A few team shots, some work examples, maybe a couple of product images. Then it usually gets left alone.

Google has now started showing view counts on individual photos and videos within some Business Profiles. Instead of just seeing overall engagement, you can see how many times each image has been viewed.

It sounds minor on paper. Most updates like this usually are. Still, there’s something useful hidden in it.

Because until now, there hasn’t been much to go on beyond guesswork. A business might assume customers like a certain type of image, but there’s never been any real feedback to confirm it.

One photo could be doing most of the work without anyone noticing. Another might be sitting there completely ignored.

Local businesses tend to underestimate how much people rely on visuals before they decide to get in touch. Reviews matter, of course – so does price and location. But photos often sit somewhere in the middle of that decision-making process, even if it doesn’t get talked about much.

A customer looking for a service will usually scroll through images before they do anything else. It’s just part of how people check businesses now. Having actual numbers attached to those images changes things slightly – not dramatically, but enough to notice patterns over time.

If one type of image consistently gets more attention than others, that’s probably worth paying attention to. Not because it changes everything, but because it gives some direction where there wasn’t much before.

The feature isn’t fully rolled out yet, so not every business will see it straight away. When it does appear, it will be interesting to see how many people actually use it for anything beyond curiosity.

If you need any assistance optimising your Google Business Profile, please get in touch with us at Engage Web.

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The assumption was that if enough people saw your brand, growth would follow.
Today, things look very different. Consumers are more informed than ever, and they’re becoming increasingly selective about the brands they engage with. They expect relevant experiences, respect for their privacy and marketing that genuinely helps rather than interrupts their social media scroll.

This shift presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Take a local furniture retailer as an example. If a customer has just completed a purchase, immediately bombarding them with unrelated offers can feel intrusive. Suggesting matching accessories, care products or useful resources based on their purchase feels far more helpful and is much more likely to generate additional sales.

The difference comes down to relevance. Modern AI tools are making it easier for businesses to understand customer intent and deliver personalised experiences at the right time. Rather than relying on broad assumptions about who a customer might be, businesses can focus on what that individual customer is actually interested in at that moment.

This is particularly important after a purchase has been made. Customers have already placed their trust in your business – so how you communicate with them next can either strengthen that relationship, or weaken it.

The businesses seeing the strongest long-term results are not necessarily those spending the most on advertising. They’re the ones building trust through helpful content, relevant recommendations and customer-focused experiences.

As privacy regulations evolve and third-party data becomes less reliable, those trusted customer relationships will become even more valuable. For business owners, this presents an opportunity. Every interaction with a customer contributes to how your brand is perceived. When marketing feels useful, relevant and respectful, customers are more likely to come back, recommend your business and remain loyal over time.

If you’d like to create marketing that builds trust while delivering measurable results, get in touch with our team at Engage Web. We’d love to discuss how we can help your business grow.

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The company says AI should do more than answer questions – it wants AI to act as an assistant that can carry out tasks for users.

At the centre of Google’s strategy is Gemini, its AI system. Google has upgraded it to work across a wide range of apps and devices. Gemini can understand not only text, but also voice, video and other forms of information. As a result, it can support more tasks than before, including task management, content creation and advice.

Google describes this new approach as “agentic AI”. Rather than waiting for instructions, the AI can begin tasks, make plans and carry them out with minimal help from the user.

At the heart of it, Google is trying to protect its core business: search. For years, people have relied on Google to find information, helping the company become highly successful. But new AI tools from other companies are changing how people look for answers – instead of using search engines, they may increasingly turn to AI assistants.

To stay competitive, Google wants to make search more intelligent. It aims to move beyond a page of results and create an assistant that understands what users need and takes action. This could transform how people use the internet every day.

Google is also integrating AI into many of its products. Gemini is being added to tools such as Google Workspace, which millions of people use for work and study. By doing this, Google hopes users will depend on its AI across more areas of daily life.

At the same time, competition in AI is intensifying. Companies such as Microsoft and Amazon are also developing powerful AI tools. Google believes its strength lies in handling billions of search requests each day, giving it vast amounts of data to improve its AI systems.

Experts say the move towards agentic AI could reshape how software works. In the past, people had to tell programs exactly what to do – but in the future, AI may take the lead and complete entire tasks on its own. This could change how businesses operate and how people use technology at home.

