 So just a couple things about my talk. I show a lot of data, a lot of screenshots, because I can't just talk about SEO. I have to show SEO. So please just do make sure you can see the screen. The other thing, this is not necessarily an SEO 101 talk. There's a lot of really great talks right after this on Google Analytics. Mickey Mellon is doing an SEO talk later. On the latest change is Google. Christine Lakin, yep, right here, is doing a talk on SEO and accessibility, which is really important. So make sure to catch the other SEO talks later as well. And there will be time for Q&A after. So the holy grail of ranking on page one, like I'm talking a big game, right? Like we're going to have to, I'm going to have to really prove myself on why this is such an important topic. But it is very specific. We're going to get a little bit tactical and a little bit technical and a lot nerdy, right? Because it's SEO. So let's go ahead and get started. I am Jenny Munn, and this topic is ranking on page one, featured snippets. And when people were asking me what I was talking about, I was like, well, featured snippets, thinking that everybody knew what that was. But I was really surprised the amount of people were like, what is a featured snippet? So that is the topic of the day. So what we're going to be discussing is the evolution of SEO and really why recent changes have kind of culminated in what we're seeing today and why things are the way they are and why this is such an important topic. We're going to be talking about featured snippets 101, the who, what, why, where, when, how, all of that information to really provide you guys with a good comprehensive overview on this. And then I give lots of case studies and examples. So hopefully none of my clients are in the room. I mean, I know they're not. But hopefully they're not because I give a lot of behind the scenes information, which I think is really important and talk about the approach that I know organizations have used or that I've used myself, which have or have not worked. So that's going to be today. There will definitely be time for Q&A again at the end if you want me to expand on any particular area because I will be talking about terms like backlinks and click-through rate and some specific data. So again, if you're lost, make sure to ask at the end as well. So just a quick note about me. Wordpress and WordCamp is very near and dear to my heart because I started out my dream 10 years ago now as a website copywriter. And when I say and I launched my business, I pretty much like hit publish on my website, my beautiful WordPress website that you see over here, which I totally like took some trademark images with the coffee cups like in the steam going. And I pretty much have the happiness bar, technical geniuses to thank because I came to my first WordCamp in 2010, I believe. And I plunked down my laptop and I was like, help me because I wasn't technical, but thank goodness for WordPress. You don't have to be. It just so gives you so much power to do wonderful things like this and to follow our dreams. So I quickly had my website up. I waited for all the business to come to me. Business does not just come to you just because you published your website, right? Which I totally thought it would. And so being an introvert, I didn't want to have to make cold calls. I didn't want to have to network and I, you do have to do that. I did end up doing that, but I also found out that what people were telling me was they Googled Atlanta Copywriter and that's how they found their copywriters. And so I figured out, and this was again eight, nine, 10 years ago, I had to get up to the top of Google in order to get more clients and avoid that up and down that many freelancers often face. So fast forward, I started teaching others how to do SEO. Today I'm a Google partner, which is for ads. I speak on behalf of AMA. I'm part of their faculty for their digital marketing conferences. And I work with clients in the K-12 education world. Okay, so enough about me. Let's get to the evolution of SEO and website traffic. And I've got four trends I want to talk about today. So back in the day, the SERPs, which stands for search engines results page, was pretty basic, right? But would you guys say that, is it a fair statement to say that SEO has changed a good amount over the years? Yeah. And this is where we get the term, the 10 little blue links, if you've ever heard that, because this was pretty cut and dry. This is what the results looked like in Google. But fast forward to today, this is a search for organic meat that was back in the day. This is the current view for what it looks like for organic meat today, okay? So pretty different. So let's explore some of these elements. If you Googled organic meat, again, depending if you were logged in, what your search history is, what websites you've clicked on, where you live, your results may or may not look somewhat like this. So the very first thing we see is one, two, three, four ads, okay? And this is one of the biggest changes over the years. People get so mad at Google, but Google is a for-profit business. The way they make money is through ads. So a couple years ago, the ads used to be kind of off to the side in the right column. Now, I think with the changes being mobile first, everything is streamlined. Google is definitely prioritizing their ads so they take up a very prominent chunk above the fold of the search engine's results page. So you see four ads. You also see Google Shopping ads as well, okay? So that takes up the whole first half. Then you see the map result and local listings underneath that, which is so interesting. And this has happened also a lot over the past year or two. I didn't type in organic meat Atlanta. I didn't type in anything geographically orienting the search, but I do think that Google is trying to interpret the intent of people and what they're looking for. This search is kind of ambiguous. So they're like, well, let's throw the map on there. I have a client ranking for organic pecans and it's his map result that comes up, which is very, you know, it's again, it's kind of strange, but I see this more and more. And a couple years ago, I stood up here and I said, the number one worst keyword you could ever try to target was the word weight loss. Okay, because you're never gonna beat out the big companies who are ranking for that keyword. And today I stand corrected because you Google weight loss and you see local Atlanta, again, based on where you are, you see local results, okay? So never say never, okay. So you see the local results, right? Very interesting. Then you drop down and you get your very first true organic little blue link listing, just one of them. And then you get the PAA, the people also ask search