SEO

Modern sites are at the grace of algorithms, which determine the content they show in the search engine result for specific keywords. These algorithms are getting smarter every day, thanks to an innovation called machine learning, also referred to as expert system (AI).

If you want your website to rank in search results, you require to know how these algorithms work. They change often, so if you continuously re-work your SEO to represent these modifications, you’ll remain in a great position to dominate the rankings.

Natural language processing (NLP) is one factor you’ll need to account for as you do SEO on your site. If your material is enhanced for NLP, you can anticipate it to rise to the top of the search rankings and remain there for a long time.

The developing role of NLP and AI in content production & & SEO Prior to we trace how NLP and AI have actually increased in influence over content production and SEO processes, we need to comprehend what NLP is and how it works. NLP has three main jobs: recognizing text, understanding text, and producing text.

• Acknowledgment: Computers think just in terms of numbers, not text. This indicates that any NLP solution needs to transform text into numbers so computer systems can understand them.
• Understanding: Once the text has actually been transformed into numbers, algorithms can then carry out analytical analysis to discover the words or subjects that appear together most often.
• Generation: The NLP machine can utilize its findings to ask concerns or recommend topics around which an author can develop content. Some of the more advanced makers are already starting to put together content briefs.

With the aid of NLP and artificial intelligence (AI), authors ought to soon be able to generate material in less time as they will just require to assemble keywords and main ideas, then let the device look after the rest. While an AI is a lot smarter than the proverbial thousand monkeys banging away on a thousand typewriters, it will take some time before we’ll see AI- and NLP-generated content that’s really understandable.

As AI and NLP keep developing, we may likewise ultimately see machines doing a lot of other SEO-related work, like inserting H1 and image alt tags into HTML code, building backlinks via visitor posts, and doing e-mail outreach to other AI-powered content editors. While it seems far-fetched today, it’s amazing to see how SEO, NLP, and AI will evolve together.

Major impact from Google BERT upgrade

In late 2019, Google announced the launch of its Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm. BERT helps computer systems comprehend human language utilizing an approach that simulates human language processing.

According to Google, the BERT algorithm understands contexts and subtleties of words in search strings and matches those searches with results closer to the user’s intent. Google uses BERT to generate the featured bits for practically all relevant searches.

One example Google offered was the search inquiry “2019 brazil tourist to usa need a visa”. The old algorithm would return search results for U.S. residents who are planning to go to Brazil. BERT, on the other hand, churns out results for Brazilian residents who are going to the U.S. The crucial distinction in between the two algorithms is that BERT recognizes the nuance that the word “to” contributes to the search term, which the old algorithm stopped working to record.

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offers it a much better sense of user intent than ever previously. Users are becoming more specific with the concerns they ask and are asking more brand-new questions, and BERT breaks down these concerns and produces search results page that are more relevant to users. This is great news for search engine users, however what does it indicate for SEO specialists? While it doesn’t precisely toss long-standing SEO concepts out the window, you may have to get used to accommodate the new algorithm’s intricacies and produce more material including long-tail(longer and more particular)keywords. Let’s move on to the

next area to get more information about creating BERT-optimized content. Developing SEO-friendly material for enhanced Google When we perform SEO on our material, we need to think about Google’s intents in presenting BERT and offering NLP a larger role in figuring out search rankings. Google uses previous search engine result for the very same keywords to improve its outcomes, however according to the company, 15% of all search queries are used for the first time. The implication here is that Google requires to decipher these new questions by rebuilding them in a way it understands.

With this in mind, your SEO ought to consider the requirements below:

Core understanding of search intent

While keywords still play an essential role in Google searches, BERT likewise pays very close attention to user intent, which just indicates a user’s desired end goal for performing a search. We may classify user intent into 4 categories:

• Navigational: The user goes to Google to get to a particular website. Instead of using the address bar, they run a Google search then click on the site link that appears in the search results page. It’s possible that these users know where they wish to have however go forgotten the precise URL for the page.
• Informative: The user has a particular concern or just would like to know more about a topic. The intention here is to end up being more experienced or to get the proper answer for their concern.
• Commercial: The user may not know what they want at the moment, so they’re simply browsing for alternatives. They may or may not make a purchase right now.
• Transactional: The user is prepared and all set to make a purchase and is utilizing Google to discover the specific product they want.

