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If you’re anything like us you’ll struggle to remember what you had for dinner last night, but now scientists have managed to unearth the last meal eaten by a creature that died a staggering 200 million years ago.
The team were studying the fossilised remains of the ’Ichthyosaurus Communis’ – one of the first species of a group of sea-going reptiles that lived in the late Triassic and early Jurassic period in Europe and Asia.
The find was remarkable, firstly because it was the only example of a newborn ichthyosaurus ever to be found by humans, and secondly because it had a stomach full of prehistoric squid.
University of Manchester/Julian Kiely
The ‘Ichthyosaurus Communis’ lived in Belgium, England, Germany, Switzerland and Indonesia, and has been known to science for nearly 200 years, but this is the first time the team have uncovered such detail.
Paleontologist Dean Lomax, who worked on the study, said: “It is amazing to think we know what a creature that is nearly 200 million years old ate for its last meal.”
Measuring in at a total length of approximately 70cm (adult relatives normally grow up to 3.3 metres in length), the team at the University of Manchester, used a CT-scanner to create a 3D model of the animal.
Lomax said: “We then found many tiny hook-like structures preserved between the ribs. These are from the arms of prehistoric squid. So, we know this animal’s last meal before it died was squid.”
This also lead the team to conclude that younger examples of the species “fed exclusively on fish” and had a totally different prey-preference to their parents and other elders.
First discovered and recognised by science in 1821, with many uncovered by Victorian paleontologist, Mary Anning, along the coast at Lyme Regis, Dorset, the ichthyosaurus is one of the most common Early Jurassic fossil reptiles in the UK.
Despite this, there are few examples of complete or well-preserved fossils, making this find even more exceptional: “This specimen is practically complete and is exceptional. It is the first newborn Ichthyosaurus Communis to be found, which is surprising…”
It was initially believed that Ichthyosaurus laid eggs on land, but now fossil evidence shows that in fact the females gave birth to live young, and were born tail first to stop them from drowning in the water.
14 ways to get smarter with your content and SEO
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Despite the many ways Google has changed the search game over the last five years, one truth remains: content is the vehicle that drives your consumer interactions, engagements, experiences and, ultimately, conversions.
However, only 41 percent of marketers think their organization is clear on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI).
Marketers aren’t just lacking confidence in their efforts; these are real and measurable deficits. In fact, only 20 percent of B2C and 50 percent of B2B content earns any engagement at all, my company’s research has found.
That’s a lot of wasted effort and resources invested in content that ends up just floating around the web, winning zero business benefit for its creators.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at content through the SMART lens. SMART is a goal-setting framework in which S stands for Specific, M for measurable, A for achievable, R for relevant and T for timely.
Below is my variation that explains how to apply search engine optimization (SEO) to your content within a SMART framework, giving you 14 concrete ways to make your marketing more effective and to win you more business.
S — Specific content wins every time
Content is not about what your marketing team wants to say. It is about providing insight and information that your audience actually wants to hear.
SMART content is designed for a specific audience, based on your understanding of their needs, preferences and intent.
- Get to know your audiences.
There’s much more to this than keyword research. Where do your consumers live online? What’s their intent when performing certain types of searches or engaging your brand in social? What action are they most likely to take at that point? Understanding the audience you’re writing for is the foundation on which SMART content is built.
- Discover opportunities through topical research.
How well do you understand the competitive environment in the verticals for which you’re creating content? Today, you’re competing for eyes and clicks. Your competitors may be other companies, but you could be competing for space in the SERPs against media brands, bloggers, influencers and more. Without that bigger-picture, bird’s-eye view of relevant search and social spaces, you’re flying blind.
Evaluating the content gaps not covered by your competition provides you with opportunities to create engaging content that speaks to people in the key moments that matter.
- Choose content formats wisely.
Which media will you incorporate to best illustrate your message, engage your audience and reach people across platforms?
Don’t limit yourself; a single piece of content can incorporate several types of media, including socially shareable images, quick video clips and embedded media, like SlideShares.
This gives you various ways to convey your message, but it also allows you to appear in different types of search results (like Google Images) and on different search platforms (like YouTube or SlideShare’s internal search), as well.
