, low conversion volume problem. This is the process the experts use when they run into this problem, and how they fix it.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN:
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 12: The Perfect Cold Traffic Ad: “Ad Scent,” the One-Two Punch, and the Guard Down Trick
Episode 37: The 5 Biggest Facebook Ad Campaign Mistakes
Episode 43: Ryan Deiss Shares 4 Steps to Crafting and Optimizing the Perfect Offer
Episode 52: Results of 687 Facebook Ad Surveys (…And a Pep Talk from the PT Team!)
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Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What's New This Week Facebook Adds Audience Restrictions to Facebook Live: Facebook rolled out “the ability to target live videos to only [...]
This post Facebook Live Rolls Out Audience Targeting: This Week in Social Media first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Tapping through my Snapchat stories one afternoon, I was arrested by a rudimentary doodle. “This Week's Cover” it said in neon scrawl.
This simple snap was everything I didn't know I needed in my life.
Since then, The New Yorker's Snapchat stories have become an obsession for me, a singular piece of high art among a cluttered tweenscape of brands and celebrities.
New Yorker cover editor Françoise Mouly introduces and explains one of the magazine's recent covers (left); the view from the publication's Manhattan offices (right).
Image: Screenshot, the new yorker/snapchat Read more...
Posted by randfish
We're hearing a lot about voice search lately, and that trend doesn't seem likely to disappear. But does it have a direct impact on how you should be thinking about your SEO strategy? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses what to expect when it comes to the future of search and what you can do to stay on top.
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about voice search, conversational search, Internet of things search, and how these attributes and the rise in these trends may or may not play a big role in our SEO strategy and tactics for the future.
Today, we have a few sort of nascent beginnings of this, and I made a prediction at the beginning of this year, in my traditional predictions post, that voice search, conversational search, Internet of things, that these wouldn't actually have a big impact or much of an impact at all on the web marketing world. What we are hearing is from the engines, specifically Google and Bing, talking about how a higher and higher percent of their queries are coming through voice searches. However, what we're not hearing is how this might be changing SEO or whether it's changing SEO.
"Okay, Google"
So today what we have going on is things like folks asking their device, their Android device, "Okay, Google, what's the difference between libel and slander?" You might hear this. Maybe you have a question, something you want answered, and Google will respond verbally to you, or they might just show you the results on the screen, and then you can click through to there, or some combination of the two.
"Alexa"
You can ask your Alexa device, the Amazon Echo Alexa device, you can ask it, "Alexa, did Iceland beat England in the Euro soccer game," or football game as English and Icelandic people would call it. In fact they did. Really, sorry about that England, but I kind of want to see the Icelandic commentator freak out again. That seems exciting.
"Hey, Siri"
For Apple products, "Hey Siri, where can I get Vietnamese rice noodles near here?" And Siri will look around you, and then return some results, that sort of thing.
Talking to cars
Of course, there's also this idea that with more and more cars are becoming hotspots for searches as drivers ask their cars things or ask their phones in their cars things like, "All right Tesla," this is not real, you can't actually say this to Tesla yet, but I'm sure it's coming, "When is my brother-in-law's birthday, and does he drink whiskey?" Hopefully, your Tesla will be smart enough, through whatever partnerships it has with these other technology companies, to be able to answer that.
This is what's happening today. We're seeing the rise in conversational and voice search. So there's a new and different kind of keyword demand and also a new and different kind of result set that returns because of that. Does it really make a huge difference from an SEO perspective? Well, I'm going to argue that not yet, no, it doesn't. However, I think there are strategic and tactical things that we should be paying attention to as this world progresses, this world of voice search, conversational search progresses.
I suspect that what we'll continue to see is that the percent of queries with an instant answer result keeps rising over time. Now this is percent, not absolute numbers. I mean, obviously the absolute number is rising, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the traditional kinds of queries that have been made to search engines are going to disappear.