Unlike old search algorithms, the new Google algorithm records user intent better due to the fact that it considers the entire context of the search terms, which might consist of prepositions such as “of”, “in”, “for”, and “to”, or interrogative words such as “when”, “where”, “what”, “why”, and “how”. Your SEO technique should produce material that:

• Answers a user’s concern or addresses a requirement right away
• Supplies worth to the reader
• Is detailed and focused

You might need to perform more research study about ranking websites for your keyword and have a look at what kind of material enters the top outcomes. It’s likewise a good concept to look at the related searches that Google suggests at the bottom of the outcomes page. These will give you a better idea of user intent and help you draw an SEO strategy that attends to these requirements.

Term frequency-inverse file frequency

You might not have actually become aware of the term “Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency” (TF-IDF) previously, but you’ll be hearing more about it now that Google is starting to use it to identify relevant search results. TF-IDF rises according to the frequency of a search term in a file but reduces by the variety of documents that likewise have it. This suggests that extremely typical words, such as short articles and interrogative words, rank really low.

TF-IDF is determined by multiplying the following metrics:

• Term frequency: This might either be a raw count of circumstances of a keyword, the raw count adjusted for file length, or the raw frequency of the most common word.
• Inverted file frequency: This may be calculated by taking the overall variety of files, dividing it by the number of documents that have the keyword, then getting its algorithm. If the word is extremely typical throughout different files, the TF-IDF gets closer to 0. Otherwise, it moves closer to 1.

We get the TF-IDF rating of a keyword in a document when we multiply the metrics above. The greater the TF-IDF rating, the more pertinent the keyword is for that specific page. As an end-user, you may utilize TF-IDF to extract the most pertinent keywords for a piece of material.

Google also uses TF-IDF scores in its NLP engine. Since the metric gauges the importance of a keyword to the rest of the document, it’s more reliable than simple word counts and assists the search engine avoid showing irrelevant or spammy outcomes.

Belief significance

Customer viewpoints about brand names are all over on the internet. If you can discover a method to aggregate and evaluate these beliefs for your brand, you’ll have some effective data about general sensations about your service within your reaches.

This process is called sentiment analysis, and it uses AI to help you understand the total emotional tone of the important things your clients say about you. It includes 3 key activities:

• Knowing where your consumers express their viewpoints about your brand, which might consist of social networks, review sites such as Yelp or the Better Business Bureau, online forums, feedback left on your website, and reviews on ecommerce websites such as Amazon.
• Utilizing AI and NLP to pull information from these websites in huge quantities, instead of gathering a random sample consisting of simply a few comments from each platform. This provides you a clearer general photo of client belief.
• Evaluating data and assigning positive or negative worths to consumer beliefs, based on tone and choice of words.

Crafting an SEO technique that places significance on client belief addresses typical problems and pain points. We’ve found that dealing with problems head-on, rather of skirting them or rejecting them, increases a brand name’s reliability and improves its image amongst customers.

Salience and classification

If you wish to much better comprehend how natural language processing works, you might begin by getting knowledgeable about the principle of salience.

In a nutshell, salience is interested in determining just how much of a piece of content is concerned with a particular subject or entity. Entities are things, locations, ideas, or individuals, which might be represented by nouns or names. Google determines salience as it attempts to draw relationships in between the different entities present in a post. Consider it as Google asking what the page is everything about and whether it is a good source of details about a specific search term.

Let’s utilize a real-life example. Let’s imagine you do a Google search to read more about how to develop terrific Instagram content throughout the holidays. You click an article that claims to be a guide to doing simply that however soon discover that the article consists of one brief paragraph about this subject and 10 paragraphs about brand-new Instagram functions.

While the post itself points out both Instagram and the holidays, it isn’t extremely pertinent to the intent of the search, which is to find out how to document the holidays on Instagram. When it was rolling out BERT, these are the types of search results Google wanted to avoid. Rather of trying to game the system to get your material to the top of the search engine result, you need to consider salience as you produce your online content.