M — Measurable content delivers on the metrics that matter
Content marketers are getting better at proving the business value of their activities. Just two years ago, only 21 percent of B2B marketing respondents to CMI’s annual content marketing survey said they were successful at tracking ROI. Now, in 2017:
- 72 percent are measuring their content marketing ROI.
- 51 percent are using a measurement plan to provide both insight and progress toward the business goals.
- 79 percent are using analytics tools.
How can you make your content marketing efforts measurable?
- Choose metrics that matter and align with your business goals.
Which KPIs tell the true story of your content’s success? Ideally, you’re going to measure your content’s performance through the entire funnel, right from lead generation and audience-building to nurturing, conversion, sales and right on through post-sales to retention and evangelism.
Site traffic, lead quality, social shares, time on site and conversion rates are among the top metrics used by B2B marketers to determine content success. Priorities are similar for B2C marketers.
- Make search engine optimization a core component of content creation.
Improve your visibility and key metrics like engagement, time on site, sharing and conversions with strategic content optimization.
Apply readability standards and optimize title tags, meta descriptions, subheadings, images and text in line with current SEO standards.
Keep visitors clicking and engaged with smart internal linking that both improves user experience and resurfaces your most popular, highest-converting content.
- Accelerate with automation.
Machine learning is growing in importance in search, especially where data sets are large and dynamic. Identifying patterns in data in real time makes machine learning a great asset to understand changes in your customer base, competitor landscape or the overall market.
Ideally, your content automation system will include reporting to tell you not only how each piece is performing but also make recommendations to help you focus on your most valuable opportunities.
Automation allows you to manage routine tasks with less effort so that you can focus on high-impact activities and accomplish business goals at scale.
A — Actionable content is always on & ready for activation
By actionable content, I mean that which is ready to answers users’ questions but also is valuable way beyond the initial period of promotion after publishing.
- Empower your content creators with technical SEO support.
Last month, I wrote about the importance of balancing technical and non-technical SEO within your organization. If you want your content to perform its best, you need to support your creative team with a technically sound, optimized online presence.
Site structure and hierarchy, meta data, mobile readiness, internal linking, site speed, coding errors and other technical SEO factors can all affect your content’s ability to rank.
Further, they can affect readers’ ability to access and enjoy the content and then take next steps. Get your technical and non-technical SEO in order to set your content team up for success.
- Optimize for activation across multiple channels.
Search engine marketing is the second-most commonly used paid content promotion tactic, next only to social advertising.
Push your content to social channels like Twitter and Facebook, but don’t forget other channels like LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+.
Ideally, you’re going to have some understanding of your audience on each platform and which channels will be most receptive to each new piece. Make sure you’re optimizing your social posts for the platform on which you’re posting — cutting and pasting the same post across all channels doesn’t cut it.
R — Resonate with content promotion in relevant channels
Even if you build it, they will not come until attracted. The competition for eyes and minds is fierce; increase the efficacy of your organic efforts and promotional spend by targeting the right people in the right places at the right time.
- Amplify in social channels for early traction.
Low spend minimums on channels like Twitter and Facebook make it affordable to run experiments against different audience segments and see where your content resonates best.
Plus, that initial boost of activity gives your content authority and appeals to the social networks’ ranking algorithms, helping you get more organic reach.
If you are tracking and measuring correctly, you can see which audiences are not only engaged, but converting. That’s where you want to allocate your content-promotion budget, rather than having some predetermined amount of spend per channel that runs its course regardless of performance for each piece.
- Syndicate and use paid promotion to reach targeted audiences outside your existing network.
Syndication takes content you’ve already published on your site and republishes it elsewhere, exposing you to another publication’s audience. You might be able to find organic syndication opportunities, and there are plenty of paid syndication services like Outbrain, Taboola or Zemanta.
If you’re looking at large-scale syndication, read Danny Sullivan’s caution on using links in syndicated pieces first to stay on the right side of Google.
- Don’t forget email!
Your consumers want to hear from you. In fact, 86 percent want to receive emails at least monthly from companies they deal with, a MarketingSherpa survey found in 2015.
Make your call to action (CTA) to click through and read the content crystal-clear. Avoid placing competing CTAs in your email, and resist the urge to try to sell in every communication. Your content is designed to do the work of helping them take the next logical step.
T — Tangible business results are derived from SMART content
KPIs like social interactions and site visits give you a great idea of how well your content performs in search and social, but you need tangible business results to prove value.
