Category: SEO

i wish you like this article on October 2017 Google Webmaster Report

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See details of post Beat high-cost paid search clicks by sweating the details below

In some industries and sectors, the per-click cost of search keywords is notoriously expensive — so expensive, in fact, that it dissuades some businesses from even stepping into the fray. When a click can cost you $200 or more, that reluctance is understandable.

At the same time, the costs of not stepping into PPC might be just as pricey, even if they’re not as obvious. In industries where competition is stiff, you could stand to lose a lot by being conspicuously absent from PPC.

So, what’s a business to do?

Fortunately, expensive clicks — even really expensive clicks — don’t have to stop you from venturing into PPC. You just have to make sure that every click counts.

Industries where clicks are costly

Before we get into a discussion about how to make sure every click counts, let’s get clear on the industries and sectors we’re talking about.

Though most advertisers aren’t paying more than a few dollars per click, some industries have average CPCs of $50 or more. Which keywords are garnering these high rates? Here are a few:

1. Business services
2. Bail bonds
3. Casino
4. Lawyer
5. Asset management
6. Insurance
7. Cash services & payday loans
8. Cleanup & restoration services
9. Degree
10. Medical coding services

My agency has clients in education, insurance and legal sectors, and I can attest to the sky-high rates. In fact, I’ve seen click costs of $200 or more with some clients!

How can a business justify playing on this field? Mostly, it comes down to sweating the details to make sure every one of those clicks counts. And by sweating the details, I mean doing the following:

1. Pay more attention to Quality Score

Normally, my team doesn’t manage to Quality Score. This is partly because most of our clients already have excellent Quality Scores, so it’s a non-issue. But sometimes we onboard new clients that have Quality Scores that are just okay.

Usually, we won’t worry too much about these scores because we know they’ll improve over time as a byproduct of good account management. But when a client is in an industry with high costs per click, we give these Quality Scores more attention.

As you know, Ad Rank is determined by a combination of factors, as stated in AdWords Help:

We combine the components of Quality Score (expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), the max. CPC bid, and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats to determine Ad Rank. When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, we consider such factors as the relevance, expected clickthrough rates, and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page.

Consequently, in a high costs-per-click environment, we’ll look closely at ad extensions, keywords, ad relevancy and landing pages to make sure everything’s set up perfectly to boost the Quality Score.

Recently, we went through this with a law firm client. The firm came to us with a decent Quality Score, but we wanted to get it even higher. We ended up creating additional landing pages to make sure that our keywords lined up perfectly with our landing pages. In fact, we ended up creating one set of landing pages for “lawyer” themed pages and another set of “attorney” themed pages to make the match seamless.

2. Keep a tight handle on location targeting

Again, this is something my team does for all accounts, but it becomes even more critical in a high-click-cost environment. Obviously, you want to minimize “wasted” clicks as much as possible — and having your client’s ad display in areas they don’t serve is a big waste!

You might think this point is self-evident, but we recently on-boarded a new client and found that its ads were showing up across the US, even though the bulk of its business was in one particular city. Needless to say, we quickly clamped down on location targeting.

The lesson here? Target the geographic radius of the company’s business, and check traffic periodically to make sure nothing extraneous is getting through. Then exclude as necessary.

3. Look for lower weekend bids

Amazingly, some advertisers turn off their ads on weekends. I can’t fathom why this is. Perhaps they think no one researches universities or lawyers on the weekend. However, weekends can present an excellent cost-saving opportunity.

In some cases, we’ve lowered bids by as much as 75 percent on weekends, and the ads continue to display in the second ad position. More importantly, we haven’t experienced a dip in leads over the weekend or during the week.

4. Focus on what’s converting

Generally, it’s better to have a handful of well-converting campaigns with generous budgets than a wide swath of campaigns with limited budgets.

