Is Google moving toward being search marketing’s point of singularity: Thursday’s daily brief

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and have you read Accelerando?

The book is a series of short stories about humanity’s move toward technological singularity. The first chapter starts with a guy named Manfred wearing what is essentially Google Glass long before Google released the product (maybe it inspired them, who knows?). And it ends with a collective superintelligence uploaded onto a communications network. Google’s latest move to encourage lead form collection in SERPs without having customers ever leave Google made me think of the book this morning for some reason. 

The search engine already has the largest search market share in the US (and beyond). Many local businesses rely on GMB to drive footfall and online business. Plus, SEOs have been complaining for a while that SERP features like rich snippets encourage searchers to stay on Google instead of clicking through to websites. Now PPC practitioners can opt in to something similar with the new leads form extension (read more about it in the article below). 

In response to the PPC announcement, someone on Twitter asked if we’d even need websites anymore eventually. It’s as if Google is testing ways to be the point of singularity across all internet and digital marketing. 

Carolyn Lyden
Director of Search Content

Google officially displays years in business in local pack

If your clients are proud of their business tenure, they can now brag about it in their Google My Business listing. The new label shows up in local search results in the map pack. You can add it to your listing or your clients’ profiles by adding an opening date under the “Info” option in the admin menu.

Showing your years in business can help establish trust with potential clients (like Barry’s listing above which shows he’s both old [lol jk] and has been working in search for over 25 years). You can also use the feature to display a future opening date for a new business.

Read more here.

In-SERP lead forms convert Google Ads users without a click-through

SEOs have been complaining for years that Google is taking up ever more SERP real estate with their own properties and money-makers. Apparently, it’s time for PPCers to feel the same. In a tweet yesterday, Google announced lead form extensions for Search, Video, and Discovery ads.

The ad extension allows advertisers to opt in to having a lead form pop up directly in search results upon an ad click. This means that the lead doesn’t go to the advertiser’s website to complete a form–but has the option to continue to the site after entering their information (or they can choose to return to search results).

Read more here.

Pitch to speak at SMX Create

We’re looking for experts in SEO and PPC to speak at the upcoming SMX Create virtual event. If you have expertise in ad copy creation, landing page design, PPC account structure, measuring SEO content success, and optimizing your on-page content–we want to hear your pitches.

Tips for pitching your session:

• Present an original idea.
• Include details about what attendees will be able to do better.
• Include specific examples and explain how they can be applied.
• Provide tangible takeaways and a plan of action.

Send in your session pitch.

Bing recommendations, Google coworking spaces & neutralizing spam.

Bing recommended topics. Bing Search is testing a new section named “explore further” that shows you recommended queries and sites based on “your activity and what’s popular.”  This seems like a new feature. 

Coworking office space label. Google is now labeling businesses in co-working spaces with a “coworking office space” label in the local pack within the search results.

Neutralize search spam. Google’s John Mueller said the company prefers to neutralize the search spam versus penalize it. He said on Twitter “most of the time, the algorithms take care of neutralizing the issue on their own. For example, if we can neutralize the effect of bad links, that’s enough; there’s no need to remove the site completely from search then.”

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• Answering your top questions about Google News Showcase – Google Blog
• Google Search Console To Show Page Experience Appearance Filter – Search Engine Roundtable
• How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love – Moz
• Speller100: Zero-shot spelling correction at scale for 100-plus languages – Microsoft Research
• Sunsetting Portfolio Enhanced CPC Bid Strategies – Google Ads Developer Blog