- Make content profitable with CTAs that drive performance.
What action would you like readers to take? Which of your site’s conversion pages is currently converting best and generating the highest-quality leads? These insights will help guide your CTA selection, but remember, your CTAs should also match the consumer intent you’re targeting with each piece. Don’t forget to include embedded performance tracking for both site traffic and conversions.
- Incorporate elements that support multiple business functions.
Make your content multidimensional with elements to build brand authority, inspire or educate on product (or service), encourage engagement and more.
Incorporate testimonials into your content, where they can serve the purpose of providing social validation within the context of an existing consumer experience. Develop author personas to give your content greater authority and build the profiles of key employees and executives.
- Improve ROI with ongoing content management and optimization.
How much content does your organization have sitting on-site and around the web? Each piece is an opportunity for ongoing traffic and lead generation, but only if it’s kept in line with constantly changing SEO standards.
Google: No Changes On Use Of Image Meta Data In Search
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Back in 2014, Matt Cutts formerly of Google talked about meta data in images and basically said they reserve the right to use it, that Google is able to parse it out but did not comment if they use it for rankings or display or both. Well, he did say they did use it for showing more details about the photos in the image thumbnails on Google Image search but did not comment about the ranking component.
Here is that video:
Google: First Click Free is over, being replaced by Flexible Sampling
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Most online news publications are not able to support themselves with advertising these days. For this reason, among others, Google is yielding to publisher requests and replacing its much-debated “First Click Free” program with what it calls “Flexible Sampling.”
Content and news publishers will now control whether and how many articles they want to let searchers access before showing a paywall or subscription prompt. The company is also working on an array of other tools to help boost publisher subscriptions.
End of First Click Free
Google’s VP for news, Richard Gingras, told me last week that the company has been collaborating with publishers and testing the new approach with The New York Times and Financial Times specifically. But despite allowing publishers greater flexibility, Google is still recommending (but not enforcing) that publishers make some content available for free in search results:
Based on our investigations, we have created detailed best practices for implementing flexible sampling. There are two types of sampling we advise: metering, which provides users with a quota of free articles to consume, after which paywalls will start appearing; and lead-in, which offers a portion of an article’s content without it being shown in full.
Publishers will not be required to provide free content to be indexed. Gingras said that Google will be crawling full articles behind the wall for indexing but that publisher decisions about how much content to sample to search users will not impact rankings in any way.
Subscription optimization
Gingras said Google is going to use ad-targeting tactics to identify which audiences are most likely to subscribe. He said that publishers would need to share their audience profiles, and Google would then seek out lookalike audiences to maximize subscriber signups.
He added that different offers and content might be shown to different audiences based on a “propensity to pay” or subscribe. Google will be using its machine learning and other capabilities to find the right audiences, based on publisher data. Publishers will be able to adjust the presentation of content and offers according to different sub-segments or profiles.
Subscription optimization won’t become available until next year, however. When I asked if this was going to be a formal ad product — given that it uses ad targeting technology and approaches — Gingras said that it might become one, but that Google was right now “just trying to understand costs and value delivered.”
Removing purchase friction
Google also wants to make it much easier for users to subscribe to publisher content. Gingras cited improved checkout and purchase flows and one-click payments as Google aspirations for publishers. “We’d like to get the purchase process down to one click.”
The company is building a standard or template-based checkout flow that will be available to publishers at their discretion. Publishers will be free to ignore it, adopt it or modify it.
Gingras told me that where the user is a Google account holder, the company can prepopulate multiple fields and accelerate checkout. And in cases where there’s a payment card on file with Google, it can enable one-click subscriptions. In real time, the publisher will query Google to determine what category the user falls into and deliver the right experience accordingly.
This attention to improving the checkout experience is especially important on mobile. Pew Research Center data show that 85 percent of US adults access news on mobile devices.
Gingras said that Google wasn’t going to take fees or a revenue share for transactions it delivers or facilitates. He asserted that the company doesn’t want to own the user and that all data would be turned over to publishers.
Showing pubs you subscribe to
Scientists Discover Ice On Mars Where It Shouldn’t Exist
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Scientists have made an unexpected discovery while studying old images from the NASA archives – a region of ice near the Martian equator, where water simply isn’t meant to exist.