The problem with campaigns with limited budgets is that those budgets can get used up quickly. In fact, a severely limited budget might not even meet minimum bid thresholds. Consequently, your campaign ends up sitting there, doing nothing.

It’s much better to cut back on the number of campaigns and give more generous funding to those that are actually converting.

To give a simplified example: You have 10 campaigns with a total budget of $100. You assign each campaign a budget of $10. If clicks rise to $12 each, nothing is going to happen.

Instead, pick your one or two top-converting campaigns and assign them appropriate budgets so they can actually convert.

5. Experiment with shared budgets

Another way to address the above scenario is to set up a shared budget. A shared budget is a single budget that’s shared among several campaigns. With a shared budget, you don’t have to try to guess which campaigns are going to convert. It’s also an excellent option when costs and campaign volume vary significantly from day to day.

We’ve deployed this strategy with some of our university and law firm clients, and it’s worked well. It avoids scenarios where some campaigns have used up their entire budget allotment, while others have budget remaining but aren’t seeing any action.

6. Lean into the Google Display Network

Often, we find that costs per click are lower on the Google Display Network (GDN) — sometimes much lower. In fact, I’ve seen $200 Search Network clicks priced at $5 on the GDN!

In addition, the GDN has all kinds of options for placement and targeting, which allows you to get super-specific and thereby minimize waste.

That’s why we’ll often suggest starting on the GDN before moving to the Search Network when industries are hypercompetitive, and clients are competing against big brands with big budgets.

7. Choose your devices wisely

Sometimes, clients feel they should run their ads across all devices: desktop, tablet and mobile. But this isn’t always the case.

Sometimes, click costs are lower on some devices (e.g., mobile) than others, which can create another cost-saving opportunity.

We recently came across a retailer who was running all of their campaigns on mobile — and just mobile. This may seem surprising (especially for a retailer), but for this client it made sense. They were getting great performance on mobile — and cost per acquisition was lower there, too.

8. Spend more time looking forward than back

We constantly look at comparative month-over-month and year-over-year data. But when clicks are super-pricey, there’s a danger in putting too much emphasis on this data. Things always change. New competitors enter the market. Google raises their prices. Or any other number of things can happen.

So rather than getting tied up in knots wondering, “Why are we paying $59 per click when we paid $50 last year?,” you’re better off spending your time on the things you can control.

Don’t stop sweating the (right) details

Sweating these details won’t turn expensive clicks into cheap clicks. But it can sometimes bring down costs a bit and, more importantly, help make sure that every click counts.

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See details of post 14 ways to get smarter with your content and SEO below

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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?

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

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i hope you like this post on Google: No Changes On Use Of Image Meta Data In Search

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:

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See details of post Google: First Click Free is over, being replaced by Flexible Sampling below

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

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i hope you like this post on Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Algorithm Update, Sitelinks Searchbox Bug, Apple Drops Bing & Happy Birthday Google

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:

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See details of post Google’s ‘Manhattan project’: Home device with a screen to compete with Echo Show below

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.)

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See details of post Targeting featured snippet and ‘People also ask’ SERP features below

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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).
4. 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.

Don’t forget the SEO basics

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See details of post The trouble with ‘Fred’ below

Disclaimer: All criticism of Google spokespeople contained herein is impersonal in nature. I know they are only representing the internal direction of the company and not acting independently. They do strive to be as helpful as they can.

When former head of web spam Matt Cutts was at Google, he spent a lot of time communicating with webmasters/site owners about updates. We knew what was coming, when it might be coming, and how severe it would possibly be.

If you woke up in the morning and your traffic had fallen off a proverbial cliff, you could go to Twitter and, based on what Cutts was posting, usually determine if Google had run an update. You could even tell how severe the rollout was, as Cutts would typically give you percentage of queries affected.

Although some believe Cutts was more about misinformation than information, when it came to updates, most would agree he was on point.

