Just when you thought you had full control over your SEO and you had understood Google’s changes to the algorithms, there is something new to give a jolt to your SEO strategy and professionals. Google will not be hosting any more ads on the right side of its search results. While this might look like a very small change to some, this is going to cause a lot of hustle in the SEO world because the effects of removing these ads will be seen in other areas of internet marketing and specifically search engine optimization.
Let’s say there were three hooks holding a total weight of 30kg with 10kg on each hook. One of the hooks is going away. What’s going to happen when you remove one hook and when you still have to manage the same weight? Of course, you will have to put the weight of the removed hook on the remaining two. That’s what’s going to happen with SEO now. With so many different places to fight for, marketers had the chance of appearing in one place if their efforts did not earn them a good place in other parts of the search results.
Now, businesses will have to compete with only the top spots on the search engine pages. Thus, this will give rise to tougher competition for the top spots. However, Google is said to balance this by allowing more ads to appear in the top slots than it allowed before. If you noticed only 2 or 3 ads in the past on top of the organically appearing ads, you might see 4 on top now. Furthermore, Google is now providing more space on the search pages by allowing more ads to appear at the bottom of its search pages.
However, the top slot that is now available for 4 ads to appear is not for every search. Google says that queries that are highly commercial in nature will be met with the presence of 4 ads appearing on top of the normal search results. By now the changes might have taken place completely and users might not see any more ads on the right sideof their Google search results. The changes made by Google are not new to the SEO world though. Google had been working on this plan for nearly 6 years now since rumors had been around since 2010.
Companies that have been investing their time and money in listing for PLAs (product listing ads) should not be worried about this change because it is not going to affect the PLAs. These changes will be affecting businesses that had been paying to get their ads on the right through Google AdWords. However, this change is going to push national SEO to its limits. It just so happens that most of the searches that are purely commercial in nature include the name of countries, states or certain regions in them. This is a direct indication that businesses will have to make their national SEO aggressive.
A great way to check the new changes and how national SEO is going to be the area that most search engine optimization professionals will be working on is to search for “hotels in New York” on Google. The term “New York” refers not only to the city but the state as well. Any businesses that have been competing for national SEO will appear in these search results. At the same time you will be able to see the recent changes that Google has made to its search results and ads.
By searching the term “hotels in New York” you will notice 4 paid ads on top of the regular search results and 3 results at the bottom. This clearly shows that there is an additional ad on top and a couple of additional ads on the bottom. However, this should not be taken as the format of every search on Google. You can already see the term mentioned above is one of the most commercial terms you can search for on Google and that’s why you have ads appearing according to the new rules that Google has applied to its search results.
It has been said that Google did not notice a great increase in clicks on the ads that appeared on the right side of the page. Analyzing that this particular effort was not being very productive, Google got rid of the side ads altogether. In addition to that, Google is also making overall changes to its products and software offerings to make the experience smooth and uniform. You can look at the arrival of Material Design to understand how Google wants a uniform experience in the applications it offers from its Play Store by keeping actions for users consistent.
With this new change, the search results on desktop computers will appear just like they appear on mobile devices, most importantly smartphones. When it comes to commercial searches, it can be said accurately that businesses investing their efforts in organic SEO will face a little bit of disappointment. It is because with commercial searches the top 4 and bottom 3 paid ads will leave very small space for organic search results. If at first there used to be 9 organic search results on the page, there will be only 8 when a commercial term is searched on Google.
If you were ranking 9th on Google’s search results and you still appeared on the first page, you will now start appearing on the second page. This is going to be a big blow for all businesses that were already resting at the bottom of first search result page. It is quite surprising that currently even the PLAs have been shrunk in their horizontal size and they are appearing only on the left side of the search page. Lastly, the local search results are still appearing on the right side of the page and you could check that out by searching for a business near your location.
