What You Need to Know About Google's SGE

Hello everybody! Joe Stoffel here, SEO Director at Marcel Digital. I wanted to take some time today to talk to you about Google's Search Generative Experience also known as SGE. This might be something you've noticed in your own search results and it has been rolled out to all United States users as of May 2024. Now, SGE is Google incorporating the power of generative AII into its own search results where it is now providing you direct answers and AI powered overviews to the queries you are putting into Google.

So we'll do a basic example here for what is an SEO migration. And so here below, we see the traditional instant answer featured snippet. But above that, we can see the actual SGE result itself in this AI powered overview. Now, right now, this is kind of a one and done.
There's nothing more that you can do with this search. You're getting your direct answers, you are seeing the links that Google is pulling its content from and providing that answer back to you. But the SGE experience, while just rolled out to United States users as of May, has been accessible through an opted-in beta type experience for over about a year at this point. So I want to talk to you about some of the things that we were seeing in that experimental phase of SGE that we feel are going to be more prominent in the future of Google’s Search Generative Experience.

The first one I want to talk to you about is the follow up feature. So this is something that we saw pretty regularly in the opted-in experience where instead of having that one and done experience, you have the opportunity to continue that conversation where Google will provide you with some suggested follow up queries or you can actually go ahead and type your own in. This allows you to continue that conversation with Google and continue to refine your search, which is also continuing to make search more conversational.

Now, in addition to this follow up feature, we also feel that at some point in the near future, we are going to be seeing more product listings incorporated into the SGE experience. Here's an example of that taking place for the query, inexpensive home security camera that is good for pet monitoring. You can see you are getting an AI powered overview of some of the features that you would want in such a product. But at the same time, Google is now incorporating actual product listings directly into this result. Now, what you'll see is that these listings are being powered by a combination of review websites and Google organic shopping. So for ecommerce players, this is gonna be a very impactful roll out for you all.

There's gonna be some things that you're going to want to be sure you're doing to optimize for this experience. One you want to be making sure that you are optimizing those Google organic shopping feeds, having all your products in there and helping them stand out as well as possible, giving them high quality imagery, giving them unique and compelling product descriptions because with an experience like this, Google is becoming your new category page. So those product descriptions, those stock product descriptions are no longer going to cut it. They need to be compelling in order to get the user to click into your own result. In addition to maximizing your presence and optimizations of Google organic shopping, you want to be making sure that you are leveraging the product scheme of structured data on your product pages. And you want to be making sure that you are still compiling reviews on your own product pages, but also getting your products reviewed on other review websites.

One other area that we feel we're going to see expanding in this SGE are within local results themselves where we feel that there's going to be an expansion of local results. So on the left hand side, we have a search. It's your traditional map pack, one sponsored listing three organic results. And on the right hand side is what the experience we were seeing. Google's SGE and the opted in experience. As you will see, there are more companies listed here going from four total to about 75 in this particular screenshot, have more imagery, a broader description, but then we also have two listed here below. Now, something that I found that was interesting about this is when you click into these descriptions, Google is taking content from review and rating websites not relying as heavily on your own Google business listing or your Google business reviews to compile that information for users.

Now, this is very important because this means that in order to make sure that you're showing up and presenting your company in a way that you want people to see you, you need to be making sure that you are engaging in digital pr so that you're going to be showing up in all the relevant websites that you possibly can. At the same time, reputation management becomes more important because if Google is gonna be relying on third party websites to provide information about your brand, you need to be making sure that they are talking about you and that you are being presented in a way that you want your brand being conveyed to prospects and potential purchasers. And on top of this, of course, continuing to generate more positive reviews for your brand is going to continue to be a very important factor when showing up in local search results.

So that's what we have for today. This is still in the experimental phase and we're going to continue to see SGE evolve and we'll continue keeping you updated on what we're seeing next.