Everything we know about the red planet says water isn’t thermodynamically stable at low altitudes, but a team lead by researcher Jack Wilson, John Hopkins University, has now suggested that this might be wrong.
And this new information could be groundbreaking for any future Mars missions.
NASA
The images in question were first collected by the neutron spectrometer instrument on NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft (the agency’s longest-operating Mars orbiter) between 2002 and 2009.
But have recently undergone some serious editing.
Wilson’s team were able to reduce blurring and remove ‘noise’ from the imaging data, improving the spacial resolution from approximately 320 miles to 180 miles, allowing us all a closer look.
“It was as if we’d cut the spacecraft’s orbital altitude in half,” Wilson said, “and it gave us a much better view of what’s happening on the surface.”
As a result they were now able to see evidence of ‘significant hydration’ near the equator, located between the northern lowlands and southern highlands along the Medusae Fossae Formation.
Spotting unexpectedly high quantities of hydrogen gathering at high latitudes, the planetary scientists knew this was a sign of buried water ice much lower down (even though the spectrometer itself can’t directly detect water).
This revelation is so mysterious because although hydrogen was always known to exist higher in the atmosphere, as confirmed by 2008 NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, but it was thought that this was impossible closer to the surface.
Indeed the team wonders how the water could be preserved there, with some speculations suggesting that it is only being held there by an ice and dust mixture cycled through the atmosphere the polar areas.
But those conditions last occurred hundreds of thousands of millions years ago and any ice deposited there should be long gone.
“Perhaps the signature could be explained in terms of extensive deposits of hydrated salts, but how these hydrated salts came to be in the formation is also difficult to explain,” Wilson added.
One In Four Teens Admit To Bullying Someone On Social Media – But Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Panic
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In late 18th Century England, public concern over Imperial wars in America, India, and Europe, was matched by a growing fear of an altogether more insidious problem developing at home – the increasing mass consumption of novels!
‘My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books […] I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread’ – The Sylph no. 5, October 6, 1796: 36-37
For critics of this trend (which gained pace after the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740), novels were seen as both psychologically and physiologically harmful: warping ideas of life and relationships, while also damaging readers eyesight and posture.
Fast forward a few hundred years, and this debate has echoes of current consternation around social media – albeit with the main focus of that concern moving from ‘ladies’, ‘mistresses’, and ‘belles’ to today’s young people. Look through any national newspaper and you’re likely to find at least one shocking story of abuse or crime linked to social networking sites.
However, while the tone of the debate on social media may have similarities to the novel-reading panic of the 18th Century, public anxiety in the contemporary case is backed up by empirical evidence. The NSPCC has, for instance, reported a doubling of Childline calls related to cyberbullying between 2012 and 2016, and a recent report by the OECD classified 37% of British 15-years olds as ‘extreme internet users’, significantly above the international average (26%).
At Demos, in our upcoming report ‘The Moral Web‘, we’ve focused on understanding how young people act on social media, and what motivates their decision-making. We found that a quarter of 16-18 year olds admit to bullying or abusing someone over social media, with many saying that they feel drawn into negative behaviour due to the visibility of communication, leading to a need to be seen ‘to act tough’.
The public response to moral panics of the past is generally to look to prohibit or restrict access the object of ‘vice’ or censor content deemed particularly harmful. In her analysis of the novel-reading panic of the 1700s, Ana Vogrinčič, finds evidence of significant attempts to ‘thwart their spread and restrain novel reading’. However, she argues that these attempts often proved counterproductive (in this case increasing public attention given to this literary form).
Again, there are parallels to our current predicament. Much of the contemporary policy response has so far focused on online safeguarding, social media companies are under increasing public pressure to ‘do more’ to remove harmful content, and schools and parents often get drawn into attempts to limit access to smartphones, and reduce screen time.
While all worthwhile endeavours, there are both practical and social limits to solely restrictive approaches. From a practical perspective, the nature of social media technologies makes traditional forms of regulation difficult – for example, constant connectivity through smartphones means that young people are regularly online outside spaces of parental mediation. There’s also a danger that overly intrusive interference into young people’s digital worlds becomes counterproductive, encouraging more covert online behaviour, as well as limiting positive developmental opportunities.
Our research for instance found that while a significant minority of young people engaged in abusive behaviour, social media provided the majority with opportunities for honest and empathetic communication (88% said they had given emotional support to a friend over social media) and civic and political engagement (51% had posted about political or social causes).
