Scott Services: Four most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

Friday, 21 April 2017

Four most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

We’re back with our weekly round-up of the most interesting search marketing news stories from around the web.

I hope you all enjoyed last Friday’s Easter search trivia quiz, and if you haven’t had a chance to test your knowledge yet, be sure to have a go and share your score with us on social media!

This week: a look at the newly-relaunched Google Earth and what it could mean for marketers, and a study has shown that 45% of marketers say their biggest difficulty with Schema.org markup is proving its value.

Plus, Google’s new “suggested clip” feature in search results shows how far its ability to search within videos has improved, and a new menu of Partner-only Features on Google’s Developer Blog hints at some exciting things to come.

Relaunched Google Earth introduces 3D local maps, visual storytelling opportunities

Google has just unveiled a stunning relaunch of Google Earth, with a wealth of new features and information to explore. On Search Engine Watch this week, Clark Boyd gave us a tour of the new Earth, including a look at how marketers can take advantage of the visual storytelling opportunities it presents, and what it means for local search, where “near me” searches will activate a 3D local map featuring business names, photographs and contact details.

45% of marketers have difficulty showing the value of Schema markup

A recent survey carried out by Schema App, a provider of tools to help marketers use Schema markup, has provided some insight into the difficulties that marketers encounter when using Schema markup.

Schema markup is often touted as a killer search tactic which is nevertheless seeing very little uptake among website owners. It can vastly improve the look of websites on the SERP with the addition of rich data, and it is integral to a number of Google features like featured snippets.

But according to Schema App’s survey, 45% of marketers say they have difficulty in “showing the value of doing Schema markup – reporting the impact and results”. Forty-two percent struggle with maintaining the ‘health’ of their markup when Google makes changes, while 40% cited difficulties in developing a strategy around what to mark up with Schema.

Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of respondents (24%) said they had difficulty understanding Schema markup vocabulary at all.

Google shows “suggested clip” feature in search results

Google is continually improving its ability to search within a video, and to surface a particular search result within the content of a video. In a previous search news roundup we reported on the fact that Google’s machine learning technology can now recognize objects within videos, as demonstrated at Google’s Next Cloud conference in early March.

Then this week, Ryan Rodden of Witblade reported that Google is now showing suggested video clips in search results for particular queries:

Image: Witblade

The suggested clip appeared in a query for “blur out text in imovie”, highlighting a suggested clip of 25 seconds in the middle of a how-to video. While it’s unknown how accurate this result was for the query, it shows that Google is making bold inroads into searching within video and is treating video like other kinds of content to be crawled, indexed and presented as a Featured Snippet.

Given the huge rise, and popularity, of video of all forms in marketing, social media and publishing at the moment, it’s a smart move and something we can probably expect to see more of in future.

Google adds extensive new menu of Partner-only Features

Google’s Partner-only Features are a forum for it to debut certain search features to a select group of approved and certified providers, before they are rolled out on a wider scale. Aaron Bradley noted in the Semantic Search Marketing Google+ group this week that Google has just added a huge new menu in the Partner-only Features section of its documentation.

The new menu features eight sub-sections including “Carousels”, “Indexing API”, “Jobs” and “Live coverage”.