box, okay? And I feel like I see that feature. Do you guys see what I'm talking about? That little toggle, I can't see that, but you open one and then a couple more drop down and if you open two or three, forget it, like the accordion style takes up the whole screen, which I like that, that's pretty good. And as a side note, you should pay attention to those keywords because those are words that Google is emphasizing as good keywords you might wanna target for your topic. So you see listing number one with a pretty big meta description, right? And then you see people also ask. Then you can see the arrow, which is a little bit more than halfway down the page. That's when you finally see the listings for spots two through 10, okay? So very different. Before you even get to the website results, which is where we wanna be, you have to get through a lot of information and most people just aren't getting that far anymore. Oh, okay, let me show my video, which is super not exciting, but I also, because we're mobile first, right? I just wanted to show you guys what the same search looks like on the mobile screen. Well, it didn't like that. Okay, maybe. Okay, this was me recording my finger scrolling down. So not high tech. Basically, I just wanna show you guys a kind of mimics desktop with a few changes. There's a couple AMP articles in there. There's a feature that says stories, which is articles from health experts right there. And you can click on more stories. And it takes you to a screen with more interesting articles from health experts and organic meat debates, right? Because what's more controversial than I think this topic right now, that's not controversial, but whatever. Okay, there's a lot of opinions. And so the mobile search looks like that too. You have to get through a lot of elements before you get to the organic search results. So what this is all leading to is that the SERPs is a very diverse place to be. Besides just those features, you might see one of these other many features that are just, you know, it's what the world of SEO and Google looks like today. So depending on the type of query, if it's e-commerce, you'll see a lot more Google shopping ads. You'll see these reviews in here. If it's a local search, you'll be inundated with local map pack results also. So again, depending on what space you guys are in, you really have to understand who are the competitors who you're competing with that click for. And this is just one of the biggest changes that your website ranking on page one is not the end all be all it used to be. You might have to have more videos. You might have to optimize your images and have those more. So you just have to understand the space you're playing in and what is ranking for your keywords. So the second trend is that Google has been very forthcoming, which is a little bit unusual for Google, right? And talking about some of the things that they're focusing on and how they want marketers and webmasters and stakeholders and businesses to step it up. What they say is that people want the answers to questions and they say, you know, we've really changed from a search engine to an answer engine. People don't want trillions of webpages. And I know I sure as heck don't want to go to page two, three, four, five to get to the answer that I want. I want things a lot faster, right? We don't have time for that. So Google knows we want the answer not trillions of website pages. So all these changes and evolutions they've been making over the last few years are designed to help get people to this because Google has a lot of competition these days. I think there's a statistic out there that says that 80% of the time that we spend on our phones are spent in apps. We're not spending it on Google and we're all on our phones most of the time. I know I'm in Pinterest a lot, sometimes Instagram, definitely an audible. Like I'm not on Google searching for things. And this is kind of a fight that we're seeing going on. Every platform, everybody wants to keep people on their platform. So Amazon is taking over the world. Facebook is trying to keep people on their platform a lot longer. They're starting to roll out and publicize a jobs feature similar to LinkedIn because they're trying to keep people. Google's trying to keep people. And they know if they're not instantly providing people these answers, people are gonna leave and look elsewhere. Like I know that I go to my Facebook groups a lot to get the answers. I'm rarely in Google looking for specific things anymore. So they recognize this and they're trying to scramble to keep up with what we show that we're wanting. And one of the things they said that they're going towards is a query-less way to get information. And when I first saw this, I was like, oh, query-less? Well, it does not mean voice search, but it doesn't. What they're saying is that they wanna provide people with enough content and some comprehensive answers and some content around the topic that people can keep following the rabbit hole without having to go back to the search bar and change their search. So again, how can they get more information and more and more and more without having to type or speak something in? And I think one of the best examples of this is this search. I know it's a little hard to read. You don't have to read it necessarily, but this was a search I did for the keyword common core math because I had just gotten a new client. They are a math curriculum provider based out of Australia. So one of their target, you know, of our most important keywords is common core math. And so, of course, I was doing my SEO due diligence. I was Googling our most important keywords, trying to get an idea of do we need videos? Do we need more images? Do we need content? You know, what do we need in order to start knocking the people who are on page one off and try to get us up there? So I kind of saw this interesting result to the right. You know, you're familiar with the knowledge graph in Google's kind of box to the right, giving a bunch of information. What I saw though was this little feature here where it's almost like a people also ask accordion of other topics within common core math that you might find interesting. And when I opened it, I toggled one, you could see they were providing this snippet of information right there to the right. And I had never seen that before. So again, I don't have to, I could keep going down the rabbit hole without having to change my query and my keyword and my search and get all the information I could ever want. And this is how Google is trying to provide people with information to keep staying on their platform. And again, I'm not ever really surprised by anything. I keep seeing these weird features on my phone and in desktop and you just can't