So how to address the legitimate concerns that underpin public anxiety? Our research finds that young people’s character and social and emotional skills are important in shaping how they think and act on social media. Traits of empathy and self-control were, for example, found to be particularly closely linked to reduced likelihood of engaging in bullying behaviour online.
It’s here that we feel policy-makers, schools, and parents can make the biggest difference – empowering young people to make a positive contribution to their online communities by building their social digital skills, together with those wider character traits which guide and shape behaviour.
Chatbots – A Blast From The AI Past With An Uncertain Future
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https://pixabay.com/en/robot-technology-modern-white-2587571/
The idea that we could hold meaningful conversations with computers creates a strong and diverse set of reactions. For some, being able to talk with a chat bot is an exciting idea, opening up a whole range of business and personal opportunities from customer service and tech support to fashion, healthcare and legal advice.
For others, particularly parts of the mainstream media, a computer that can chat is a portent of a Terminator-style AI armageddon of the human race. When Facebook discussed some of its recent chat bot developments, where the bots apparently developed their own language, it was described by one national newspaper as ‘controversial’ and ‘unsupervised’. A side bar in The Mail’s coverage of the story offered a frightening picture of ‘The AI Warnings’ that come with such developments.
Many more outlets incorrectly reported that the experiment was shut down because Facebook ‘were afraid of the results’, when in fact the bots were just not working as intended. This fearful perspective will no doubt return whenever the next big chat bot story emerges, but it takes the emphasis away from much more useful discussion on where chat bots might be of greatest benefit in the future – or even if they have a future at all.
The view of many is perhaps summed up by a recent piece in leading tech website The Register who argue that, “the jury is still out” on chat bots. Yet, the idea that we can hold meaningful and useful conversations with a computer has been fascinating AI experts for decades.
The following is part of a ‘conversation’ between two bots – one called ELIZA, created to assume the role of a psychotherapist and one called PARRY, who was programmed at act paranoid.
ELIZA: Good Evening. Tell me your problems. Please terminate input with a period or a question mark.
PARRY: People get on my nerves sometimes.
ELIZA: I am not sure I understand you fully.
PARRY: You should pay more attention.
ELIZA: Suppose you should pay more attention.
PARRY: You’re entitled to your own opinion.
ELIZA: What makes you think I am entitled to my own opinion?
PARRY: It bothers me just to be around people in general.
ELIZA: Please go on.
PARRY: I went to the track at Bay Meadows a while back.
ELIZA: What does that suggest to you?
PARRY: I went to the races.
The conversation went on for some time, with PARRY becoming increasingly ‘frustrated’ with ELIZA’s seemingly unhelpful responses.
It’s quite different and much more meaningful in human terms to the language ‘invented’ by the two Facebook bots. It’s also interesting to consider when you put it into a historical context – that AI conversation took place in 1972.
Originally, ELIZA (created in 1964) and Parry (created in 1972) were intended to act as Turing Test candidates to see whether a computer could convince a human it was real on the basis of a conversation between the two. Given the ‘personas’ created for ELIZA and PARRY, someone came up with the idea of hooking them up and that friendly chat was the result.
Passing a Turing Test is supposed to show that a machine is displaying human levels of intelligence. Whether it does or not has been debated since Alan Turing created the test back in 1950, and for the past ten years has been the objective for an annual chat bot competition, The Loebner Prize.
Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Algorithm Update, Sitelinks Searchbox Bug, Apple Drops Bing & Happy Birthday Google
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This week in search I cover the pretty big ongoing Google algorithm and ranking shifts, you want to check this out. Google said they do look for spam patterns between Search Console accounts. Google bug dropped the Sitelinks search box, Google is working on fixing it. Google is serving more AMP content on the mobile results now. Google said competition is different in different Google regions. Google said when going HTTPS make sure to do it all at once. Google is testing audience reviews in movie knowledge panels. Google phone call organic extensions are rolling out to more. Google is rolling out local finder website mentions. Google does still support pubsubhubbub, now known as WebSub. Google added an export button to the reports in the beta Google Search Console interface. Google launched their new shopping ads ad units to appease the EU. Google AdWords now allows bulk cancels of accounts. Google AMP testing new faster AMP cache. Apple dropped Bing and went back to Google. Google celebrated their 19th birthday this week! That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:
Google’s ‘Manhattan project’: Home device with a screen to compete with Echo Show
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Google generally doesn’t do as well when it builds “follower” products — think Google Plus or Allo. But there are other examples where Google has excelled with later entries (e.g., AdWords, Maps). Right now, Google Home is a follower product seeking to break out of Amazon Echo’s shadow.