Five tools that can help you establish SEO-friendly content

Provided all the changes that Google has made to its search algorithm, how will you ensure that your material stays SEO-friendly? We’ve gathered 6 of the most beneficial tools that will help you develop content that ranks high and satisfies user intent.

1. Frase

Frase (frase.io) declares to help SEO specialists produce content that is lined up with user intent quickly. It improves the SEO and content production procedures by using a comprehensive option that integrates keyword research study, content research, content briefs, material creation, and optimization.

Frase Content, its material production platform, suggests beneficial topics, data, and news based upon the keywords you get in. If you’re working with a team, the Content Briefs function tells your writers precisely what

you need them to produce,

reducing the requirement for modifications and freeing up their time for more tasks. 2. Author Writer(writer.com) understands that all of us compose for various factors, and when you sign up, it asks you a couple of concerns about what you intend to use it for. You might be interested in improving your own work, developing a design guide, promoting inclusive language, or unifying your brand name voice.

Writer’s full-screen editor has an integrated grammar checker and provides you helpful real-time ideas

concentrating on inclusiveness, design, and tone. Writer also offers a reporting tool that lets you track your writers’progress for a specific duration, such as spelling, inclusivity, and composing style. 3. SurferSEO Internet user(surferseo.com)makes heavy use of data to assist you develop content that ranks. It analyzes over 500 ranking factors such as text length, responsive website design, keyword density, and referring domains and explains common aspects from top pages to give you a much better concept of what works for a particular keyword.

You can see Surfer’s analysis at work when you use its web-based full-screen editor. You will see a control panel that tracks what the app calls the”content rating”. It likewise gives you helpful keyword tips. 4. Alli AI Alli AI (alliAI.com)uses you a fast, painless method to perform SEO on existing content. All you need to do is include a single code bit to your site, evaluation Alli’s code and recommendations, then approve the modifications. Alli executes them in minutes as soon as you approve the modifications.

Alli does this by finding the most convenient links to develop. If you choose to do things manually, the tool likewise reveals you connect constructing and outreach chances. If you’re having a hard time to stay up to date with all Google’s algorithm changes, Alli claims it can instantly adjust your site’s SEO method.

5. Can I Rank?

Can I Rank (canirank.com) compares your site content to other websites in its specific niche and gives you useful recommendations for growing your website and enhancing your search rankings. Its interface is simple to comprehend and the tips exist as jobs, consisting of the estimated quantity of time you will need to spend on them.

What we like about Can I Rank? is that everything remains in plain English, from the menu to the ideas it offers you. This makes it friendly to those who aren’t technical specialists. It likewise presents data in chart kind, that makes it easier to validate SEO-related decisions.

Bottom line

Google alters its search algorithms a fair bit, and getting your page to rank is a continuous challenge. Because its most current upgrade, BERT, is heavily affected by AI and NLP, it makes sense to use SEO tools based on the exact same innovations.

These tools– such as Frase, Writer, SurferSEO, AlliAI, and Can I Rank?– assistance you develop content that ranks. A few of them look for grammar and SEO functionality in real-time, while others crawl through your website and your competitors’ websites and develop content suggestions. Trying out these tools is the only way for you to know which one(s) work best for you. Stick with it, and you’ll stay ahead of the game and create material that carries out well for many years to come!

May Habib is Co-founder and CEO at Writer.com.

From the simple starts of the Internet and online marketing, we’ve reached an age where the Internet is an important communication tool, and online advertising is valued at more than 400 billion dollars a year, more popular than even the TELEVISION ad market. The international pandemic just accelerated this trend and pushed more business online. What can we anticipate out of SEO in 2021? Which patterns should we be anticipating? Which changes will affect the industry? In this post, we’ll talk about the primary trends we anticipate to have an effect and change the direction of SEO in the coming year.

Direct changes to online search engine

SEO is entirely depending on the significant search engines, primarily Google. Any modifications to Google’s method operandi, algorithm, and top priorities will have direct, extensive effect on SEO in 2021. These modifications cause losses in billions of dollars for some services while resulting in gains of billions of dollars for others. It is necessary to be aware of the approaching modifications and how to best prepare for them.

