Okay, so I got some feedback from the folks at Range Online Media — their thoughts on whether the new Google search options feature will affect SEO marketers.
According to John Greer, Sr. SEO account manager at Range Online Media, the first thing marketers will want to know is how many people are clicking on the Google Search Options button. “If it’s very few people it has more selective an impact, but it might be one of those things that they’re rolling out like this right now but eventually it becomes more prominent,” he says.
Kerry Dean, SEO account manager at Range, adds that right now the Options button is not really being advertised. “The people clicking on it now are Web-savvy [folks] who have to know about it.” However, he adds that if it does become more prominent, SEO marketers will need to take it seriously as searchers become used to searching by recency, for example, or genre. “If it does turn out to be something that becomes ingrained in the way we search, it points out the need for pretty much any company to generate fresh content on a daily basis.”
But of Google’s announcements last week, Greer said the new tool getting the most buzz around his office are the new microformats, or “rich snippets,” which add additional data and information in the initial search result without having to click to another page.
“I think we’re all pretty interested in what rich snippets could do to improve click-through rates in the SERPs,” he explains. “For example, we’ve got some clients that include reviews on their sites, so we are definitely going to have them work on adding the microformat code for reviews on their pages very soon.”