On paper, Google should win in this market. It has a larger developer ecosystem. And it has a better assistant. But Amazon is being very aggressive by innovating quickly and offering a dizzying array of devices at different price points. Amazon also has a more powerful sales channel. Overall, Amazon is out-innovating the rest of the “smart speaker” market at the moment.
Amazon now has two devices with screens: Echo Show and the new Echo Spot. According to TechCrunch, Google is also working on a Home device with a touchscreen:
Two sources confirm to TechCrunch that the Google device has been internally codenamed “Manhattan” and will have a similar screen size to the 7-inch Echo Show. One source received info directly from a Google employee. Both sources say the device will offer YouTube, Google Assistant, Google Photos and video calling. It will also act as a smart hub that can control Nest and other smart home devices.
A Home with a touchscreen could run Android apps and offer a stronger screen experience than the sub-optimal Echo Show. It would also enable video calling and be compatible with entertainment services such as Netflix.
Echo Show, right now, doesn’t fully utilize the screen and creates consumer expectations it doesn’t fulfill. An Echo Show 2.0 will likely be an improvement. (I haven’t been hands-on with the new Echo Spot.)
Targeting featured snippet and ‘People also ask’ SERP features
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Search engines have a peculiar business model: They exist to quickly direct you somewhere else. This is in direct contrast to your typical web business or social platform, where they do everything they can to keep you engaged and on that platform.
This can’t have escaped the notice of the good folks at Google. And now, many questions are answered directly on the search engine. This keeps you on the page a little longer and (I would imagine) ups the likelihood of your conducting another search or — shock, horror! — even clicking on a search ad.
You have probably seen this a million times, but the following searches should all provide some form of answer directly in the search results.
- “What is my IP?”
- “Calculator”
- “What is the square root of 196?”
- “Telephone number for Bowler Hat SEO”
For these kinds of queries, there is no longer a need to actually visit a third-party website — even when they are directly referencing a business, as in the telephone query example.
We get answers directly in the search results now, which is often super-helpful for us users.
Featured snippets
One particular SERP feature that we are seeing more commonly is known as a featured snippet (or answer box).
A featured snippet is a summarized answer to the user’s search query that typically appears at the top of the search results. The snippet will include a brief answer to the question, a linked page title and the URL of the page.
Here is a featured snippet for the question, “What is a featured snippet?”
We have been tinkering with some of the posts over on the Bowler Hat blog and have managed to generate featured snippets for a number of them. This is great positioning and is often referred to as “position zero,” as it sits above the standard results with a supersized listing.
As an example, we have a post that provides a set of small business SEO tips, which tends to hover around third or fourth for a variety of search terms. With a featured snippet, we now have visibility above the organic results and within the results themselves. Win-win.
This is great additional exposure. Even though I am not super-keen on the text they are using in this example, from an organic search perspective, what’s not to like?
There are a couple of different forms that featured snippets can take, from the most popular paragraph form to tables to bulleted lists. We have seen bulleted lists taken from content in a <ol> tag as well as from header tags — which just reinforces the need for well-structured HTML.
Featured snippet placement can be hugely powerful from an SEO and marketing standpoint:
- More SERP real estate
- More clicks overall*
- Increased awareness and branding
* It’s of note that, in our experience, the featured snippets don’t tend to get a huge amount of click-throughs, and they reduce the click-through on the organic listings slightly. So, while it may not set the world on fire, clicks on your snippet and organic listing combined should increase compared to a listing alone, and the exposure itself is going to be highly valuable. And, of course, not all featured snippets are created equal — for the “small business SEO tips” example above, the snippet does not answer the question, so you have to click through to get the goodies.
Yet, there is another side to this coin: There is only one featured snippet, and only one company can have it. So, what impact does a featured snippet have if you are not the chosen one?
There are a few studies out there that would indicate that a featured snippet does reduce the number of clicks on a first-page listing. It would seem that a typical #1 listing does around 25 percent of clicks, where a #1 listing with a featured snippet above does about 20 percent of clicks.