# 1 Page experience as a ranking aspect on Google [May 2021]

As of May 2021, you must expect what Google calls as “page experience signals” to be a ranking aspect. The page experience describes the method the visitors feel as they communicate with the websites. It is identified by a plethora of attributes from mobile-friendliness, safe surfing, HTTPS, and the others. These were currently ranking elements formerly, however they’ve been more institutionalized and work within the “page experience” structure. Furthermore, Google is introducing Core Web Vitals as part of ‘page experience’. They’re thought about to be user-centric metrics that try to figure out the quality of the user experience. These user-centric metrics will determine the filling speed (Largest Contentful Paint), interactivity (First Input Delay), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). The first two items that go into Core Web Vitals appear rather self-evident, so it doesn’t appear like an excellent idea to invest more time explaining them in this post.

Although, the third product might puzzle some people. Visual stability refers to how much the layout shifts and jumps around. Picture if a button tracks your mouse and jumps around whenever you get close to it, this is quite a self-evidently bad user experience, and this variable goals to capture this. The self-advertised function of adding a specific page experience ranking factor is so that Google can offer higher-quality, more interesting material to its users. Considering the variables that it takes account of, a website with a high page experience score will load quicker, be more interactive, more stable, more secure, more mobile-friendly, and a lot more. These all integrated, undoubtedly, will lead to a superior experience.

Get included in top stories without AMP

Another purpose of the intro of the brand-new page experience ranking framework is to make non-AMP content eligible to appear in the Top Stories function for cellphones. It is one of the primary methods websites drive traffic to their content from mobile, so this might be a substantial modification that would disrupt the rankings of lots of sites on mobile. This change will also roll out in May of 2021, which makes May a hell of a busy month for SEO experts.

We require to be prepared for all the drastic changes this modification in the algorithm can bring. We can’t possibly ascertain its effect at this phase.

# 2 Mobile-first indexing for all websites on Google [March 2021]

Mobile-first indexing is certainly not new, Google has been utilizing it for more than a number of years. It was initially introduced as a response to a prevalent problem: more and more individuals are using their phones to search for stuff and browse the net. The problem is that the mobile and desktop versions of sites do not constantly match up in material, and Google usually only indexes one variation, which typically was the PC variation. This creates a mismatch between the rankings on mobile and the content on these pages. To ease this inequality as it was becoming a growing problem due to the increasing popularity of mobile, Google decided to execute mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing describes the practice of indexing the mobile variation of the site first in Google’s databases instead of the desktop variation. This would precisely assess the quantity of content on mobile websites and their relevance prior to displaying the results.

Going from a completely desktop-first indexing scheme to a completely mobile-first one would’ve been a huge action, nevertheless, and this is why Google has actually been taking years implementing this change. It started by allowing the option to webmasters to change their website indexing to mobile-first. It was followed by making mobile-first the default choice for crawling brand-new websites. When Google will begin making mobile-first indexing the default choice for all sites, the last and most current update is going to come in March 2021. This indicates that the method your site is indexed and the material that’s thought about may alter in March. It is tough to figure out how huge of an impact this will make beforehand, however you must anticipate some instability.

Thankfully, Google has published a fundamental guideline to ensuring the shift to mobile-first indexing goes efficiently on your website:

• Make sure the material of your website is visible to Google bots and spiders.
• Ensure you submit all the appropriate meta tags on both the mobile and the desktop

variations of your landing pages.

• Ensure that your mobile site loads quickly by making it possible for lazy loading.
• Ensure that you are not obstructing any relevant mobile-specific URLs in your robots.txt file.
• Although it is difficult to make sure similar content, you should try to have at least similar primary content on both variations.
• Check the alt tags of both image and video embeds.

Wider SEO trends

Aside from specific updates to algorithms, we have previous info about, some larger patterns in the sector that are going to change how we engage with SEO. A few of these patterns have been going on for many years and only just accelerating and others are brand-new. Below, we’ll cover the most prominent ones.

