SEO News You Can Use: Google Offers Two New Features To Help Leverage First-Party Data

Google is offering more support to publishers in the form of two new features regarding first-party data that will allow for more ad personalization. As a result, publishers will have greater autonomy and more options to implement marketing strategies that best suit their corporate objectives. So what’s new in Google Ad Manager and AdSense?

• Publisher first-party cookies expansion – helps provide meaningful advertising to publishers without tracking users across various third-party websites. It leverages data from user interactions with ads on the publisher’s own website following the user’s AdChoice preferences. 
• Audience signals introduced – divide first-party information or data collected directly from customers into audience or contextual categories that can be used when buying ads online. This provides more resources to identify and buy audiences based on factors like “demographics, content interests or purchase intent across multiple sites and apps without tracking people’s activities in apps or across the web,” according to Search Engine Land.

Both features are especially beneficial for smaller publishers that may not have the resources or support needed to reap the advantages of first-party data.

More SEO News You Can Use

Google Updates and Clarifies Product Review Best Practices, Adding 3 Category Examples: Google recently refined its documentation on how to write product reviews. It also clarifies a few things, like the fact that these practices apply to product and product review pages yet exclude user-generated product reviews. Google also added three new examples of categories to the Google Help Doc to help clarify which sites may be affected by the recent Products Review update. These examples include “A blogger that provides independent opinions of products, an expert staff member of a merchant that guides shoppers between competing products and an editorial staff member at a news or other publishing site,” according to Search Engine Land. For more information, visit Search Engine Journal here.

Google Updates Requirements for Image Structured Data: Google now makes it easier to give credit to online resources in the form of new requirements for image-structured data. Google added three new properties, namely creditText, Creator and copyrightNotice, that allow you to give credit to image creators. This is a step up from the previous method, which needed International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) image metadata to avoid news media copyright infringements. A great advantage to adding this type of information to structured data plugins is that it will be easier to scale as you go. For more in-depth detail, take a look at the Search Engine Journal article here.

Google Give Insights on Writing Effective Image Alt Text: In further SEO-related news, Google’s latest podcast provided pointers on how to write compelling image alt text. In Google’s Search Off the Record, Google Search liaisons John Mueller and Lizzi Saassman highlighted practical ways to create effective image alt text, including whether it’s better to be descriptive or not, especially when it’s a concept, according to Search Engine Journal. Mueller suggests providing content that would be valuable in terms of helping to provide information that will describe the idea or image to someone on the other end of the phone. If it doesn’t add value, it can be regarded as decorative and, therefore, should probably not be included in the alt-text. It’s also important to add information about the image in relation to the context in which it is being used. In other words, to be as specific as possible to find a balance between describing the image and alt text. This will ensure that an image search result will answer search intent as accurately as possible because, essentially, users are not only looking for images but the information linked to them in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Research Reveals Insights on 150,000 Product Searches: Search Engine Journal recently reported on some interesting research results done by seoClarity on 150,000 product searches. This makes for some valuable data, especially for apparel eCommerce sites. “Research on the search results of 150,000 apparel-related keywords reveals that Google shows SERP features 95% of the time, reflecting opportunities available for online merchants who are keen to sell more through Google,” said Roger Montti of Search Engine Land. The top three features shown on the SERPs are carousels, People Also Ask and FAQs. The results seem to suggest that search features surpass organic search results in SERPs, particularly page one, of which 85 percent are Popular Products. Interestingly, most of these were mobile query results, with 75 percent appearing in the Popular products SERPs at least four times. For more insights, read on via Search Engine Journal here.

Google Announces Passkey Functionality for Android and Chrome: Google Play Services Beta and Chrome Canary members will have the opportunity to test the beta launch of the new passkey feature. This feature saves the passwords of verified users that will be automatically entered online. Search Engine Journal reported that all Android and Chrome users are expected to have access later in the year. Users can create and use passkeys on all devices synced with Google Password Manager. Developers can also build support for this feature online using WebAuthn API, allowing for better security and user experience. Passkeys are similar to Google’s password manager feature. It allows users to automatically complete passwords in online forms once devices are enabled using biometric data like fingerprints or facial recognition, personal identification number (PIN), etc. This vastly enhances security compared to conventional methods like push-based approvals, short message services (SMSes) or one-time passwords (OTPs).

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