ever be surprised by these different features, but you have to be aware of them and make sure you're adjusting your strategy to meet these trends. So trend number three makes me laugh. Here's what Google came out and said last year about the search behavior today, all of us and how we search and what we want. Inpatients, immediate action, instant gratification, even some impulsiveness are just a handful of descriptors for behavior today. We are empowered and emboldened by information. We can pull our phones out and get whatever we need at the drop of a hat. And in 2019, searchers want more useful information, more personalization and more immediacy. And I kind of think that this makes us sound like little toddlers, right? We want instant gratification, we're having temper tantrums, we want what we want when we want it. What we need to think of as business owners and marketers and webmasters and stakeholders in our organization is we can't have websites that load in 11 seconds. We can't have outdated elements on our website. I have a client with so many flash player videos that don't work and has that big puzzle icon. We can't not have mobile friendly websites. You can't have copy that's not on point and vague because you can't expect people to go down the rabbit hole and go to from your homepage to your blog posts and learn all about how awesome you are. We don't have time for that and that's not what searchers want. So you have to make sure that you really understand your consumer today and you're meeting these needs with these search behaviors that we all have, like little toddlers. And then this last trend. So, zero click searches. Is anybody familiar with this, that name, zero click searches? It's relatively new. I think it was coined here by Rand Fishkin. And what this is is when the answer is displayed directly in the search results without attribution or a link to the source credit. So here's an example just of this direct answer, the zero click search you're seeing is that this client who I just had at a math company in Australia, when we meet, when we talk, we do our webcam or a screen share, I know it's gonna be seven AM or it's gonna be nine PM at night because of the time difference. They are way across the world. So when I'm proposing times, I'm always like, okay, well we just changed time zones in March. Did they change or did we just change and how does that work out? So I'm always going to Google and Googling EST versus AEST which is her Australian time zone. There's several in Australia because it's a big country and thank goodness I don't have to go to a website anymore, plug in my time because that's what I used to have to do to do the time conversion. Google tells me right then and there, Australian Eastern standard time is 14 hours and it gives me the time and I'm like okay, thank goodness, I can do this now. I don't have to click anymore which to me as a consumer, this is like glorious, right? Like I don't have time to click through and do a website converter as a marketer. It's a little bit less glorious and it's a little bit scary that answers are being provided right there. And if you can see Rand Fishkin's face, like he is super fired up about this. Rand Fishkin, if you guys don't know him, he is the founder of Moz. He is like the godfather of SEO. He is super disturbed by this and I put a couple links here. He did a really great whiteboard Friday which talks about here are some things you can do to combat this because this is a very increasing trend that we're seeing. There's a lot of zero-click searches. You don't have to click anywhere. The publisher's information was taken and put directly onto the SERPs. I also see this because in analytics, I'm always having to double check my data and my mindset. I'm like, okay, how do I measure the growth? What is the growth percentage of analytics for this keyword? And I'm always looking at number and data and I'm having to check myself to Google. How do you do growth percentage increases again? And it'll tell me right then and there. So in that instance, again, we're getting instant answers and it's pretty great from a user experience. From a marketer, it's a little bit scarier and you will see these more and more. So what does all this mean? All these new trends that we're seeing. It means that attention spans have gone down. We already know that there's been a lot of studies. Our attention span is less than that of a goldfish. Our users and our customers and our prospects have this mindset as well. There is more than ever competing with attention. I think just the changing SERPs, it's just a lot less likely. We saw that those 10 little blue links, that's all the options people have. If you were spot one or two or three, chances are pretty good and you're gonna get the click. Today, not so much. So again, a heck of a lot less clicks than ever. And that is something I've seen over the years. Clients are upset. They're like, well, our SEO traffic has gone down. And I say, well, we're still ranking on page one. The ranking hasn't changed, but people aren't coming to your website. You might have to have videos. It's going to be a longer sales cycle and you're gonna have to get your content in front of people multiple ways. Things are changing and we just have to adjust. And so what are one of those things that we can do to adjust? And that's featured snippets. So now we're gonna kind of get into the whole point of this talk and the who, what, where, why, when, how. So what is a featured snippet? This is a featured snippet. It is, at its most basic definition, an element in the SERP. It is a box that contains the answer to the query. But how this is different than my Australian Eastern Time Zone conversion is because you see the website link right there pretty prominently. So this actually provides attribution for people to click through. So there is, there's three elements. The first is you'll see a little text snippet. The second is you'll see an image and something really interesting, well, I think it's interesting, to note about this is half the time the image URL is different than the text snippet URL. So you have the text result from one website and the image pulling from a second totally different website. Both are awesome, people can click on both, but that's something that I see too. So we're gonna talk about image optimization as well. And then the third is that source attribution link. So that is featured snippet 101. And you might hear me call this position zero because I think the term featured snippet is a little bit too close to some other SEO terms that I won't say because I feel like I don't wanna confuse you guys so I'm not even gonna go there, but if you do have a question about that after, let me know. So I might call this position zero more