Google’s Search Related Announcements From Google I/O May 2021
Last month there were a lot of interesting announcements from the Google I/O conference The announcements ranged from changes to shopping campaigns, Machine learning and AI , applications, and SEO. In this blog we cover some of the changes related to e-commerce, Google Shopping and YouTube videos.
YouTube Video Markup For Search
Structured Data Markup is a way to add notations within your YouTube videos and allows Google’s search engine to show relevant text about your videos that may be buried with the video. This type of markup can help your videos show up in Google results and stand out from the rest. The markup will allow users to skip directly to important moments in the video that you indicate using text markup.
We have already started to see examples of this markup at the bottom of search results as shown below in the screenshot.
One of the new markup languages is called clips markup that will help you enhance videos for Google Search. It is fairly complex this type of Markup to video and the tools you need can be found here on Google’s developer blog: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/video
The other type of markup that is coming soon is called Seek Markup. All you will have to do with this new markup is create a file that tells Google how to link to an arbitrary timestamp within your videos and Google will use AI and Machine Learning to automatically create the markup that you would manually have to setup for all your videos using Clip Markup. We recommend waiting for this feature to be launched and then setting this up for all your videos.
Mueller’s talk on what’s new in Google search can be viewed here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRmDxNBhzow&feature=emb_logo
Changes To Google Shopping
Shopping Graph
Google announced that they have expanded on their other well-known search feature Knowledge Graph with a new feature called the Shopping Graph. This graph allows Google to showcase products in the shopping feed and enhances the results using Google’s AI. This works in real-time and pulls in data form reviews, prices, videos and product data from merchant data feeds.
More information about Google’s Shopping Graph can be found here: https://blog.google/products/shopping/more-ways-to-shop/
Shopify Integration
Google announced they have partnered with Shopify. Shopify products will now automatically synch with Google Merchant center. You can also run Google smart bidding campaigns straight from the Shopify interface. However, the performance is likely to be much worse than setting up and managing ad campaigns that you control directly from Google Ads interface.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/create-marketing/google
Image Search Integration
In addition in the image searches Google will show related products over images that will lead consumers to similar products available on Google shopping. If you have your products listed in Google’s merchant center feed this could lead to greater discovery of your products if users are using Google image search to find products they are interested in.
For complete coverage of the event you can watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB2B-HVAwAk
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Sean Golliher
President
Sean periodically teaches as an adjunct professor on the topic of search engines and search marketing at MSU and is a member of their computer science advisory board. He completed coursework for his PhD in machine learning at MSU. He was the founder and publisher of SEMJ.org. Sean holds four engineering patents, has a B.S. in physics from the University of Washington in Seattle, and a master’s in electrical engineering from Washington State University. As president and director at metric ppc, Inc. he focuses on search marketing, internet research, and consults for large companies.