Want to see how AI can be used as part of a plan to optimise your brand’s presence online? At Engage Web, we know what it takes to make your business succeed, so reach out to us now to get started.

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If you’ve recently made changes to your website, whether that be updating a meta description, rewriting page content or changing a title tag, you might expect Google to notice these updates straight away.

In reality, this is not always the case, as Google doesn’t always pick up these changes immediately.

In fact, it can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks for Google to notice changes made to a website and show the updated version in search results.

This is because Google has limited resources available to crawl and index a website. Google doesn’t check every website every day – instead, it decides when to come back based on several different factors.

This can include how often your website is updated, and how easy it is for Google to understand.

This process involves one of Google’s crawl bots visiting your site, reading through its content and discovering these updates and deciding whether those changes should be added to their index.

Google’s index is a database holding saved versions of web pages that Google has crawled and indexed. When someone performs a search, Google searches its index and returns the pages that it believes are the most relevant to the user’s query.

When you update a page, Google needs to visit that page again, see the changes and update the version saved in its index. Until that happens, Google may still show the older version of the page in search results.

Once Google has seen and processed the updated page, your changes can start to appear.

As a general guide, the timeline below shows roughly how long it can take for Google to show changes made to a website:

• Small changes to text typically appear within a few hours to a few days.
• Adding new pages or making larger website changes can usually take up to two weeks to show properly in Google’s search results.
• Changes that affect where your website ranks can often take between a few weeks to a few months. This is because Google needs time to review the updated page and compare it with other pages in the search results to decide where it should appropriately rank.

There are a few ways you can try and speed up the process, including manually submitting the URL of your updated page into Google Search Console to request indexing and ensuring that your sitemap is up to date and is regularly submitted to Search Console.

Need help ensuring that your website is being discovered, indexed and shown to the relevant audience in search results? Reach out to our team of experts at Engage Web to find out more today.

The post How long does it take for Google to notice changes to your website? appeared first on Engage Web.

There are several reasons that your site may not be appearing. These can include crawling and indexing errors, poor keyword targeting or content that doesn’t match what the user is looking for.

We’ve detailed a few common reasons your website may not be ranking and what you can do to enhance its visibility.

Crawling and indexing issues

To put it simply, Google can’t rank a page that it can’t find.

Before your website can rank in search results, Google needs to be able to crawl and index its pages.

Google’s bots discover and scan the pages on your website and stores them in a database so that they can be shown in search results for relevant search queries.

If Google’s crawl bots are struggling to find the pages on your website, those pages are unlikely to appear in the search results.

Search engines have limited resources to crawl and index a website. The easier your website is to navigate, the more likely it is that your key pages will be crawled and indexed properly.

Common crawling and indexing errors can include:

• “noindex” tags being added to a page incorrectly
• Missing or outdated XML sitemap
• Orphan pages with no internal links leading to them

To identify and fix these issues, head to Google Search Console. This will show you which pages have been indexed, and which have been excluded from Google’s index.

The Pages report in Google Search Console can help you spot which pages have been “excluded by noindex tag” or “blocked by robots.txt”.

Manually review these to ensure that important pages are not being prevented from appearing in the search results by mistake.

Weak authority and backlinks

If your competitors have more high-quality backlinks pointing to their site from reputable websites, they may be more likely to outrank you in the search results.

Google sees backlinks from one site to another as a signal of trust and authority. When another website links to your content, it’s like a recommendation. They find value in your content, so Google should too.

Links carry what is known in the industry as “link juice” or “link equity”. This is essentially authority passed from one web page to another.

The stronger and more relevant the linking website is, the more value that link can pass to your site. A backlink from an established website will usually carry more SEO (search engine optimisation) value than a link from a low-quality or unrelated site.

To fix weak authority, look at gaining backlinks from relevant and reputable websites. These could include suppliers you may have worked with previously, local business directories or partner websites.

Creating useful content can help build backlinks to your site naturally. Detailed guides or expert advice can provide resources that other websites may want to reference and link to in their own content.

The aim of backlinks is to build a diverse backlink profile from trusted and relevant websites. Quality is more important than quantity.

Keyword targeting issues

Your website may not be ranking because you are targeting the wrong keywords.

Some keywords are simply too competitive, especially if your website has a lower domain authority than the websites that are already ranking on page one.

