On-the-Page SERP

 

The Future is: No-Click Answers

Faster answers. It’s what we all want. In search we’re on our way to getting it thanks to Google shifting from being a search results list to an answer engine.

For a long time landing the top search result was a marketer’s dream. Then came Google ads and now Google is shifting to on-the-page SERP with Featured Snippets.

 

 
Screen Shot 2018-06-05 at 10.27.28 AM.png

What is on-the-page SERP?

To understand on-the-page SERP, let’s start with a quick activity. Pick up your phone, open Safari (or whatever you use to search the internet) and type in a question. Stuck for a question? Here are a few to try:

Who is Devante Smith-Pelly?

What is a sea robin?

What is an eddy line?

What does your screen look like? Perhaps something like this:

This is what Google calls a Featured Snippet. And it’s the future of search results. It’s all about getting an answer without having to click through to a website.

 

The data behind the trend

Now that you’ve had a taste of the experience, let’s look at the data.

30% of Google search results include a featured snippet, according a study by Stone Temple Consulting.

What happens when a searcher gets a featured snippet, basically they get to move on with their day. As someone looking for the answer to a question, it’s great news for you. But as a marketer it means fewer people clicking on your website.  Rand Fishkin, you know that guy who’s synonymous with search, did some analysis of search data recently and he found these kind of “no-click searches” are up.

61.03%of mobile searches result in no-clicks

43.28%of desktop searches result in no-click

Combine the increase in mobile and voice assistant searches with Google’s intentional moves to give people answers as quickly as possible and we can all expect a drop in organic referral from Google to our websites.

How to make content that hits the on-the-page SERP trend

So our challenge as marketers and content creators is how do we get a searcher to do what we want, without them clicking to a website? As with all things Google, how content lands in a featured snippet (aka answer boxes) is changing regularly. But the folks at Google say featured snippets typically come in three types:

  • Paragraph

  • List

  • Table

What else matters?

Beyond formatting content to fit into one of the three types mentioned above, content creators should also pay attention to these factors:

  • Traditional SEO practices. Being on Page 1 improves the chance a brand’s content will be featured, though being in the very top position (#1) doesn’t seem to matter as much.

  • Answering a specific question. Think about the questions your audience has and voila instant content topic. You can answer one question at a time or consider answering many related questions. This is also where long-tail keywords and topic clusters can come in handy.

  • Health and finance topics. Yep, that’s right. Certain topics do better than others, health and finance are two of them. DIY-related content also does well.

  • Video and images. Search is evolving overall to be more video- and image-oriented. Be sure to tag these content assets appropriately so they come up in searchers’ queries.

  • H2 tags. Put the question you are trying to rank for in an H2 tag with the answer directly below it. Emphasize question words like Who, How, Have, What, Does, When, Where, Should, Which and Why in these tags as well as the header.

Kara Schlabaugh