This past week we learned about a new service Google is working on that will benefit local businesses, and Bing (yes, Bing) added some pretty cool new features to its image search.
Full details on each of these stories in this week’s SEO news roundup!
Latest SEO News – Week Ending 4/10/2015
Google To Hook Searchers Up With Local Services
A report was released this past week with details about a new search product Google is working on that will link searchers directly to the local services they’re looking for.
By interpreting a searcher’s intent, this new feature from Google will be able to identify when someone is looking for a local service, and match them up with the appropriate service provider.
Details are scarce at this point, as Google has yet to release an official statement, but from what is known so far it sounds like this could really help drive more traffic and revenue for local businesses. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
New Features in Bing’s Image Search
The next time you’re doing an image search you may want to use Bing instead of Google, because it just added some unique new features that really enhance the overall search experience.
Now when you search for and click on a photo in Bing, you’ll have an array of new options to explore the content of the image even further.
Bing will now display descriptions of whatever happens to be featured in the image, as well as options to view higher res versions of the image, or to visit a product page to buy what’s featured in the image.
A complete list of new things you’ll see in Bing image search are as follows:
- Places to buy the product in the image
- Related searches based on the image
- Pinterest collections with the image
- More sizes of the image
- Pages with the image
To Bing’s credit, these are unique new features that Google doesn’t have. Good on them for innovating, they may pick up some more search share out of this as a result. I know I’ll be using their image search more often.
Test it out for yourself to see what you can find by browsing through images, the amount of content it links you to is really quite impressive.
For site owners, this may be an opportunity to get a few more clicks from Bing search, so make sure you’re using images in your content!
Reminder: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Launches on April 21st
To keep this fresh in everyone’s mind, we’d like to remind you that a significant algorithm update is coming in just under a month that will affect how non-mobile friendly sites appear in search results.
For full information please see this post.
Wrapping it Up
We have a new local search feature from Google to keep an eye on, and Bing started stepping up its game with some new image search features that keep it competitive with Google.
If you have any questions about any of this past week’s SEO news, please leave a comment and I will be sure to respond.
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