# 1 Voice search is ending up being more and more prominent

Voice search was essentially non-existent simply 5 years ago. Still, the advancement and proliferation of Alexa, Google Assistant, and a wide range of other voice assistants over the last couple of years have actually promoted voice search beyond our wildest dreams. According to information, voice search income will more than quadruple from 2017 to 2022 from just 2 billion to 40 billion dollars. This surge in appeal presents difficulties and opportunities to traditional SEO techniques. Simply as an example, in voice searches, getting the first position is a lot more crucial than it remains in traditional text searches. That’s why you require different methods to capitalize on this brand-new, emerging SEO arena totally.

# 2 Feature bits and microdata

Google is trying to present more and more types of highlighted snippets to its web page. These range from recipes to news and tutorials. These bits aim to make browsing faster for users and keep traffic on Google’s site. It is nevertheless advantageous for websites to implement it since you have a chance to be included, which would drive a great deal of traffic to your website.

Naturally, getting featured doesn’t constantly indicate you’ll see exponential growth in traffic, but data from Ahrefs shows it matters a lot! Typically, getting featured means you’ll get, on average, around 8,6% CTR while the leading ‘natural result’ will get 19,6% of the traffic. This is incredibly outstanding and shows that the included snippet steals a substantial quantity of clicks from the top position, which would navigate 26% CTR in SERPs without a highlighted snippet. Although, you need to be careful about how Google includes you. You should monitor your ranking and adjust your snippet and optimize it for more clicks.

# 3 Non-textual content

As we move into the next year, we’re seeing an Internet saturated with blog sites and landing pages. and it is ending up being progressively challenging to rank for noteworthy keywords with decent traffic. That’s why lots of SEO companies are trying to expand their reach by diversifying the kind of content they produce and publish. Infographics are one of the simpler methods to develop engagement and rank greater. Although, even they’ve been excessive used over the last few years. A far more promising frontier for 2021 appears to be videos. These might be uploaded to Youtube as standalone content or embedded in your site too. It’ll assist you get more traffic from Youtube views, which appears way less saturated than Google’s conventional online search engine currently. This does not mean it is any less important. YouTube generates 15 billion dollars for Google each year. It is a platform you can’t manage to disregard.

It is also worth pointing out that there specify video snippets on SERPs that you can just rank for through video content, and these video bits are really popular on search questions starting with “how-to”, requesting tutorials, and other types of instructional content. They are prime real estate that you can potentially rank for with a reasonably produced video.

# 4 UX SEO

The days where SEO was just about titles and meta-tags have actually long gone. Nowadays, SEO is a detailed topic that integrates competence from many different fields from marketing to software engineering and innovative writing to attain the very best result. A current trend in SEO that is acquiring more and more stream is the UX SEO framework.

UX SEO refers to the practice of optimizing the user experience of a website to achieve better conversion rates and engagement. It isn’t just important that your site gets routine visitors, however it is likewise equally essential to ensure that these visitors engage with your site. UX redesign success stories are practically endless, for example, ESPN learnt that simply a homepage redesign increased their profits by 35%. There is no reason why UX optimization might not be an integral part of your SEO strategy, and UX SEO provides you a structure to accomplish this.

Conclusion

Each year, Google presents more than 3600 little modifications to their algorithms, and each year, patterns emerge in this unstable sector that nobody has been able to anticipate. You need to continuously stay up to date with the news to be on top of your SEO game, checking out a post on the patterns in the approaching year isn’t enough. I tried to make this short article as extensive as possible, and you need to be moderately prepared for the challenges ahead if you pay attention to all the trends that I’ve included here.

Adrian Kempiak is CTO at Neadoo Digital– SEO company. Adrian is a tech lover, in the SEO industry for over 9 years. Assessments and audits for companies from numerous markets. Accountable for running both worldwide SEO projects for ecommerce shops and local SEO for businesses worldwide (UK, USA, Australia, Spain, and a lot more).

Have you ever wondered how small businesses grow their SEO efforts on a minimal budget? Everything comes down to prioritizing your needs and efficiently determining your success along the way. That is essential to growing your online presence while conserving your service big cash in the long run.