So if a site fell off that cliff, you could learn from Cutts what happened, what the update was named, and what it affected. This gave you starting points for what to review so that you could fix the site and bring it back into line with Google’s guidelines.

Why the help?

Cutts seemed to understand there was a need for the webmaster. After all, Google’s Search is not their product — the sites they return from that search are the product.

Without someone translating Google’s desires to site owners, those sites would likely not meet those guidelines very well. This would result in a poor experience for Google users. So, that transfer of knowledge between Google, SEOs and site owners was important. Without it, Google would be hard-pressed to find a plethora of sites that meet its needs.

Then, things changed. Matt Cutts left to go to the US Digital Service — and with his departure, that type of communication from Google ended, for the most part.

While Google will still let webmasters know about really big changes, like the mobile-first index, they’ve stopped communicating much detail about smaller updates. And the communication has not been in such an easily consumable format as Cutts tweeting update metrics.

In fact, very little is said today about smaller updates. It has gotten to the point where they stopped naming all but a very few of these changes.

Google communication in 2017

Right now, the Google spokespeople who primarily communicate with SEOs/webmasters are Gary Illyes and John Mueller. This is not a critique of them, as they communicate in the way Google has asked them to communicate.

Indeed, they have been very helpful over the past few years. Mueller holds Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts to help answer questions in long form. Illyes answers similar questions in short form on Twitter and attends conferences, where he participates in various AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions with interviewers.

All this is helpful and appreciated… but unfortunately, it is not the same.

Highly specific information is difficult to find, and questioners are often are met with more vagueness than specifics, which can at times feel frustrating. Google has become obtuse in how they communicate with digital marketers, and that seems to be directed by internal company processes and policies.

This lack of algorithmic specificity and update confirmation is how we wound up with Phantom.

Welcome, Phantom

Google has many algorithms, as any SEO knows. Some, like Penguin and Panda, have been rolled into Google’s core algorithm and run in (quasi-) real time, while others, like the interstitial penalty, still run, well, when they run.

Big updates such as Penguin have always been set apart from the day-to-day changes of Google. There are potentially thousands of tweaks to core algorithms that run every year and often multiple times a day.

However, day-to-day changes affect sites much differently than massive algorithm updates like Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, Pirate, Layout, Mobilegeddon, Interstitial, and on and on. One is a quiet rain, the other a typhoon. One is rarely noticed, the other can be highly destructive.

Now, Google is correct in that webmasters don’t need to know about these day-to-day changes unless someone dials an algorithm up or down too much. You might not ever even notice them. However, there are other algorithms updates that cause enough disruption in rankings for webmasters to wonder, “Hey Google, what happened?”

This was true for an algorithm update that became known as Phantom.

Phantom?

There was a mysterious update in 2013 that SEO expert Glenn Gabe named “Phantom.” While it seemed to be focused on quality, it was not related to Panda or Penguin. This was new, and it affected a large number of sites.

When “Phantom” ran, it was not a minor tweak. Sites, and the sites that monitor sites, would show large-scale ranking changes that only seem to happen when there is a major algorithm update afoot.

Now, there was one occasion that Google acknowledged Phantom existed. However, aside from that, Google has not named it, acknowledged it, or even denied Phantom when SEOs believed it ran. Over time, this string of unknown quality updates all became known as Phantom.

The word “Phantom” came from the idea that we didn’t know what it was; we just knew that some update that was not Panda caused mass fluctuations and was related to quality.

Not Panda quality updates

The changes introduced by Phantom were not one set of changes like Panda or Penguin, which typically target the same items. However, the changes were not completely disparate and had the following in common:

• They were related to site quality.
• They were not Panda.
• They were all found in the Quality Raters Guide.

We don’t use the word “Phantom” anymore, but from 2013 to 2016, large-scale changes that were quality related and not Panda were commonly called Phantom. (It was easier than “that update no one admits exists, but all indicators tell us is there.”)