than I call it a featured snippet, but it's the same thing. So, okay, why? Again, we kinda talked about why these are so important, but let me go a little bit more into depth about why, because I wanna convince you guys, here's some of these things that you should pay attention to. So we talked again about evolving SERPs, zero-click searches. Those reports coming out all the time, Path Interactive, which was reported by Search Engine Journal, just came out with a study that says younger audiences are more likely to skip the click. And for everything we kind of know about millennials and the younger generation who's even more instant gratification than maybe some of us, that seems a lot less likely, right? They are not gonna spend the time to go to our website if they can't quickly find the information they want. In fact, Spark Turro, which again, I'm sorry to talk so much about manfishkin, but he's awesome. This is his company, he spun off of Moz, and he did a study reported also by Search Engine Journal. I feel like I have to say that, so there's some credibility to it. 34% of all desktop searches result in no click. On mobile, 63% of users never click on results. Okay, so that's a little bit scary, right? We're working so hard to get our content found invisible and people aren't even gonna click on it, right? So that's happening. The second reason, and I'm gonna go into a little bit more about the second and third, voice search in higher than average click-through rates that come along with this featured snippet position zero. So let's get into voice search a little bit. I'm not gonna talk too much about it. Besides, it's funny, it just seems to be this like mysterious topic that nobody knows what to do with. Everybody's talking about it, nobody knows how to make it actionable. And SEOs, we're still trying to figure out what we do with these smart devices and voice search. Right now, how you optimize for voice search is getting to the top of Google and trying to get into these featured snippets. And I'll give you this specific example. So I have a client I consult with occasionally. They're called Brainscape. I went to high school with the founder Andrew and they're in New York and they're like one of these 10-year-old startups. They've been a startup for 10 years, which is probably pretty common, right? And he was saying, so they do online flashcards and they are super lucky. They've got a lot of user-generated content which is on super specific terms, a lot of long tail terms. They rank so well. They have certified flashcards, like they have a bajillion, like a backlink, like an SEO's dream of what a backlink profile looks like. And they rank for hundreds of these featured snippets. And he was all sad because his biggest competitor ranks for thousands. And so that's like first world SEO problems, right? Like he was lamenting the fact that he only ranks for hundreds of these. But again, putting it all in context. And so he was telling me that his investors think it's super impressive when he goes to do his quarterly pitch decks and he's going to them that they really do perform so well on SEO. And he says it's super impressive when he can pull out his phone and talk to it and Google reads the results. So let me see if I can mimic that and make it happen and the mic can pick it up just to show you guys exactly what we're talking about here. What is the hardest part of medical school? According to Brainscape, the board exams to become a certified medical doctor are universally regarded as one of the most difficult parts of medical school. The first exam. Okay, so that's it. But when it says according to Brainscape, like the investors are like, oh yeah, great job, you know? So that happens. I remember going to a voice search event a couple of months ago at April's Meetup, which was super awesome. You guys definitely make your way to the WordPress Meetups around town. And we had some smart devices to play with. And I said to Amazon's Alexa, I said, Alexa, what are the best plugins for WordPress? And she goes, hmm, I don't know what that is. Okay, and then I go to Google. I'm like, hey Google, what are the best plugins for WordPress? And Google's so smart. It goes, according to WPBeginner, the best plugins for WordPress are la, la, la, la. And so, you know, it's like, well, WPBeginner, a very recognized website. Like obviously they're rocking it. They probably have a lot of these featured snippets. So there is a lot of street cred that comes along with your result being the top one that's read. And the more you can do in that, as more people are doing their voice search, it has a replaced text search, but it is growing. So again, that is, it's the result that's read in voice search. That's another reason why this is so important. Okay, so this is where we get a little bit nerdy with the data. Higher than average click-through rates. So here's an example from a company I worked with. And again, maybe that's a little hard to read, but I'll explain it. They are a language advocacy organization. So what that means is, you know, everybody's all big with Steam and STEM and technology and kids need to learn. And I'm probably at the wrong conference talking about this. Like everybody has to know how to code, but this organization came to me because they're trying to balance that with learning a second language is important. There are so many jobs that come along with knowing another language. And so we need to get our message out there and help amplify and balance that with all of the Steam, STEM conversations. So I came on board, and one of the very first things I saw was they had not optimized their website in any form or fashion. And they were part of a larger association. So they had a lot of credibility coming to them because they were linked from lots of.gov websites. They had some great backlinks, okay? So that was not their problem. They just had never done foundational SEO. And a little SEO can go a long way. So when I was making a list of URLs and content to optimize, of course, homepage came first. The homepage is the most important page of your website. But soon after, they had linked to one of their core articles, which was the 10 benefits of learning a second language. So that was second on my list. So I quickly optimized that one. And pretty soon, we started to move on to page one pretty quickly. And again, the reason I mentioned why they had some good backlinks because moving to page one pretty quickly doesn't always happen if you don't have some of the right foundational SEO. For them, it did happen quickly. So we moved up to page one pretty quickly and we were hovering around the middle of page one. I remember doing their monthly analytics like a month or two later. And I was comparing month to month. And I saw that the