Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) have evolved significantly over the years, incorporating various features to enhance user experience and provide more relevant results. These features can significantly impact your website's visibility and ranking.
To optimize your website for Google SERPs, it's essential to understand the different features that appear on the results page. Google's algorithm favors websites that provide high-quality, relevant content.
One of the most prominent features on Google SERPs is the Knowledge Panel, which provides a concise summary of a topic or entity. This feature is often triggered by a specific query, and its presence can impact your website's visibility in the search results.
The Knowledge Panel can be a double-edged sword, as its presence can both help and hinder your website's ranking. If your website is not featured in the Knowledge Panel, it may not be as visible to users, potentially impacting your website's traffic and engagement.
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What Are Google SERP Features?
Google SERP features are various elements included throughout the results page that appear beside traditional organic results. They include news articles, videos, images, and featured snippets.
The purpose of SERP features is to provide users with quick, relevant information directly on the search results page. This means users don't necessarily have to click through to a website to find the answer to their questions.
SERP features often appear above organic results on the search result page.
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How Google SERP Features Work
Google SERP Features are designed to help users find what they're looking for faster. They appear next to, above, or below standard search results and provide additional information about a search query.
A featured snippet, one type of SERP Feature, is a short piece of text highlighted within a box at the top of Google. It's quality information related to a search query that Google has lifted from a webpage.
Featured snippets get approximately 8% of all organic clicks, according to a study by Ahrefs. They typically provide quicker answers to a user's question and are more concise and direct.
Generally, featured snippets have a higher click-through rate than regular organic results. They extract content from the page that answers the query in the best way.
How Rankings Work
So, how do rankings work? Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings determine the order in which different websites appear in response to a query on a search engine, like Google.
There are various ranking factors and algorithms designed to deliver the most relevant and high-quality ranking results to users. This means that the higher a website appears in the SERP, the more organic visibility and clicks it will receive.
SERP features can appear above the organic results to help provide users with quick, relevant information.
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What Are & How to Win Them?
Featured snippets are a type of Google SERP feature that provide a short piece of text, highlighted within a box, at the top of Google search results. They're designed to help answer a user's search query more efficiently and effectively.
According to a study by Ahrefs, featured snippets get approximately 8% of all organic clicks. This is a significant opportunity for businesses to increase their online visibility and drive traffic to their website.
Featured snippets can take the form of a paragraph, a bulleted list, a numbered list, or a table, and they occupy what's called "position zero" in search results. This means they're placed even higher in the search results than first-position links.
To optimize for featured snippets, you should target informational intent by answering questions that show up for the keywords you're targeting. This means providing relevant, helpful, and well-organized content on your web page.
Google is most likely to pick up a featured snippet result from the top 10 pages ranking for a search query, so if you rank on page 1, there's a good chance you may earn a featured snippet. If you don't rank on page 1, you'll need to optimize your web page copy to earn your way up.
Here are some tips for optimizing for featured snippets:
- Target informational intent by answering questions related to your keywords
- Provide relevant, helpful, and well-organized content on your web page
- Use different types of HTML formatting, such as ordered and unordered lists, tables, etc.
- Make sure your content is concise and direct
By following these tips, you can increase your chances of earning a featured snippet and driving more traffic to your website.
How Common?
It's extremely rare for a Google SERP to not contain any SERP features. Only 2.68% of Google's first page results are without SERP features of any kind, according to SEMRush Sensor data.
In fact, it's uncommon to encounter a set of Google results without any SERP Features. Approximately 3 percent of Google's top 20 results lack a SERP feature listing.
The most common SERP features include Rich Snippets, which add a visual layer to an existing result, such as review stars for product ratings, Paid Results, Universal Results, and Knowledge Graph data, which appear as panels or boxes.
Here are the most common SERP features in a quick rundown:
- Rich Snippets
- Paid Results
- Universal Results
- Knowledge Graph data
These features can significantly impact your organic click-through rate (CTR).
Optimizing for Google SERP Features
To increase your chances of appearing in SERP features, you should target informational intent by answering questions that show up for whatever keywords clusters you are targeting. This means providing relevant, helpful, and well-organized content for a search query on your web page.