Here at SEO.com, we make every effort to offer small company search engine optimization that is customized to your precise needs. We work to accomplish this while at a price that works finest for your company.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how search engine optimization deals with a small company budget plan.

Competitive Analysis Helps Uncover Growth Opportunities

One great advantage of how small company SEO works is with competitive analysis. Numerous companies like yours are competing for the same keywords and the same consumers.

Examining your rivals’ weaknesses and strengths is crucial to the success of your company. This will help reveal chances for growth that your rivals are yet to take advantage of.

At SEO.com, your keyword research strategist will thoroughly evaluate your existing website and rivals to determine the best keywords to focus on when developing your new material.

Custom-made Strategies Helps You Reach The Right People

When it pertains to SEO on a small business spending plan, not every company is the very same. What works for one company might not work for others. This is why it’s important to develop custom methods for your business. By establishing a targeted strategy, you will reach the best individuals and conserve yourself huge cash in the end.

Our small business SEO bundles include a dedicated Content Strategist. Your content strategist will take the research done by the keyword research study group and use it to your content method.

Keeping Your Page Optimized Helps Ensure The Best Page Rankings

On-page user experience is vital for your small business SEO growth. Optimizing each page detail from on-page copy to website navigation helps users discover what they’re searching for with ease. This helps your site convert your visitors into paying customers. In return, this assists your page achieve the best page ranking and make your website more trustworthy to your audience.

That is why it is not a surprise that we note web design as Phase 1 in general online marketing success. While your website is an on-going task, working bit-by-bit to provide the information your visitors are trying to find in a user friendly fashion will help support your small business search engine optimization project.

Building Relevant Links Drives Quality Traffic

Another important element of growing your small company via SEO is link building. Structure links with sites that relate to your cause benefits your SEO. For a little AirBnBlooking to increase its online presence, they might want to work to build relate to travel sites. Relevant and quality links like these assistance bring premium traffic to your site and aid increase your page ranking.

Our small business SEO packages start with a minimum of one link per month. We will assist compose the content and release guest posts that include your service on a variety of relevant websites. We do this by connecting constantly with content ideas and new topics to our backlinking partners. Backlinking can be a tough job. Let us do the work for you!

Consistent Monitoring & & Reporting Ensures You Quality Results

Constant tracking and reporting are likewise vital in growing your SEO efforts. Monthly reporting schedules help you remain in the loop by showing the actions required to grow your online existence. This also helps guarantee the best approach to targeting the best people at the right time. In the end, this assists cause quality results that boost your capacity at turning visitors into paying clients.

Small company SEO is a long-lasting game with even longer-lasting outcomes. Companies normally start to see movement in search engine result at the six-month mark. When you are there, ranking for a keyword, it is much easier to continue and keep to write and publish content pertinent to your search term.

Quality SEO Strategies Lead To Top-Notch Results

No doubt that the best small company search engine optimization efforts are techniques tailored to your exact requirements. On top of that, competitive analysis, on-page optimization, and structure pertinent links likewise help attract the right individuals. It is likewise essential to always monitor your seo efforts to ensure success.

At SEO.com, we work to guarantee that your website brings in the best individuals and assists grow your small business. We’re a full-service web marketing company that helps small companies with all elements of growing that online existence. The very best part is that we make this occur at a price that works finest for your needs. Contact us today and let us help grow your online existence for the better.

Featured snippets are probably the first thing people see when they perform a search query. Acquiring the position ‘zero’ on the SERPs, the featured snippets dominate the page and immediately capture the attention of the viewer.

However, does it make an impact on the visitor? Do the featured snippets get more clicks when compared to the top results? How does the audience perceive them?

To answer these questions and more, we at Engine Scout recently conducted a study and analyzed how featured snippets influence searchers’ behavior and overall experience.

The methodology applied for the featured snippet study

In our study on featured snippets, we collected data from 3552 testers, who were asked to look at four different SERPs with snippets. They were required to make a search on Google related to a specific keyword and make a selection from the results.

To collect an unbiased opinion, featured snippets were not mentioned anywhere in the survey.