For example, you’d struggle to outrank Apple for the term “iPhone” because Apple has an established brand authority, backlink profile and search relevance.

If you’re a smaller or newer business, trying to rank for broader keywords straight away can be difficult.

Effective keyword targeting means choosing search terms that are relevant, realistic and closely aligned with not only the products or services you offer, but how your audience would search for them.

Instead of only targeting broad, highly competitive keywords, look for more specific search terms with clear intent. These are longer-tail keywords. They often have lower competition and can bring in more qualified traffic.

For example, instead of targeting “SEO”, you could target “local SEO service for small businesses”.

These longer-tail keywords may have fewer searches each month, but they are often much easier to rank for. They can also attract better-quality traffic because the searcher knows more clearly what they are looking for.

To review your keyword targeting, check the keywords you’re currently focused on and consider whether they’re too broad. Could you target a more specific, longer-tail variation instead? Are the websites ranking for them much stronger than yours?

If you’re unsure, you can use a tool such as Alsoasked.com to find the questions that people also ask about a particular keyword/phrase. This may provide some alternative keyword suggestions.

Mismatched searcher intent

Creating content around your focus keywords is important, but if the content you’re publishing doesn’t match the intent of the searcher, it’s going to struggle to rank.

Your content needs to match the intent of the searcher. This is what Google believes a user expects to see when they search a particular keyword.

For example, if you search for “SEO Chester”, you’ll see that the first page of results shows location-specific service pages from SEO agencies in Chester.

If you were to publish a blog targeting “SEO Chester”, you may struggle to rank, as this doesn’t match the type of result the user would expect to find.

To fix this, do a manual search of your target keywords and review the pages that are already ranking on page one.

Look at the type of content Google is showing. Are they showing product pages? Service pages? Blog posts? This helps you understand the searcher intent for that term.

Compare these to the pages on your site that you want to rank for these terms. Does the content type match? Is the content too thin? Does it answer the query properly?

If your page does not align with what is already ranking, you may need to make adjustments.

Need help enhancing the visibility of your site in Google’s search results? Get in touch with the team at Engage Web today.

The post Four reasons why your website isn’t ranking in Google and how to fix it appeared first on Engage Web.

A lot of the time, the changes are barely noticeable anyway. Maybe the dashboard looks slightly different, maybe something runs a bit faster, but day to day nothing really changes for the average person managing a business website.

WordPress 7.0 feels a little more significant than that.

The update introduces more built-in AI (artificial intelligence) features, which is exactly where most online platforms seem to be heading right now. WordPress can now help create summaries, suggest headings and generate image descriptions while content is being uploaded. It’s not going to suddenly run your marketing for you, but for busy businesses it could shave time off the more repetitive tasks.

What will probably matter more to most users is the general usability side of things. Anyone who updates their own website regularly will know how frustrating WordPress can sometimes be. You fix spacing in one section, and something moves somewhere else. You click into settings looking for one thing and end up six menus deep wondering how you got there.

This update seems designed to make the whole experience feel less awkward.

That’s important, because plenty of business’ websites become outdated simply because nobody enjoys managing them. Blogs get abandoned, service pages stay untouched for years and small updates keep getting pushed back because the process feels more annoying than it should.

The wider picture here is that website platforms are trying to remove as much friction as possible. AI tools are part of that, but so is simplifying the editing experience itself. The easier it becomes to manage content, the more likely businesses are to keep their websites active and up to date.

As always, there’s still the usual advice to back up your website and check plugin compatibility before updating anything major. Even good updates can cause problems on older setups.

Still, this feels like one of the more practical WordPress releases in a long time. Not because it completely changes how websites work, but because it focuses on making everyday website management feel a bit less painful for the people actually using it.

If you need any help when it comes to website design or development, please get in touch with us at Engage Web.

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The study examined what happens on a search results page when Google’s AI Overviews appear. Researchers tracked how people moved their cursors, how far they scrolled and how long they stayed on the page.

What they found marks a clear shift from the fast, almost automatic behaviour that has defined online search for years. Instead of clicking quickly on the first link, users are now pausing to read, scrolling up and down and comparing options more carefully before making a decision.

The presence of AI Overviews appears to hold people on Google’s results page for longer, regardless of what they are searching for. In the past, behaviour varied depending on whether someone was looking for information, a local service or a specific brand. Now, with AI summaries in place, those patterns are becoming more similar, with users taking extra time to study what they see before acting.

