Hello Reader,

If you haven't heard of it, Search On is an annual event in which Google announces broad updates to our search experience. This is different from the 200+ data points they use to create search engine results, it's instead all about the end users of the search engine.

Think of this as the other side of the search coin—what your potential site visitors are experiencing when they use Google.

Why does this matter to website owners when we talk about rankings so often? It matters because the better we understand how our audience is interacting with information (what they discover in search—remember 90% of internet experiences start with a search), the better we can meet them where they're at and create a connection.

The event was a couple of weeks ago, and it was packed full of interesting stuff for sure! I won't touch on everything. (If you are interested in the highlights related to shopping, here's an article with some good top-level highlights.)​

Broad brush, Google is making big strides in creating a more "natural and intuitive" (according to them) search experience.

This is happening in a few key ways that you should understand a tiny bit (I deeply believe that anyone with a website should have a small baseline of knowledge on this).

Multisearch is a fascinating approach to search that will likely grow in the coming years. The concept here is that people can search using images and text at the same time—Google says it's akin to taking a picture of something and asking a friend about it. (There are already 8 billion "Lens" aka image-based searches each month already.) This is really appealing, especially when the proximity (physical closeness to the search results you're shown) addition to multisearch happens later this year.

Also in this realm are additions to translations in search, so this will allow you to find results outside of the language you're searching in, particularly with images, which can break down barriers to information. There's also a new immersive search result for locations, which I see being very powerful for a whole lot of industries. (You can preview this here.)

This next piece is a bit wonky to explain (you can see it in action here), but Google is introducing another new search experience within the search bar to help searchers immediately refine their topics with different keyword prompts and results.

So, this will potentially do a couple of intriguing things: 1) if a search is specific enough, it will bypass the search engine results page entirely for many people and 2) it will likely reward well-optimized content that's also very specific.

This is my favorite part of the update, because it is an opportunity for small sites to pop up for hyper-specific searches without searchers being distracted by names they may already know. In short, my working theory is that it could be a brand awareness opportunity in the search engine. Remember: Brand awareness is a legit goal when we're talking about using SEO in our marketing.

Again, I'm not expecting you to have a deep understanding of any of this—and none of us will until we see it all in action. But, it's clear to me that the future is definitely full of opportunities for folks willing to experiment with search-first marketing content in the coming year.

Talk soon (and I'll be less nerdy next time—promise),

Sarah