That’s a notable impact for sure, but we have seen far worse implications in the wild with clients we currently work with at my agency. One client site saw traffic impacted by over 50 percent where a featured snippet has appeared above their #1 ranking. So, these averages are not always useful, and you have to monitor the impact of SERP features like featured snippets for terms you are targeting. For this specific client, that snippet has now disappeared — so a calm head is also needed as these new SERP features mature.
In this case, if a featured snippet appears, your rank tracker may tell you that you are still in position #1, yet traffic has dropped. So ensuring you understand the SERP features is key here.
(We like the BrightLocal rank tracker for this, as it keeps screen shots of each rank report. This is a great help when doing historical analysis of rankings and traffic so we can see what the actual page layout looked like at any given point in time.)
People also ask
Another feature that tends to crop up along with featured snippets is “People also ask” boxes. These are sets of questions that relate to the original search query.
“People also ask” boxes are an interesting SERP feature in that they are dynamic. When you click on any one of the questions, specific details are revealed and further questions are added to the bottom of the list.
The following image shows both a featured snippet and a “People also ask” box.
So, if we include the ad links (five with the sitelinks), the featured snippet and the “People also ask” links, our traditional #1 organic listing is the 11th link on the page (jeez). Throw a few more ads into the picture, and that is a lot of links for a user to wade through before they get to a traditional organic result — often with the answer already on the page.
How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?
As mentioned above, when a user clicks on a “People also ask” question, we see the question itself expand to take up more screen space, and we get an additional two or three questions added to the bottom of the list.
This process repeats itself for each question clicked on. There is seemingly no limit to this, and each click pushes the traditional organic results further down the page.
Here, we see the initial four questions expanded to six questions, with the answer to the first question also revealed.
And it just keeps on going and going and going! It really can spiral, and it is almost like conducting new search queries in relation to the questions you answer right there amidst another set of search results. Wild!
After 10 clicks, we have 10 expanded questions, each about the size of two standard organic listings, and 14 further questions below. This occupies about four total screen sizes of scrolling on a typical desktop before you get to an organic result. This is not intended to be a realistic example of search engine usage, yet it is still a little scary if you rely on organic clicks and don’t have featured snippets.
Featured snippets = People also ask?
In the majority of cases, Googling the questions from the “People also ask” results will return a featured snippet. So, if we Google the expanded question above, “Is the Uber app free?” we get the same piece of content as a featured snippet.
So it is almost as if the “People also ask” results are related to featured snippets.
Another interesting fact here, taken from the recent Ahrefs study on featured snippets, is that content can rank for many featured snippets. In fact, the top-performing page in the Ahrefs database had 4,658 featured snippets… for a single page.
Taking a look at this page and the site itself, which also has a huge number of featured snippets, the writing style is certainly interesting: Short, practical sentences. Paragraphs are, in fact, often just one sentence. It makes for easy reading and (it would seem) for easy digestion by search engine algorithms.
If you are using content marketing as a part of your SEO (and you really should be), then you should also be looking to target these new SERP features to improve your visibility and traffic from organic search.
SEO for featured snippets
Fortunately for us lucky campers, there have been a few studies done to identify the patterns here and provide guidance on optimizing your content for featured snippets.
The major takeaways here to optimize your content for featured snippets are as follows:
- Ensure your content already ranks well for the targeted search query — ideally, in the top five results and most certainly on the first page of results.
- Have the best answer, and summarize the question and answer in a way that matches the current featured snippet. This is a real opportunity if you are not the first, as you can piggyback those stronger results with better content (which is the way it should be).
- Ensure your content matches the kind of featured snippet that is showing for a given query — if you are targeting the paragraph format, have a paragraph of roughly 40 to 50 words that includes the question and summarized answer. If you are targeting a list or table, have your content in a list or table (ideally with some form of incentive or CTA to get the user to click and read the full article as well).
- Don’t be afraid to experiment. Playing with the content and using the “Fetch as Google” feature in Google Search Console can show almost instant changes to the content in the answer box/featured snippet. You can also see this impact the results where a site has a featured snippet but you also rank highly. Experiment.
Fortunately, this is not terribly technical. There are no guarantees, and it requires an analysis of what the featured snippets that you are targeting look like, but with some small tweaks, you can generate big results.