click-through rates went through the roof for that same keyword, benefits of learning a foreign language. It jumped from an 8% click-through rate to a 25% click-through rate. And I was like, okay, wow, that's really big. We only moved up two spots. And so we moved up, we were at spot seven on page one. We bumped up to spot five, okay? So that incremental change should not have produced a 300% click-through rate. So immediately I went incognito mode and I Googled our keyword, benefits of learning a foreign language. And sure enough, I saw that we had gained the featured snippet spot, position zero. And there was no other change. So that alone was like, okay, wow, we totally jumped up. We were still halfway down. There were still other websites that organically ranked ahead of us. But because we had that spot, we got so many more clicks. And again, you think that, well, the snippet's right then and there. Why would people click through? But for a lot of searches, people do need more information. But having that spot gives people such a piece of mind that, okay, well, if Google put that there, it's an unconscious thought. If Google put that there, then that seems credible. I'm gonna click that. Yeah, question. So the snippet isn't something you can create but a core pay for. It's Google generated. That is such a great point. Did you guys hear the question? The question was, you can't pay for it. It's not like, I mean, that would be kind of cool, but not really. You can't pay for that spot. You could pay for an ad, which I don't even think the ads take up. Most of the time, they don't take the spot. No, you don't pay for it. It is programmatically, it's algorithmically calculated. And that's the other reason I didn't wanna use another word, schema. A lot of people think schema generates this and it does not. This is an algorithmic calculation, how Google decides what to emphasize. And so we are gonna talk about, well, how do you get this more? Because you can't pay for it. You can't inject code in the backend. This is something that's gotta be done through a few specific areas. You can't get it to a client to say, you know what you need is a snippet. You can't. You can't necessarily from that perspective. Yeah. Yeah, you can't guarantee it. No. Okay, so this is what we're seeing here and what we're dealing with. And I was like, this is awesome. And so just continuing on with the data. Again, maybe a little bit hard to see, but that article, it ranks for several keywords. It's got really great click-through rates, 30%, 21%, 17%, 40% click-through rate, whereas their brand, of course, has a 68 click-through rate, because that's the brand. People are searching on that organization. They're probably going to click on it, but it's up there and the clicks that they get have surpassed even their brand name clicks. And I see that a lot. When an article or a blog post or a piece of content does really well, it will surpass your brand name, which for an SEO person, that's pretty awesome. Okay, so here's a second example. I worked with an e-commerce client a couple years ago and they had already been through several SEO people. They had great SEO. What they did, they had this cosmetic product that covered up face scars. And they relied on SEO so heavily because when people had this makeup, I'm trying to think of an embarrassing topic that people don't talk about on social media. Like some embarrassing product like us women use, but we don't want to tell everybody we use it, okay? So this was one of those where people just don't, oh my gosh, I love my makeup that covers my scar from my surgery or my dog bite or an acne scar. So they didn't have a lot of people talking about it. Openly they had a lot of customers who were huge advocates, but it wasn't something where they would get a lot of word of mouth. So they did rely on SEO. They had great SEO for people looking for makeup to cover scars. And they said, okay, we're already on page one, but how can we grow from here? So when I came in, I said, okay, we're already number one for all the keywords that perfectly describe you. What we have to do is go higher up the funnel and think about what are the keywords people are using before they realize they need a makeup? Like are they, you know, and what we discovered is people Google the words cream, they Google other treatments besides they ever think of makeup because that's kind of an unusual product. So they Google gel and creams, surgeries, a lot of alternatives. So what we went and did was we created content around these other areas before people even realized that they needed a makeup. And I call this sideways SEO. So it's when you come in and you approach SEO and growth from not directly head on, they had already cornered the market and scar makeup. It's coming in from one of the other perspectives your target market has in mind and how can we now go after those and introduce people to you? So we created a ton of content around some of their competitor products. So for example, this keyword is, what is this? How to use bio oil on acne scars. We had a fantastic copywriter and I think I should point that out. Like you cannot underestimate the importance of having a really fantastic writer. So we had a great copywriter who knocked it out of the park. Bio oil for acne scars. We had so many long tail keywords start to populate in position one and you can see here, you can see our featured snippet and then how to use bio oil for acne scars is getting a 40% click through rate. Whereas before it wasn't on the board. So we very quickly kind of got into position one. This is a very long tail keyword, super specific to their niche and this started happening. You can see I blurred out the other keywords because I didn't want them to be mad at me that I was giving away all their secrets. But you can see 46, 46, 42, 41, those are very high click through rates. Okay, so here's the how of how we get into this because fortunately you can't pay for it. Google is very vocal about saying you can pay for ads all day long but you cannot pay to get organically in the top because they don't want just the big brands like Home Depot and the Coca-Cola's of the world to dominate. They truly want the companies who deserve to be there who are experts, smaller organizations in their niche to show up. So let's talk about how. There are certain conditions. Not every search is gonna produce a featured snippet and so this is kind of what you have to understand. First and foremost, you have to be a site worthy of ranking and that's why this is what I say a little bit more of an intermediate topic. If you have not done your foundational SEO, if you have never researched your keywords, if your technical side of your website is a hot mess, this should not be the first tactic