This extra time can be significant. In some cases, users remain actively engaged with search results for up to 20 seconds or more, carefully evaluating options before deciding where to go next. Researchers say this suggests people are making more deliberate choices rather than clicking impulsively.

One of the most noticeable changes is a behaviour described as “back-scrolling”. Instead of moving steadily down the page, users often scroll down to scan links and then back up again to reread the AI summary or reconsider top results. This pattern, observed far more often when the AI Overviews are present, shows that people are double-checking information before clicking.

The shift reflects a broader change in how search works. For years, success online depended heavily on appearing at the top of search results, because users tended to click one of the first links they saw. Now, the results page itself has become a place where decisions are made, rather than just a gateway to other websites.

Analysts estimate that a large share of Google searches now end without a click, as people get answers directly on the results page. This has raised concerns among publishers and businesses that rely on search traffic to attract visitors.

Even so, the new data suggests the situation is not simply about fewer clicks. Instead, it points to a more complex process in which users are weighing options more carefully. Those who do click may be more confident in their choice, having spent longer evaluating what they see.

Google has argued that these changes reflect improvements in search quality, helping users find what they need more efficiently. However, critics say the growing role of AI in search could reshape the balance between the search engine and the wider web.

The findings highlight a turning point for how people interact with online information, as well as the brands they come across online. If you want your brand to become more visible through Google, at Engage Web, we can help. Speak to our experts today to get our support.

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This update marks a major transformation from traditional static ads to experiences that respond directly to a user’s intent.

Key new ad types include Highlighted Answers, Conversational Discovery ads, the Business Agent for Leads and AI-powered Shopping ads. For instance, a shopper searching for “ways to make my home smell like a spa” might now see an ad that not only highlights relevant products, but also explains why they’re ideal for that need.

Similarly, AI-powered Shopping ads for high-consideration purchases, like TVs or appliances, will offer custom explainers to help users make informed decisions.

The Business Agent for Leads takes this even further, replacing static forms with an AI (artificial intelligence) chat experience trained on your website. Users can ask questions, explore products and even schedule consultations – all within the ad itself.

For businesses, this signals a new era in which appearing in AI-generated search responses isn’t just optional – it’s essential. Brands that optimise for conversational ad formats and AI-driven explainers will gain a competitive edge as search behaviour evolves.

At Engage Web, we help businesses appear in AI queries. If you’re ready to make your business visible in AI Mode and stay ahead of competitors, we’ll work with you to craft tailored strategies that position your brand where your audience is actively searching. Get in touch to find out how we’re helping businesses just like yours respond to the most recent changes in search.

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An article by AI expert Max Spero highlighted research from Pangram Labs, which analysed almost 30,000 Amazon customer reviews across 500 best-selling products. The findings suggest AI-generated reviews are already appearing across major product categories, with baby products, beauty, wellness and relaxation among the areas most affected.

For shoppers, this is worrying. For brands, it should be a wake-up call.

Trust is one of the most valuable assets a business has online. It takes months, often years, to build, but it can be damaged in seconds. When customers suspect reviews are fake, exaggerated or generated by AI, they do not just question the reviews – they question the business behind them.

This matters because reviews sit right at the point of decision. A customer has found your product or service, compared options and is close to buying. A strong review can tip them over the line, but a fake-looking one can send them straight to a competitor.

The problem is not limited to obviously suspicious five-star praise either. AI can now produce reviews that sound natural, detailed and human. A fake review might mention delivery speed, product quality, customer service and value for money in a tone that feels believable. This makes detection harder, but it also raises the risk for brands tempted to cut corners.

Take a local service business, for example. If several glowing reviews all use similar phrasing, customers may quickly spot the pattern. Or imagine an ecommerce brand using AI-written reviews to boost a product launch. Sales might rise briefly, but if customers feel misled, refunds, complaints and reputational damage can follow.

Good marketing should build confidence, not manufacture it, and at Engage Web, we believe the strongest digital strategies are built on authenticity. This means earning reviews properly, responding to feedback professionally and using real customer experiences to shape content, SEO and conversion campaigns. Genuine trust will always be more powerful than fake volume.

While AI has its place in marketing (it’s unavoidable these days), it should never replace honesty. Brands that protect their credibility now will be the ones customers return to later.

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