Community Discussion: Are You Optimizing Your Brand's Content for Featured Snippets?
-
My latest post on the Moz Blog, Featured Snippets: A Dead-Simple Tactic for Making, explores how to keep Featured Snippets once you have them. I'm curious to know how many brands are actively working to get in the answer box, and for those who are, what's been the results?
-
Hi Ronell!
First, I want to say that I love this topic and your blog post was extremely insightful. Featured snippets were a hot topic at SMX this year, I have been mesmerized by them ever since. I do think they definitely play a vital role in a company's SEO efforts!
Currently, we haven't made it a huge priority to get our content featured within one of the answer boxes, but I have a feeling that this will be changing in the coming months as featured snippets become more and more popular. By focusing on getting featured in these snippets, you're essentially snagging the #0 rank on a SERP—which is obviously where any company would want to be!
Thanks for the reminder that this should be a priority!
-
We're in a very niche industry (noise measurement instruments) and so it may be easier to get into the #0 answer box as it's unlikely that someone would stumble across us. Our customers are usually looking for some specific information and so we're positioning ourselves with more educational content such as terminology guides and reference information.
However, it's been a double edged sword for us. There is a lot of traffic coming from the article, and some others that we appear in, but it's proved very difficult to get any traction or conversion from those visitors. We've run an number of A/B tests, different CTA's and downloads and we're still trying to work out what would be best.
So although it's great to have a #0 slot, which we didn't plan for, a lot of our effort for 2017 is going to be based on conversion and getting visitors to become more than just a stat on our analytics page, especially for those coming from the #0 position.
We are going after more of these as "what are" or "how do I" questions are clearly the best way for us to get a #0 as and have a content plan for this. But, as I've said above, the key task is conversion of those visitors into something useful.
-
Getting in the Answer Box has become more of a focus for me and my company in recent months, and one I'm really pushing for in 2017. I've done some work with our content team to help them understand what sorts of queries might have a greater chance to nab a #0 spot, as well as exploring what formats seem to work best in our niche. I haven't yet started down the road of experimenting with markup or other technical tactics, but would like to at some point.
We've managed to nearly double the queries we are ranking for in the last few months, from 60ish in August to just over 100 now. The search volume isn't particularly high for these terms, but it's exciting to be able to see if we can replicate these results elsewhere, with more impact.
Great topic, and timely for me and my efforts in the upcoming year!
R.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
ECommerce Replatforming URL's
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same. Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half - /stainless-steel-hardware.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoatOutfitters
&
/stainless-steel-hardware We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html) Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL. It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix. Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!2 -
Webpage has bombed outside of Top 50 for search term in one week. What's the cause?
I've been monitoring the performance of some pages via the email Moz sends every week, and until this week two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected. What could be the cause for this? I've looked at Google Webmasters for an indication of a penalty of some sort but there is nothing glaringly obvious. I've no messages on there, and I haven't bought a load of spam links at all. What else could I check?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
When does it make sense to make a meta description longer than what's considered best practice?
I've seen all the length recommendations and understand the reasoning is that they will be cut off when you search the time but I've also noticed that Google will "move" the meta description if the search term that the user is using is in the cached version of the page. S I have a case where Google is indexing the pages but not caching the content (at least not yet). So we see the meta description just fine on the Google results but we can't see the content cache when checking the Google cached version. **My question is: **In this case, why would it be a bad idea to make a slightly lengthier (but still relevant) meta description with the intent that one of the terms in that description could match the user's search terms and the description would "move" to highlight that term in the results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
Google isn't seeing the content but it is still indexing the webpage
When I fetch my website page using GWT this is what I receive. HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacobfy
X-Pantheon-Styx-Hostname: styx1560bba9.chios.panth.io
server: nginx
content-type: text/html
location: https://www.inscopix.com/
x-pantheon-endpoint: 4ac0249e-9a7a-4fd6-81fc-a7170812c4d6
Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400
Content-Length: 0
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:29:38 GMT
X-Varnish: 2640682369 2640432361
Age: 326
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive What I used to get is this: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.23 (Amazon)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.18
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 +0000
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
ETag: "1365696024"
Content-Language: en
Link: ; rel="canonical",; rel="shortlink"
X-Generator: Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:sioc="http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#"
xmlns:sioct="http://rdfs.org/sioc/types#"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"> <title>Inscopix | In vivo rodent brain imaging</title>0 -
Organic 'not provided data' - strip out brand?
I cannot strip out brand data on the 'not provided' keywords in Google analytics. Is this not possible anymore? I understand we cannot get specific keywords but can we no longer strip out brand on organic traffic in Google analytics for keywords that are 'not provided' ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Duplicate content reported on WMT for 301 redirected content
We had to 301 redirect a large number of URL's. Not Google WMT is telling me that we are having tons of duplicate page titles. When I looked into the specific URL's I realized that Google is listing an old URL's and the 301 redirected new URL as the source of the duplicate content. I confirmed the 301 redirect by using a server header tool to check the correct implementation of the 301 redirect from the old to the new URL. Question: Why is Google Webmaster Tool reporting duplicated content for these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAccount320 -
Pagination Question: Google's 'rel=prev & rel=next' vs Javascript Re-fresh
We currently have all content on one URL and use # and Javascript refresh to paginate pages, and we are wondering if we transition to the Google's recommended pagination if we will see an improvement in traffic. Has anyone gone though a similar transition? What was the result? Did you see an improvement in traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0