There were three choices for the testers to choose from: Ads, featured snippets, and regular result listing.

They were later asked which section they clicked on to estimate the Click-through rate (CTR).

What is a featured snippet and how does it boost website traffic?

The featured snippet is a summarized extract from a post that answers the user’s ‘search query‘ most accurately. It is placed above all the Google search result listings, occupying position zero.

This means no matter what your website’s ranking for a certain post if Google chooses a featured snippet from your post, it will appear on the top.

According to Ahrefs, it is 99.58% true that Google will only consider your content for a featured snippet if it is already ranking on Page #1. The other 0.42% pages that Google considers account for their ‘People also ask’ box SERP feature. This feature only receives a total of 6% click shares, for the same reason.

The ‘concise and direct‘ nature of these featured snippets motivates users to click on them. According to our study, they account for 35.1% of all clicks which translates to getting ‘extra traffic‘ to your website.

Optimizing a post to rank for a featured snippet can be tricky. Any content can be worthy of becoming a ‘Featured-Snippet,’ including a paragraph, a list, table, or even a video.

Try these three quick strategies to win more featured snippets that get clicks to your website.

1. Include direct answers to a search query in a paragraph snippet

Paragraph snippets account for 82% of the total featured snippets.

These snippets give the most relevant response to a query in a paragraph form. They usually also display a pertinent image alongside or above the text.

Here is an example of how Google shows a paragraph snippet when asked about ‘What is SERP?‘

2. Make the best use of keywords in your paragraph

Attaining the first rank in Google for a keyword requires quite an effort.

Enriching your optimized content for featured snippets with the right keywords increases your chances of that ‘Position Zero‘ in the SERP.

Try to include question-oriented keywords in your content. People find search results with keywords resonating with their question as “trustworthy” and “informative.” This is the primary reason why they prefer a featured snippet over all other organic results.

Take a close look at your competitor’s featured snippets for some inspiration. Make a list of keywords that have triggered a featured snippet for them, and make your content surrounded by these keywords.

Several online tools can lessen your workload by retrieving information and keywords from the competition’s snippets. You can use them if you find it time-consuming to manually optimize your content for featured snippets.

3. Include a knowledge panel in your content marketing strategy

A box with information relevant to a search query appearing on SERP’s right panel is called a Knowledge Panel.

It only appears when the search is about an entity, for example, business, person, or location. The information inside this box lets the reader know about the entity and gives them a way to reach out to it.

Featured snippet alone offers a close competition to the organic listing for the total click share.

But pages ranking for both the featured snippet and the knowledge panel outperform the organic listings for the CTR. A double featured snippet leaves behind the CTR of organic listings, getting 42.1% of the total click share.

Therefore, it is an added benefit if you strategize your featured snippet to trigger a knowledge panel.

For reference, check out this post to see how Gennaro Cuofano structured his featured snippet with his Amazon author page reference. Google considered this reference and used it to display a knowledge panel alongside his featured snippet.

The other side of the story

Featured snippets can sometimes work opposite to their intent.

According to our study, 24% of users confuse featured snippets for Ads.

Therefore, merely optimizing content to target the featured snippet doesn’t ensure a high CTR.

Google keeps altering its interface to make the Ad label on the paid search results barely noticeable.

As featured snippets also acquire the top position on SERPs, it is very natural for someone to get confused and not click them.

According to Dr. Pete Meyers, the Marketing Scientist at Moz:

“The lesson for SEOs is that we can’t just target a feature — we need to understand query intent, what our buyers expect from that feature, and how they perceive that feature.”

Try to make your content look like a straightforward, quick answer to a query with images for references to appear very different from an ad.

Wrap up

Google introduced the featured snippet to make it easy for searchers to find relevant answers quickly. With voice search technology becoming a common search tool for half of the smartphone users,  featured snippets catered to the trend and enabled users to read the answer out loud.

To make Google identify your content worthy to pick snippets from, you have to optimize your content so it’s relevant and appropriate for voice search SEO, so it helps to bring in more traffic to your site.

Jonathan Gorham is Co-Founder at Engine Scout Digital Marketing. He can be found on LinkedIn.