In fact, one of the things that I would urge you and caution against is to say, "Oh, because voice and conversational search are rising, we should stop paying attention to direct, traditional web search and web results." It may in fact be the case that even with the rise of all these instant answers and new SERP features and voice search that the raw number of clicks on search results in your industry, in your field, for your keywords may actually have gone up despite all these trends. Because these trends are additive, they are not necessarily taking away from other forms of queries, at least not necessarily.
I think Google and Apple and Amazon and Alexa and all of these engines that participate in this will be continuing to disintermediate simplistic data and answer publishers. So I think it behooves you to question what types of information you're publishing
The way I'd phrase this is if a certain percent, X percent of queries that result in traffic can be answered in fewer than Y words, or with a quick image or a quick graphic, a quick number, then the engine is going to do it themselves. They don't need you, and very frankly they're faster than you are. They can answer that more quickly, more directly than you can. So I think it pays to consider: Are you in the safe or dangerous portion of this strategic framework with the current content that you publish and with the content plans that you have out in the future?
So if you're in the world of food and cooking, recipes probably very safe. It's very, very difficult for an engine to say, "Okay, here let me read you the ingredients. Let me show you the photos. Let me give you the entire rundown. I'll give you the comments. I'll give you the star rating." This is too complex.
What's very simple is cooking conversions. "Alexa, how many pounds of flour do I need to make up a cup?" Very simple cooking conversion, instant answer very possible. Pretty dangerous to be relying on a ton of your click-through traffic for that dangerous stuff.
Sports analysis, very, very difficult for any of these services to try and provide analysis of a game, very easy for them to provide a score.
Very difficult for them to do an in-depth product comparison, very easy for them to do a specific, simplistic product price comparison. "What are the prices of X on these?"
Learn to code tutorials, almost impossible to disintermediate, but a quick function look-up, very easy to disintermediate.
SAFE: If it's hard to aggregate and present simply, you have a competitive advantage, and you probably will be able to keep that traffic.
DANGEROUS: If it is easy to aggregate and present simply, you're probably in dangerous territory long term.
There are three things that we really think about as we move to the conversational and voice search world. Those are...
It requires SERP analysis of both desktop and mobile, and preferably in the future I think we're actually going to be looking for keyword research tools that can perform a voice query and then can tell us what the results either look like or sound like from the engine.
We need to do our prioritization of keyword targeting, which keywords we actually want to select and which keywords we want to create content for and try to rank for, based on our click-through opportunity and our value. If we don't have that information and that data, then we're probably going to be choosing some keywords unwisely compared to our competition who is thinking about this.
If someone searches for libel versus slander, it is the case that if you rank on the first page and you have the right content structure, Google may pull you into that instant answer box. What we've seen from our research is that being in that instant answer box is not a bad thing. In fact, it tends to increase click-through rate and overall traffic for many, many publishers. Not true for everyone. Some instant answers do really disintermediate queries, the "Iceland versus England, what was the score?" If Google just tells you, you don't need to click through. But certainly on libel versus slander you may see libel is written or published defamatory statement, while slander is spoken. It's very likely that people will actually be clicking through to learn more about that subject, and then you have an opportunity to serve up ads or to serve up your services or whatever product you're selling, those types of things. So format things intelligently.
Dr. Pete did a great blog post* on how to rank number zero, how to get into those instant answer results. He recently did a presentation at SMX Advanced that he's published on SlideShare, that you can check out as well. Both those resources very handy.
*Editor's note: This is indeed a great blog post, but it's still a draft. Stay tuned - we'll share this with you on Tuesday, July 26th. :-)
So if keyword search volume for the terms and phrases that you care about, if the orange is typed and the green here is voice search, you can see that it looks like over here this is 60% plus, so voice search has overtaken typed search. But what's actually happened is that, year to year, typed search has gone up as well. It didn't stop paying to try and rank for these keywords. In fact, it paid more and more dividends. It's just that voice search grew even faster. So I think we have to be cautious if we think about voice as completely disintermediating or taking over our industry or our content. Rather we should think of this as additive, and we need to pay close attention to the true overall volume demand, both typed and voice search over time.
All right gang, look forward to your tactics, your strategies for voice and conversational search, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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