According to a study by Ahrefs, featured snippets get approximately 8% of all organic clicks. This highlights the importance of optimizing for SERP features, as they can significantly boost organic traffic to your website.
To optimize for SERP features, you should also use schema markup, which is a type of microdata or structured HTML code that helps search engines understand the page better. By using schema markup, you can make extracting data from your content easier for Google, which may look at sites that use schema markup preferentially to find information for the answers box.
In fact, using schema markup can help you appear in featured snippets, answer boxes, and other types of SERP features. So, make sure to use schema markup on your website, especially on your homepage, to improve your chances of appearing in SERP features.
Here are some common SERP features that you can optimize for:
- Featured snippets
- People also ask
- Related queries
- Knowledge panels
- Adwords and Shopping links
Choosing Website Plugins
Choosing the right website plugins is crucial for optimizing your website for Google SERP features.
To maximize your online presence, you need to have the right tools to optimize your web pages for SERPs and their features. Quattr is a comprehensive platform that provides users with all the data and tools they need to track and analyze their website's visibility and traffic on search engines.
Optimizing for SERP features requires a different approach than traditional SEO tactics. You need to understand the different types of SERP features and how they can benefit your business.
SERP features are most often used to answer user queries with informational intents. Since users who are in the 'awareness' stage of their buying journey aren't yet ready to buy, you'll want to focus on features that provide information and answer questions.
Some common SERP features include:
- Featured snippets: These are boxes that appear at the top of the SERP, often containing a brief answer to the user's query.
- People also ask: This feature displays a list of questions related to the user's query, along with answers from other websites.
- Related queries: This feature displays a list of other queries that are commonly typed in alongside the user's query.
- Knowledge panels: These panels provide information about a particular topic, including a brief summary, related articles, and images.
By understanding the different types of SERP features and how they can benefit your business, you can optimize your website to appear in these elements and increase your visibility in search results.
Optimize for Mobile
Optimizing for mobile devices is crucial, as 63% of organic search engine visits are done on mobile devices. This means that having a mobile-friendly website can greatly improve your chances of ranking in a featured snippet or other feature at the top of the SERP.
Using a mobile-friendly design with a responsive layout that adapts to different screen sizes is essential. This provides users with a better experience, and it's worth noting that Google wants to provide the best user experience possible on both desktop and mobile devices.
Mobile users have different behaviors and expectations than desktop users, and Google takes this into account when displaying SERP features. For example, mobile users may be more likely to use voice search, so Google may prioritize voice-based SERP features on mobile devices.
Google adjusts the layout and content of SERP features to accommodate the smaller screen size of mobile devices. This means that some SERP features may be compressed or moved around on mobile devices to fit the smaller screen size.
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Mobile devices have different technical limitations than desktop devices, such as slower internet connections or limited processing power. This requires Google to optimize SERP features for mobile devices to ensure they load quickly and don't slow down the user's browsing experience.
The Carousel on mobile displays multiple list cards from the same site, which users can swipe through to find the information they need. This feature is currently enabled for certain types of content, such as recipes, courses, restaurants, and movies.
Google SERP Feature Types
Featured snippets are a type of SERP feature that provides a short piece of text, highlighted within a box, to help answer a user's search query more efficiently and effectively.
According to a study by Ahrefs, featured snippets get approximately 8% of all organic clicks. They are typically more concise and direct, with the aim to provide quicker answers to a user's question.
Rich snippets, on the other hand, display information in addition to the page's title, URL, and meta description, providing more details on a web page to search engine users. Earning a rich snippet entry on SERPs is beneficial for businesses as it gives additional context to users for their search.
Video results are a specialized format that shows a pack or carousel of videos with a series of relevant content to answer the user's query. These only appear for certain keywords and are designed to provide users with the most relevant video content based on their search queries.
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Types of Google SERP Features
Google's search results pages are more than just a list of links. They're a treasure trove of information, with various features designed to make your search experience more efficient and effective.
Featured snippets are a type of SERP feature that provides a direct answer to a user's search query. They're essentially a box that highlights a specific section of content from a webpage.