that you pursue. But if you are authoritative and you do have a good niche, you have done some stuff then you should absolutely kind of start thinking about this. So identify a common question related to your area and your industry. And the type of queries that are keyword searches that usually come up with a featured snippet is the questions, okay? These are questions. They're who, what, where, when, why, which, how, best. Those are the type of keywords that they're more long tail. They have less monthly searches but they can be super valuable to your organization. Those are the ones that generally right now produce a featured snippet. Not all the time, but a lot of the time when people are asking questions, Google knows, okay, people want a quick answer, we're gonna throw up a featured snippet. Some keyword research tools. I wasn't gonna go into keyword research a whole lot but I did wanna provide you guys with some of the tools that you can use to kind of dig out and unearth some of these keywords. Answer the public is a good one. There is definitely, if you go to Answer the Public, there's a very sketchy guy on page one who, yeah, suit everybody's like, oh yeah, that guy. It's very strange but you will always remember that. You can type in your keyword and it'll produce, like it's designed to produce every single question around that specific keyword and topic that you've ever thought about. And keywordtool.io is a good one also. But here's the problem with some of these free keyword research tools. They don't give you the data. They don't say, well how to use bio oil for acne scars produce 20 searches per month versus how to apply bio oil for scars. That only produces 10 searches. So you don't get the data to help make decisions. And at some point maybe it's not as important but it generates a list of questions that people ask around your topic and then you can go and plug it into another tool but just to start wrapping your mind around this idea of questions. And I do have a second keyword tool you could pair along with that but I didn't wanna get too specific to this. Ask me at the end if you guys need more information on how to use these free tools because we all like free and I have a super awesome free tool that I use and I pair it with these. Moz Keyword Explorer. So that is free but they do make you register for an account, like obviously I'm a big Moz fan and I used to use them. If you do have a paid account it's around 99 a month I think for a certain number of sites but you can get access to their tool. You will get the search count but you just do have to have an account. And then SEM Rush is who I use now but that's premium. You can do a trial and you can do all your keyword research and export it and then cancel your credit card but if you are getting serious about SEO and it is becoming increasingly important or you manage SEO for clients at some point you should get a pretty good comprehensive tool and that's $99 a month too and that will give you of course all the monthly search count data plus more things you could ever even want to know. Okay, so tactical on page tips. So besides the right conditions for producing a featured snippet if it's not too spammy and it makes sense use the question as the URL. Now that's provided that you're the only point of that blog post is specifically to answer that question. If that question is just a small subset of a larger article maybe don't do that but if you break up the question in the URL and of course if it's not 50 words long I've seen that work before again it's not guaranteed but maybe just to really emphasize that this post answers this super specific question. Restate the question and I kind of say this is gross. Like you need to regurgitate the question like throw up the question on the page. You have to put that question onto the page physically in text. Use that question in a subhead or in a title. You might be able to just use it as part of the normal text, paragraph text but you should probably emphasize it more with a subhead. So put it there, answer the question in a succinct, clear manner and I've had to go back and do this over the years because I tried, I went against my own advice and sometimes when I'm describing something I use an analogy I try to get all clever and cute that is not gonna work for a featured snippet. You have to be clear and I always tell people what is my saying that clarity trumps cleverness every single time and that is totally this. Like Google wants clear succinct answers because that meets the user's needs featured snippet so be clear, include a relevant well optimized images on your pages. Compress your images, don't make them be huge. Upload them with keywords or a keyword phrase in the file name if it aptly describes the image. Use alt text, make sure that the copy surrounding the images is relevant to this topic because again you saw that the image was right there next to the text and you can get your images to rank. Use a natural conversational tone but bottom line easy to read and authoritative answer. And then just foundational on page SEO because again most of the results that are featured snippets are already on page one in some form or fashion. It doesn't have to be the top result. I've seen results down on page one like page seven and that's the featured snippet. So you don't have to be at the super top but you do have to generally rank well and when you rank on page one it's usually those results that get pooled somehow. So foundational on page SEO at a page level because you have to think there's things you do to your individual page or post and then there's things you need to do to your overall website. Page level, quality, valuable, unique copy. You have to choose the right keyword, select it and use it. Right, have a well-written title tag and a meta description, thoughtful subheads. Scannability in overall page content structure. Again you can't just throw up all your text and big giant paragraphs. You have to have small paragraphs. You have to use concise words. You have to use bullets or number lists. You have to break things up with subheads and if you guys have Yoast SEO. And this is why WordPress is just the best. Half of my clients do have custom CMSs which is awful and I'm always like I don't understand why I can't optimize all text on these images because they're produced from some weird database that's like 80 years old. And WordPress just makes everything so easy. So being able to be done by lay people is that the right word who aren't technical. You can structure, you can use subheads. If you use Yoast, Yoast is always yelling at me because I had too many sentences before I added a subhead. So that Yoast reminder is so fantastic when you go down that traffic light. Media optimization, again