Search Engine Recap - Week 5 (2024)

The fifth week of 2024 brings highlights from Google's Q4 Earnings Call, a change in Core Web Vitals, and recommendations on how your business should navigate to maintain visibility on the search engine. Here's an overview.

Google Shares Financial Results in Q4 Earnings Call

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has unveiled its financial results for the fourth quarter and the entirety of 2023 in its latest earnings call.

In Q4, revenue increased by 13%, driven primarily by AI enhancements in Google Search, YouTube, and Cloud services.

Google's strategic focus on AI, such as the Gemini model, aims to enhance user experiences and advertisers' performance, with a particular emphasis on reducing search latency and improving the quality of search results.

For those working with SEO, it's essential to adapt strategies to the evolving AI-driven landscape, which can impact visibility while also offering new opportunities for content optimization.

Google Rolls Out 'Circle to Search'

Google has introduced a new feature called "Circle to Search", now available on select Android phones, enabling users to search for information by 'circling' or highlighting content on their screens.

This feature is particularly useful for shopping, searching for definitions, travel inspiration, comparing options, and answering complex questions.

Therefore, it underscores the need to optimize both visual and textual content to be displayed using this innovative search method.

Google Updates Core Web Vitals with 'INP'

Google has announced an update to Core Web Vitals, replacing First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) on March 12, 2024.

INP measures website responsiveness to user interactions to enhance the user experience.

For those working with SEO, it's crucial to assess and optimize your website for INP to ensure good performance, which will affect search results and user engagement.

This involves diagnosing and addressing issues affecting interactivity, such as long JavaScript tasks or complex DOM structures.

Takeaways and Recommendations

Insights from Google's financial results once again underscore where the search engine is heading. With AI driving growth, more investments are in store, a fact that Google has been transparent about.

This makes it especially exciting regarding SGE (Search Generative Experience), when it will be rolled out and in what format.

Additionally, the Circle to Search format and the Core Web Vitals update emphasize the importance for businesses to stay updated in their optimization efforts, which are becoming increasingly crucial for users and thus search engines.

Therefore, ensure to create user experiences that provide value from the first click and in formats that match multimodal formats.

If you want to be at the top today and in the future, the above updates - as well as future ones - are essential for achieving results on the search engine.