You can’t have so many sites shift that dramatically and tell SEOs the update does not exist. We all talk to each other. We know something happened. Not naming it just means we have to “make up” (educated guess) what we think it might be.

And from this mysterious Phantom, Fred was born.

‘Hello, Fred!’

In early March, 2017, the SEO world was rocked by a seemingly significant algorithm update that appeared to target link quality. Google, however, would not confirm this update, deflecting questions by responding that Google makes updates to its core algorithm nearly every day.

When Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz asked Gary Illyes if he cared to name the unconfirmed update, he responded jokingly:

‘Fred’ is more than a funny joke

Of course, Fred is not just a funny thing that happened on Twitter, nor is it just the default name for all Google’s future updates. In fact, it is not actually that funny when you break down what it really means. Fred is representative of something far deeper: Google’s historically unstated “black box.”

Now, Google does not use the term “black box,” but for all intents and purposes, that is exactly what “Fred” represents to webmasters and SEOs.

Meet Google’s black box

A black box is when a system’s inputs and outputs (and their general relationships) are known, but

• internal structures are not well understood (or understood at all);
• understanding these structures is deemed unnecessary for users; and/or
• inner workings are not meant be known due to a need for confidentiality.

To this end, Google has also communicated to SEOs through different channels that they are acting from a black box perspective — the way they used to before Matt Cutts took over Webmaster communications.

We have been told we don’t need to understand the algorithms. We have been told that this knowledge is not necessary to do the work. We have been told that all we need to do to be successful is be awesome. “Awesomeness” will get us where we need to be.

This all sounds good. It really does. Just be awesome. Just follow the Webmaster guidelines. Just read the Google Quality Rater’s Guide. You will be set.

Of course, the devil is in the details.

What does ‘awesome’ mean?

Follow the Webmaster Guidelines. Read the Quality Rater’s Guide. Follow these rules for “awesomeness.”

While that advice can help an SEO become awesome on a basic level, it can’t tell one what to do when there is a complex problem. Have a schema implementation issue? What about trying to figure out how to properly canonical pages when doing a site modification or move? Does being awesome tell me how to best populate ever-changing news sitemaps? What about if you get a manual action for that structured data markup because you did something wrong? What about load times?

There are a lot of questions about the million smaller details that fall under “being awesome” that, unfortunately, telling us to “be awesome” does not cover.

This is where the black box becomes potentially detrimental and damaging. Where do you get information about site changes once you have passed the basics of the Webmaster Guidelines and Quality Raters Guide? You saw a change in your site traffic last week; how do you know if it is just your site or an algorithm update if Google won’t tell you?

Being awesome

Google no longer wants SEOs to worry about algorithms. I get it. Google wants you to just be awesome. I get that, too. Google does not want people manipulating their algorithms. Webmaster Guidelines were first written to help stop spam. Google just wants you to make good sites.

The issue is that there still seems to be an unspoken assumption at Google that anyone who wants information about algorithm updates is just trying to find a way to manipulate results.

Of course, some do, but it should be noted most people who ask these questions of Google are just trying to make sure their clients and sites meet the guidelines. After all, there are multiple ways to create an “awesome” website, but some tactics can harm your SEO if done improperly.

Without any confirmations from Google, experienced SEOs can be pretty sure that their methods are fine — but “pretty sure” is not very comforting when you take your role as an SEO seriously.

So, while “being awesome” is a nice idea — and every site should strive to be awesome — it offers little practical help in the ever-changing world of SEO. And it offers no help when a site is having traffic or visibility issues.

So, why is this important?

The lack of transparency is important for several reasons. The first is that Google loses control over the part of product it has never controlled: the websites it delivers in search results. This is not a concern for site owners, but it seems the ability to actively direct sites toward their goals would be something Google would value and encourage.

They have added Developer Guides to make finding SEO/webmaster information easier, but these only help SEOs. Site owners do not have time to learn how to write a title tag or code structured data. These guides also are very high-level, for the most part — they communicate enough to answer basic questions, but not complex ones.