A study by Sistrix found that the average click-through rate (CTR) for the first position in Google is 28.5%, whereas in the second position, the average CTR drops to 15.7%, and in the third position — to 11%.
Google may answer the searcher’s query in the index, particularly if the answer isn’t in the core knowledge graph, creating a class of organic results with information extracted from a target page.
Featured snippets have a higher click-through rate than regular organic results, and they can be a great opportunity for pages that already rank 1-5 for a particular search query.
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Other types of SERP features include Knowledge Panels, which provide specific information about people, places, and organizations, and Direct Answers, which provide immediate, exact answers to users without the need for them to click through to a website.
Here are some common types of Google SERP features:
- Featured Snippets
- Knowledge Panels
- Direct Answers
- Local Map Pack
- Paid SERP Features
- Related Questions
- Enriched Results
- The List
- App Pack
- Trending Videos
- Local Teaser Pack
- News Box
Each of these features has its own unique characteristics and benefits, and understanding how they work can help you optimize your website for better search engine visibility.
Mobile v/s Desktop
Google SERP features are designed to provide the best user experience possible, and they look different on mobile and desktop devices. This is because mobile screens are smaller, so Google may need to adjust the layout of the SERP features to fit the smaller screen size.
Mobile users have different behaviors and expectations than desktop users, with 63% of organic search engine visits done on mobile devices. This is why optimizing for mobile devices is crucial, especially when it comes to ranking in a featured snippet, rich snippet, or local pack.
Google takes into account technical limitations of mobile devices, such as slower internet connections or limited processing power, when designing SERP features. This ensures that they load quickly and don't slow down the user's browsing experience.
Google SERP Feature Optimization Strategies
Optimizing for SERP features requires a different approach than traditional SEO tactics. You need to understand the different types of search intents and how to target them. There are over 30 SERP features, and Google constantly runs tests and experiments, so staying up-to-date is crucial.
To optimize for SERP features, you should target informational intent by answering questions that show up for whatever keywords clusters you are targeting. The idea is to provide relevant, helpful, well-organized content for a search query on your web page.
You can optimize for featured snippets by targeting informational intent and providing high-quality content. Featured snippets occupy what is called “position zero” because they’re placed even higher in the search results than first-position links. This may result in a higher CTR for web pages earning a featured snippet.
To get a SERP feature, you need to enable your website to get to the top of the SERPs by optimizing its content using structured data and making sure it follows Google’s guidelines and demands. You should study structured data and how it works, learn how to build, test, and release your structured data, and decide which content assets on your site that you want to target SERP features with.
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Using schema markup is essential, as it will allow Google to identify semantic entities on your site and make extracting data from your content easier. Google may look at sites that use schema markup preferentially to find information for the answers box.
Long-tail keywords are beneficial for many reasons, including being more specific to each search query. This means that users often have a higher intent to take action or make a purchase, so if they find your site through long-tail keywords, they may be more likely to convert. Some Google SERP features, such as feature snippets and answer boxes, are often triggered by long-tail keywords matching the search query.
Here are some benefits of using SERP features:
- Increased organic traffic
- Boosted online presence
- Improved brand credibility
- Drive more conversions
- Appear above your competitors
- Reach your target audience
Monitoring your performance is key to success in digital marketing and SEO. You should measure success in order to stay competitive and adapt to changes. Identifying areas for improvement can help you understand which topics to focus on to outperform your competitors.
Google SERP Feature Best Practices
Optimizing for SERP features has become essential for businesses looking to improve their online visibility and drive more traffic to their websites. By following these best practices, businesses can increase their chances of appearing in SERP features and attracting more clicks from users.
To rank on page 1 on Google search results, you need to optimize your web page copy to earn your way up. Google is most likely to pick up a featured snippet result from the top 10 pages ranking for a search query. You should target informational intent by answering questions that show up for whatever keywords clusters you are targeting.
To optimize for SERP features, you should target informational intent by answering questions that show up for whatever keywords clusters you are targeting. The idea is to provide relevant, helpful, well-organized content for a search query on your web page. Different types of HTML formatting can help enrich the structure of your content, like ordered and unordered lists, tables, etc.
