Google Is Testing A New Interactive Feature On Search Results
- 21 December, 2020
- Jason Ferry
- SEO experts
Google announced to professional SEO experts and webmasters that they are conducting a test on their search engine results page to monitor searcher behaviour. Their testing includes interactive elements that let searchers click and view images from the web pages, which means that website owners and SEO experts may soon have the chance to choose which images to show searchers on the results page.
If the testing gets implemented in the future, it could impact click through rates significantly. This is because it gives websites the opportunity to show off their content's images and attract more searchers to visit their web pages. Having such a feature means that the SEO community will have to change up their techniques and methods to get higher traffic.
Google has not yet published any documentation for this feature as it is still in the works, but right now, they are testing whether or not the images can help searchers understand a website's content and if it is relevant to their queries.
As for professional SEO experts, the new feature may work in their favour as long as they wisely choose the best images to show their potential readers who are browsing the search engine results pages.
Currently, Google is planning to test the new feature on a small number of searchers. They also have a control group that will help researchers understand the behaviour of those without the feature under similar situations.
Moreover, the control group can help compare the number of searchers who clicked on the image icons during the same time period for the same type of questions. All of these will help the researchers measure user satisfaction, as well as other factors.
The search engine giant published a How Search Works article regarding to their live testing. They mentioned that they conduct more than 17,000 live experiments every year to analyse human behaviour by seeing how searchers engage with a feature before its official implementation.
Most of the features in question are only open to a small percentage of the users, usually at 0.1 per cent.
After they gather enough information, Google proceeds to perform comparisons between the control group and the experiment groups. Google then analyses a long list of metrics, such as the websites that searchers clicked through, the number of questions that were typed in, queries that were abandoned, how long it took for searchers to click through, and so on.
All of the gathered information is then used to measure the engagement and efficiency of the feature. With these processes, Google aims to make the websites that appear on the search results more relevant and useful for its users in the future.
If the new feature gets implemented in the future, the SEO experts will have to choose images that accurately depict or summarise the topic of their content, providing their readers with better insights on what their page is really all about.
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