In the end, Google hurts itself by not communicating in greater detail with the people who help affect how the sites in their search results work.

If it is not communicated to me, I cannot communicate it to the client — and you can be assured they are not going to the Developers site to find out. I can also tell you it is much harder to get buy-in from those at the executive level when your reasoning for proposed changes and new initiatives is “because Google said to be awesome.”

If Google doesn’t tell us what it values, there’s little chance that site owners will make the sites Google wants.

Why else?

SEOs are not spammers. SEOs are marketers. SEOs are trying to help clients do their best and at the same time achieve that best by staying within what they know to be Google’s guidelines.

We work hard to keep up with the ever-changing landscape that is SEO. It is crucial to know whether a site was likely hit by an algorithm update and not, say, an error from that last code push. It takes a lot more time to determine this when Google is silent.

Google used to tell us when they rolled these major algorithm updates out, so it gave you parameters to work within. Now, we have to make our best guess.

I think it would be eye-opening to Google to spend a week or so at different SEOs’ desks and see what we have to go through to diagnose an issue. Without any clear communication from Google that something happened on their end, it leaves literally anything that happens on a website in play. Anything! At least when Google told us about algorithmic fluctuations, we could home in on that.

Without that help, we’re flying blind.

Flying blind

Now, some of us are really experienced in figuring this out. But if you are not a diagnostician — if you do not have years of website development understanding, and if you are not an expert in algorithms and how their changes appear in the tools we use — then you could find yourself barking up a very wrong tree while a crippled site loses money.

Every experienced SEO has had a conversation with a desperate potential client who had no idea they were in violation of Google’s guidelines — and now has no money to get the help that they need because they lost enough search visibility to severely hamper their business.

And that leads me to the last but most important reason that this black box practice can be so damaging.

People

People’s livelihoods depend on our doing our job well. People’s businesses rely on our being able to properly diagnose and fix issues. People’s homes, mortgages and children’s tuition rely on our not messing this up.

We are not spammers. We are often the one bridge between a business making it and employees winding up on unemployment. It may sound hyperbolic, but it’s not. I often joke that 50 percent of my job is preventing site owners from hurting their sites (and themselves) unknowingly. During earlier versions of Penguin, the stories from those site owners who were affected were often heartbreaking.

Additionally, without input from Google, I have to convince site owners without documentation or confirmation backup that a certain direction is the correct one. Can I do it? Sure. Would I like it if Google did not make my job of convincing others to make sites according to their rules that much harder? Yes.

Will Google change?

Unlikely, but we can hope. Google has lost sight of the very real consequences of not communicating clearly with SEOs. Without this communication, no one wins.

Some site owners will be lucky and can afford the best of the best of us who don’t need the confirmations to figure out what needs to be done. But many site owners? They will not be able to afford the SEO services they need. When they cannot afford to get the audit to confirm to them that yes, Google algorithms hurt your site, they will not survive.

Meanwhile, we as SEOs will have difficulties moving the needle internally when we cannot get buy-in from key players based on the idea of “being awesome.” Google will lose the ability to move those sites toward their aims. If we are not communicating Google’s needs to site owners, they will likely never hear about them. (There is a reason so many sites are still not mobile-ready!)

Is that black box worth it to Google? Perhaps. But is being obtuse and lacking in transparency truly beneficial to anyone in the long run?

It seems there are better ways to handle this than to simply direct everyone to make “awesome” sites and to read the Webmaster Guidelines. We are professionals trying to help Google as much as we are asking them to help us. It is a partnership, not an adversarial relationship.

No one is asking for trade secrets — just confirmation that Google made a change (or not) and generally what they changed.

It is like feeling really sick, going to the doctor, and he tells you, “Well you have a Fred.”

You ask the doctor, “What can I do for a case of ‘Fred?’”

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