Posted on by Bob Ottaway

HOLD ON FOR WILD RIDE AT GOOGLE

As Google rushes to catch up with Microsoft Bing, changes are being made that are still not all determined but may benefit your site if it’s not on Page One of Google search results right now.  Here’s what’s going on…and maybe you can capitalize:

  1. GOOGLE IS PLAYING CATCH UP:  They won’t admit it, but the way Search has unfolded in the last 12 months, it’s most obvious.  Bing has been the leader.
  2. BING PARTNERS WITH CHATGPT:  Microsoft owns about 49% of OpenAI that created ChatGPT.  When it was released on November 30th of last year, it caught the world by storm.
  3. MICROSOFT RUSHES TO INCORPORATE CHATGPT INTO BING:  As soon as Bing introduced answers to users’ queries using ChatGPT, Google had to respond…and respond fast.
  4. GOOGLE INTRODUCES SEARCH GENERATIVE EXPERIENCE (SGE):  Google began rolling this out by the mid-point of last year, and it is available to most users in the US and India.  
  5. WHAT IS SGE?  To quote Google: “Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a new approach to search results. It’s an experimental search experience that uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to provide users with quick and clear overviews of search topics—without having to click on individual webpages.”  Dec 20, 2023 
  6. HOW CAN YOUR SITE BENEFIT?  As Google is rolling this out as fast as possible, it is very much a system in flux, which is to say there seem to be a variety of scenarios that are being tested by Google, and one of these is determining what sites appear for an SGE search result.  This may benefit your site.
  7. NO WEBSITES LISTED ON PAGE ONE ARE APPEARING IN SGE: Amazingly, in research conducted recently by Authoritas after testing 1,000 keywords in the US,  93.8% of the generative links came from sources outside the current top-ranking domains. This is a big advantage if your site is not being returned by Google on Page One.
  8. WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?  Be prepared by optimizing your site to the fullest.  Make each page relevant for your most popular searches.  Google is first and foremost looking for the correct answer to the user’s inquiry, and hopefully, it will be the best answer, too.

These are exciting times.  We want you to be able to take advantage of them.  Onward and upward!

For more information: https://superiorhomeservicesmarketing.com/blog/what-it-takes-to-get-a-roofing-lead/