Update on search experiences in EEA Countries

As publishers, we are always on guard in terms of what Google is going to give us next on their updates every year, and this first quarter of the year is no different.

Their update on the possibilities for the new European regulation enacted in 2023 called the DMA (stands for Digital Marketers Act), which aids an open and fair digital market in the European region. These new regulations allow users to see more visual and entity focus results, in this way the results provided by the SERP are much more relevant and provide a more fair exposure to all available results for the user’s query.

With this in mind, Google has introduced a new carousel-rich result, which relies on the structure data in the markup of your website. Let’s explain a bit more:

New Carousel, Explained

Normally, rich results will rely on the structured data in the markup of a website. This leads to said carousel showing more graphical elements or interactive experiences, making the user experience more relevant and accurate for the user.

That being said, the new carousel rich result specifies the results generated for shopping, travel and local queries, and it is currently being tested first in the UK, France, Czechia and Germany. Each denominational tile in these carousels gives pertinent information about these queries, such as prices, reviews, and images from businesses, places or products; this is also known as a review schema markup.

This type of structure data is used by Google to provide the user with as much information as possible for them to make an informed decision and answer queries with more accuracy. This carousel is played horizontally, allowing the user to scroll horizontally to give more visual options from said site.

This structure data is very important since it improves your website results in the SERP visually. Moreover, with rich snippets, you can display yellow stars create contrast and are visually appealing to the user, as well as an extra social validation for your site from actual user feedback.

It's because of this that if the site doesn’t have a structured data markup on the page the standard text results will be the one that will show up instead; therefore is recommended to include the markup as mentioned earlier.

Aggregator Units and Refinement Chips

Google is also introducing dedicated aggregator units that allow users to easily see the top aggregator results for their respective queries. With this, the user can narrow their search to more relevant aggregators, or to put it simply, the program that collects multiple resources for a specific search (like places and text results, jobs and flights). In this case, publishers don't need to add any markup to be eligible to appear on these results.

There are so many additions Google is doing to enhance the user experience and increase the relevancy of results. Google's new updates for 2024 focus on enhancing user experience and promoting fair competition in the European market.

The introduction of the carousel-rich result for shopping, travel, and local queries, along with dedicated aggregator units, provides users with visually appealing and informative search results.