Google, after much testing, has launched a new “seach options” panel, which you can see by clicking on “show options” just below your main search window.
Among the options are time-sensitive (how recently was the page updated?), show images from the page, and longer text.
We feel this is a very significant upgrade of Google’s search capabilities and will help continue their dominance in search. More importantly, if you are doing Internet Marketing, it will greatly help searchers sort out the sites they are looking for, before they even visit the site.
For example, a client of ours is a high-end hardwood flooring contractor. If you search for “hardwood flooring Tampa”, two of their pages show up in the top ten organic search listings. However, it isn’t that easy to distinguish amongst the listings, who is a professional hardwood floor contractor and who is something else.
If you click on the option to show images from the site, most of the others immediately show as being lower-level companies, general flooring contractors (not specializing in hardwood), or directories.
Why is this important? It is one thing to show up in searches. You still need to get the searcher to click selectively on the link to your site, as opposed to others.
This is the equivalent of having your ad in a magazine amongst 9 other ads for competitors. How do you get them to select yours?
I will make two predictions:
1. This will be VERY popular with searchers.
2. It will reward the company with a professional website.
We’ll be monitoring statistics over the next weeks to see how this change affects things. It should be gradual (as not everyone will discover or try the new features immediately). I’ll report in on it later.
Here’s a video from Google explaining the new features: