Not so very long ago the only thing website owners had to worry about in the SERPs was their ranking. If you could get your page to show up in the first couple spots, you’re going to get a lot of traffic and hopefully make some good money. Today, however, the search engines are using the SERPs to provide searchers with information directly, before they even have to click on a link.
This started some time ago with search engines listing things like the current time when someone typed in a search like, “What time is it in Hawaii?” It expanded with more direct answers to questions over time. Bing then took it a step further, offering tax help widgets to searchers who were looking for that type of thing.
Recently, Google announced that they would be providing restaurant menu information on the SERPs when people searched for specific restaurants. Google did not specify how they were gathering that information together, but it is likely that they are using a combination of scraping restaurant sites and using menu aggregators like Allmenus.com. However they are doing it, this is just one more indication that marketers of all types need to think beyond simple SEO.
Setting your site up to make it easy for Google to gather the information they may want to display directly to customers is more important than ever. Avoid using images or PDFs of content, and focus on more searchable formats. In addition, making sure all this type of data is easily available for the spiders and bots from the search engines will ensure you are prepared for any additional changes that are made.
Just how far the search engines want to take this will be interesting to watch. At some point, site owners aren’t going to want their information displayed in the SERPs without the visitors ever making it to their page. While it makes sense for restaurant owners to have their menus available, not all businesses operate in the same way. In addition, menus often change rapidly, so it will be essential for Google to keep their data current or it could cause problems.
You can see the Google+ post about this update HERE.