optimization. If you embed videos, you have to optimize your videos and the titles also. Like optimize as much as you can thoughtfully. Don't stuff your keywords everywhere but optimize as much as you can on a page. From a site level, again the whole site needs to be quality, valuable, useful, fast with clean code and I know the web developers and all my clients hate me because I'm always like every month what can we do to speed up our websites because it can never be fast enough. So again, this does matter. Structured data usage where it makes sense. That's schema and marking up the content in the back end so Google knows the entities and the type of content that are on your website. Having a good overall site authority does help. Good site architecture. Hopefully, or maybe if you didn't attend Bobby's awesome session yesterday on site structure make sure you do catch the video because that is very important. And then some good solid backlinks. So again, if you don't have these elements in place that's okay but just know featured snippets is not like a beginner SEO 101. Don't think that that's the very first thing you need to do when it comes to SEO. This is more of an intermediate tactic. It's not hard but I want you to get your house in order first. So who? So who can rank for all these? I wanted to go through a couple examples of the approaches I used and the different types of websites I have so you guys can kind of get an idea for yourself. Optimizing existing authoritative content. So again, this is that Australian math company. They've got math experts out the wazoo. So they had their experts write these like 80 blog posts which again is like an SEO's dream to work with such great assets as I call it. Like I love when I've got fantastic authoritative content and I only have to come in and apply a little SEO and I look like such a hero. I had, if anybody knew Brad Irof, did anybody know Brad? He passed away a couple of years ago in the WordPress community. And he was like, Jenny, you only wanna work with sites that are already awesome. And I'm like, well yeah, obviously. I come in looking like a hero and all I did was a little bit of SEO. The real attribution goes towards a good technical background and the writers. I can't say enough about having great content on your website. I just come in and do a little SEO and it goes so far. So I came in and they already had great content. I went down the list of optimizing it and right away I started noticing, okay, we're moving up to page one. This is a screenshot from SEMrush. If you see the little crowns next to the numbers that means those are featured snippets. And we won those featured snippets in position zeros. All we did was a little foundational SEO on top of authoritative content. Okay, so here's another approach we use. So here's Brainscape. Again, my friend Andrew's company. And when I asked him, okay, well, how did you get hundreds of these featured snippets? And he says that he thinks it's due to two things. The first one was technical. Again, he said, our content wasn't that good. It was written by interns. It was written by a person who was straight out of college. Again, these are very specific comprehensive topics on different flashcards. Like, why was the Civil War started? What were the three reasons that kickstarted the Civil War? I don't know. So people create these flashcards and they created this content. So not super hard to come up with, but it wasn't like a dissertation, okay? They had a ton of content that was just written about some specific topics. But he said what they did focus on was their technical SEO. So their on-page SEO, they had schema and the appropriate places on the website. They did a lot of internal linking and cross-linking their related flashcards and content to itself. They really focused on their site architecture. And he said that was their major focus. The second thing that they did, so they had the content, they said that their secret weapon was they had an email list of hundreds of thousands of people, which again is a little bit of an unfair advantage, but they worked pretty hard for that. So they had this huge email list. So what they would do, they would take these blog articles, four to eight, twice a month, and they would send them out to their hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And those people, their readers, would click on the article and then they would share them on social media. So email marketing, I think Brooke, you just wrote a blog post about that, didn't you? Yes, how email marketing does help your SEO because they amplified their content, and sure enough, then it got shared and maybe it got some backlinks, but I think more was not, and that's how he says, because the content wasn't that well written, but he had these two things going for it. So are you currently ranking for featured snippets? And let me just take a look at the time. Okay, awesome, are you ranking for featured snippets? So if you want to know, if you're like, well, where do I rank? Because I'm always checking my rankings. A free tool is Google Search Console. Who here uses Google Search Console sort of regularly? Okay, good, good. And if you don't have that, then make your way to the happiness bar and figure out how to get it. It's a free tool, it's just like Google Analytics, but it gives you more webmaster nerdy data. And if you're serious about SEO, it's non-negotiable. And it's so funny to me how 90% of the people who come to me, they just don't have it yet. So I feel like we need to do a good job of spreading this. It's really the free best way to understand how Google is thinking about and interpreting your website. So this is a screenshot from Google Search Console. And what I tell you, what I say is usually, look for higher than average click-through rates. So I remember kind of looking through, this is an older client now, but I remember looking through it and saying, okay, well, what are the click-through rates that they have? And I was like, oh, well, they're a homeschooling client. And Idaho homeschool laws has a 43% click-through rate. Like that's pretty high. So I Googled it and sure enough, they're ranking it position zero for several of these because they took the time to, they wanted to be known as the experts in homeschooling laws. So they went and created unique content for all 50 states and each state has its own URL. And most of those rank pretty well and several of them rank in position zero and they have super high click-through rates. The other thing I say to do is maybe filter by position. So you can see, okay, anything one through 10 generally is page one, 11 through 20 is page two. So this kind of gives you an idea of how your keywords you're doing, where are they ranking, and if they have a higher than