Consider reading: Why Are Keywords Important
Here are the most common SERP features:
- Featured Snippets
- Rich Snippets
- Local Packs
Optimizing for mobile devices is more important than ever – 63% of organic search engine visits are done on mobile devices. Ensuring your website is mobile-optimized can improve your chances of ranking in a featured snippet, rich snippet, local pack, or other feature at the top of the SERP.
Why Are They Important?
SERP features are becoming more prominent than traditional webpage listings, and they're generated based on Google's ever-changing algorithm. They provide multiple pieces of information to users, designed to respond to search queries more effectively.
According to a study by Ahrefs, featured snippets get approximately 8% of all organic clicks. This is a significant opportunity for pages that already rank 1-5 for a particular search query.
SERP features are crucial for growing businesses because they can increase brand visibility, attract new customers, and ultimately drive more traffic to their websites. Many features appear in "position zero", or at the top of the SERP, meaning brands that appear in these features benefit from increased visibility.
Google will extract content directly from the content on your web pages and display it right on top of the SERP to the user. This is why optimizing for SERP features is essential.
Here are the benefits of using SERP features:
- Increased organic traffic
- Boosted online presence
- Improved brand credibility
- Drive more conversions
- Appear above your competitors
- Reach your target audience
Optimizing Best Practices
To optimize for SERP features, follow the best practices outlined by experts. Optimizing for SERP features has become essential for businesses looking to improve their online visibility and drive more traffic to their websites.
Businesses can increase their chances of appearing in SERP features by creating great content for user search intents and expressing this intent directly in their content as explicitly as possible. Optimizing and earning a SERP Feature indicates to Google that your content is worth promoting and increases your brand awareness.
Understanding and optimizing for the different types of search intents helps you be right where your user is. SERP Features are thus a great way to give you insights into user search intents and guide your content optimization plan.
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To get a SERP feature, you need to enable your website to get to the top of the SERPs by optimizing its content using structured data and making sure it follows Google’s guidelines and demands. Study structured data and how it works, and learn how to build, test, and release your structured data.
Mark up the content on your pages using schema.org properties, and follow and apply the General Structured Data Guidelines accordingly. Run a Google Rich Results Test to check if your content is optimized for SERP features.
By following these best practices, businesses can increase their chances of appearing in SERP features and attracting more clicks from users. Having the right tools to optimize your web pages for SERPs and their features is key to gaining valuable leads for your business.
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Enhanced User Experience
The goal of a search engine is to provide users with answers to their questions – the goal of Google SERP features is to enhance this experience. Featured snippets, local packs, top stories, and more are all designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently.
This improves the user experience and increases the likelihood of users returning to your site in the future. Users are more inclined to trust your brand when they get the information they are looking for simply and clearly.
Google SERP features are essential for enhancing the user experience, and they typically rank lower than organic results, making them easier to rank for. A website must be well-optimized and encourage engagement and clicks for the business to succeed.
A study by Ahrefs found that featured snippets get approximately 8% of all organic clicks, which is a significant amount of traffic. By optimizing your content for SERP features, you can drive more traffic and engagement to your website.
Here are some benefits of using SERP features:
- Increased organic traffic
- Boosted online presence
- Improved brand credibility
- Drive more conversions
- Appear above your competitors
- Reach your target audience
By following the best practices for Google SERP features, you can improve the user experience and drive more traffic to your website.
Google SERP Feature Tools and Resources
Google's Testing Tool is a must-use for anyone looking to add rich snippets to their website. Simply copy and paste your page's source code into the tool to preview your snippets.
To enable rich snippets, you'll need to add schema markup to your pages. This can include images, ratings, and industry-specific data.
Google's Rich Results Test is a great resource for validating your code and checking the rich snippet on a live page. Just enter your URL or validate the code to see how it looks.
Sources
- https://eastsideco.com/blog/what-are-serp-search-engine-results-page-features
- https://www.link-assistant.com/news/serp-guide.html
- https://www.quattr.com/improve-discoverability/optimize-for-google-serp-features
- https://mailchimp.com/resources/serp-features/
- https://www.kanukadigital.com/2022/05/a-guide-on-google-serp-features/
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