average click-through rate and they're not your brand, then go Google those and see if those happen to be in position zero. So that's maybe the free way to tell. Besides, of course, you can just manually search your keywords randomly every now and again, which I absolutely encourage you to do. It's just the amount of variations people search on these days. That's what's hard. Nobody is searching the same three keywords over and over. Yeah, Josh. Quick question on your position just a second. This is organic position, yeah. And I call it position zero, but there's never like a zero. It'll never say zero. So that's something to note. Thank you. Did everybody, Josh, what was your question? Question was the position or organic or overall. Okay, his question was, is the position for organic or overall on the page? And this is just organic. Okay, so then here's a premium tool. So again, if you manage SEO on behalf of clients, if you're an agency, this is SEMrush because again, that's what I use, but every tool I think has really adapted to really showing people how featured snippets is a part of your overall world with SEO and your keywords. So again, SEMrush shows me with the little crown what keywords we have that are position zero. If you see it in the second column, you'll see I've highlighted in yellow at the bottom. That means there is a featured snippet present, but it's not us. So this is another screenshot. If I wanted to say, okay, well I want to win more featured snippets. We've already done our foundational SEO. Now I want to go after and get more of those clicks because I already know they generate a very high click through rate. So there's a report. If you go over to position tracking again, this is SEMrush, but you could figure it out in any tool you use. It'll tell you the keyword and it'll tell you which website is ranking if it's not you, which I think is pretty awesome because that kind of helps you do more competitor analysis. So again, at some point, when you get past the beginner phases of optimizing your website, you're going to want to start targeting your competitors and figuring out what they're doing right so that you can take over their spots. Okay, so here's a free tool that I definitely want to tell you guys about. If you're not using it now, Moz bar from Moz. It's a Chrome extension. And it's one of my favorite because when you install it, you toggle it on. If you go to any website page, you push the Moz bar button and it'll tell you what is the title tag? What is the meta description? What is the page load time? What is the canonical? It'll tell you just, oh, that's great information. It'll help you highlight your internal links on a page. It gives you a lot of great information on a website page, on the SERPs, what it does. Let me show you what it does in the next slide. But talking about how here's how I pursue competitors and go after their featured snippets. So we saw previously that we are not ranking, where is it? Number one, Rigger in Math. Okay, gets about 140 searches per month. And here's this URL over here, coursestandards.org, that is ranking in that place that I want to be. So I go Google Rigger in Math because I want to do a little bit of on SERPs analysis. And first and foremost, you see, okay, there's the website. Number one, you see coursestandards.org. But number two, that's our image in there. So we already won the image. It should be relatively easy to take over the text snippet also, right? So I use Moz bar and I took a look. What Moz bar does, do you guys see that gray bar that's highlighted there? It'll tell you for every website listing in the SERPs, it'll tell you what is the page authority and what is the domain authority and how many links are coming in to that specific page. And this helps me understand, okay, do we have a realistic chance of outranking this website and taking over? Is this something that I should really spend time pursuing? And again, that's a little bit technical, but when I did take a look, okay, let's see, our result, our page authority was 21. Coursestandards.org has a 52 page authority, which is a very huge jump. And the reason is it's because they are the governing body behind Common Core. And so it's gonna be very hard to beat them out. They have a thousand backlinks going to that page where we have zero. And so that might be a result that I should probably let go and move on to the next keyword because they may be pretty hard to beat out for that featured snippet. Maybe not impossible, but I'm gonna go after some easier targets in the meanwhile. Okay, so that kind of wraps up. Like, are you guys so impressed that I finished on time? Yes? Okay, Q&A. My slides are there and I will definitely put them out on the Twitter handle as well. So thank you all so much for getting up early this morning. Did we have time for questions, Bobby? Are you pointing at me? Okay. Oh, okay. Does anybody have any questions? Okay, hold on. Yeah. Okay, so good question. So his question was schema. I touched on schema a little bit. Does it play a role at all? And why I didn't want to confuse the word schema is because sometimes you refer when you do schema and add structure data, it produces what's called rich snippets. And the word rich snippets is so close to featured snippets. I was like, oh, I'm not even going there because I know I'm gonna mess up and keep calling these rich snippets. Rich snippets are produced. Like, if you guys Google a product and you see star ratings, sometimes you'll see if it's in stock, you'll see the price, you'll see if there's any reviews. Having structure data on your website is good because it helps Google understand but it still is not the thing. It's good from an overall website SEO perspective and it might help contribute but it's very indirect. It's definitely not a direct correlation. Yeah, Josh, did you have a question? Yeah. One more, okay, one more question. Josh, yeah. When Google made the change three years ago, they added that fourth paid slot. It was both a sort of pain for me as a Google ads expert. How did you guys in SEO respond to that because it pushed everything lower on the page and how did you sort of qualify that with your clients and how do you still keep up with that change because it's still affecting everybody in search, paid and organic today still? Yeah, that's a good question. So how do we keep up with the fact that ads are so prominent? We have to have a lot of content everywhere and we have to educate. It's just a longer sales cycle and so sometimes I will tell them, go ahead and bid in PPC but not always. So it just depends on what the results are. We can talk maybe more. That's a good question. I'm sorry, thank you guys so much. I'll be hanging around a little bit. Thank you all, have a great word camp today.