How to increase global traffic with Answer Box optimisation - Brighton SEO Sept 2019

1. How to increase global traffic and rankings with answer box optimisation Zanna Pupele// Webcertain Group SLIDESHARE.NET/ZANNA.PUPELE
2. Featured Snippet Google Answer Box Position Zero No-Click* search results
3. Featured Snippet Google Answer Box Position Zero No-Click* search results
4. a paragraph [with an image] a table a list
5. a paragraph [with an image] a table a list
6. How many queries trigger Featured Snippets?
7. How many queries trigger Featured Snippets? Depends on the country!
8. Getting in Position Zero In some countries it’s easier than in others!
9. Compete for an existing Featured Snippet Getting in Position Zero
10. Getting in Position Zero
11. Getting in Position Zero
12. long tail keyword / search intent Getting in Position Zero
13. Creating a brand new page, answering the query Getting in Position Zero
14. Based on true story Increase traffic and rankings with answer box optimisation
15. Based on true story Increase traffic and rankings with answer box optimisation
16. 1.1 Research - Italy Query Translation Search Vol in Italy Client Ranking (Google IT) Ranked URL (Google IT) come stampare fronte retro how to print two- sided 720 41 https://www.brand.it/ufficio/latest/F49 BR-01I.pdf come stampare fronte retro pdf how to print two- sided pdf 140 30 https://www.brand.it/ufficio/latest/F49 BR-01I.pdf come stampare fronte retro mac how to print two- sided mac 90 83 https://www.brand.it/ufficio/soluzioni- software/apple-airprint/itit.html come si stampa fronte retro how to print on both sides 70 36 https://www.brand.it/ufficio/latest/F49 BR-01I.pdf come stampare fronte retro word how to print two- sided word 20 - Not ranked how to print two-sided
17. how to print two- sided H1: How to print two-sided (duplex) • 5 steps as bullet points H2: Advantages of double-sided printing • 4 bullet points H2: Brand™ duplex printers 1 paragraph – 62 words H2: Print duplex automatically 1 paragraph – 66 words H2: Duplex printing: Automatic VS Manual Paragraph – 3 bullet points – paragraph Related Articles – 4 in the carousel 2.1 Page Creation - Italy
18. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page come stampare fronte retro how to print two-sided 720 41 www.brand.it/ufficio/F49BR-01l.PDF 8 www.brand.it/ufficio/approfondimenti /come-stampare-fronte-e-retrostampare fronte e retro print two-sided x 6 how to print two-sided 3.1. What we managed to achieve ? - Italy
19. how to print two-sided 3.1. What we managed to achieve ? - Italy
20. how laser printer works Query Translation Search Vol in Italy Client Ranking (Google IT) Ranked URL (Google IT) stampante laser come funziona laser printer how it works 140 59 https://www.brand.it/ufficio/digital-printing- equipment/stampanti/itit.html come funziona stampante laser how a laser printer works 50 24 come funziona una stampante laser how a laser printer works 50 70 stampante a laser come funziona laser printer how it works 30 39 stampanti laser come funzionano laser printers how they work 20 53 stampante laser colori come funziona laser printer colors how it works 10 72 https://www.brand.it/ufficio/stampanti/stamp anti-a-colori/phaser-7100/itit.html come funzionano le stampanti laser how laser printers work 10 68 https://www.brand.it/ufficio/digital-printing- equipment/stampanti/itit.html 1.2 Research - Italy
21. 2.2 Page Creation - Italy H1: Laser printer: how does it work? • Paragraph (47 words) • 4 mini-topics as bullet points H2: Advantages of laser printing - Paragraph (77 words) • 4 bullet points H2: Which laser printer to choose? 3 paragraphs – 172 words Related Articles – 4 in the carousel how laser printer works
22. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page stampante laser come funziona laser printer how it works 140 59 www.brand.it/ufficio/digital-printing- equipment/stampanti/itit.html 3 www.brand.it/ufficio/approfondiment i/come-funziona-stampante-lasercome funziona stampante laser how works laser printer x 2 how laser printer works 3.2 What we managed to achieve ? - Italy
23. how laser printer works 3.2 What we managed to achieve ? - Italy
24. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page come stampare dal cellulare how to print from mobile phone 320 33 www.brand.it/servizi/stampa-gestiti/stampare-da- remoto 17 www.brand.it/ufficio/approfondimenti/come- stampare-cellularecome stampare cellulare how to print mobile phone x 7 how to print from mobile 3.3 What we managed to achieve ? - Italy
25. how to print from mobile 3.3 What we managed to achieve ? - Italy
26. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page was ist duplexdruck what is duplex printing 210 - not ranked 6 www.brand.de/office- produkte/einblicke/was-ist-duplexdruck duplexdruck was ist das duplex printing what is it x 8 printing two-sided 3.4 What we managed to achieve ? - Germany
27. printing two-sided 3.4 What we managed to achieve ? - Germany
28. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page vorder und rückseite drucken print double sided 140 - not ranked 7 www.brand.de/office- produkte/einblicke/vorder-und-ruckseite- drucken how to print two-sided 3.5 What we managed to achieve ? - Germany
29. how to print two-sided 3.5 What we managed to achieve ? - Germany
30. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page drucker mit handy verbinden connect printer with mobile phone 320 33 www.brand.de/printer-supplies/compatible- cartridges/dede.html 7 www.brand.de/office- produkte/einblicke/drucker-mit-handy- verbinden how to print from mobile 3.6 What we managed to achieve ? - Germany
31. how to print from mobile 3.6 What we managed to achieve ? - Germany
32. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page comment imprimer recto verso how to print double sided 720 - Not ranked 4 www.brand.fr/bureau/infos- complementaires/comment-imprimer- recto-verso how to print two-sided 3.7 What we managed to achieve ? - France
33. how to print two-sided 3.7 What we managed to achieve ? - France
34. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page imprimante wifi comment ça marche how WiFi printer works 180 57 Not ranked 3 www.brand.fr/bureau/infos- complementaires/imprimante-wifi how WiFi printer works 3.8 What we managed to achieve ? - France
35. how WiFi printer works 3.8 What we managed to achieve ? - France
36. Query Translation Search volume Ranking position Ranked page imprimer depuis un smartphone android print from an android smartphone 90 22 www.brand.fr/connectkey-mobile-apps 15 www.brand.fr/bureau/infos- complementaires/imprimer-despuis- smartphone-android how to print remotely 3.9 What we managed to achieve ? - France
37. how to print remotely 3.9 What we managed to achieve ? - France
38. What we managed to achieve? Definitely see positive results with creating new pages/content!
39. Getting in Position Zero Yes, its possible! … But its temporary
40. Question Time! zanna.pupele@webcertain.com

Editor's Notes

Hello, I am Zanna, I am working for Webcertain Group, an international digital marketing agency, as a senior account manager and team leader.
So, as a team leader, I am involved in many digital marketing projects my team is working on for different clients, operating in different countries.

Today I am going to share with you our experience of working on Featured Snippet projects, our findings, learnings and conclusions, as well as few examples, explaining why we see the featured snippet optimisation as a big opportunity to achieve some good results.
So, - why featured snippets are important? There are various school of thoughts within SEO community, about featured snippets and their usefulness, some thinking that they may negatively impact click-through rates.

However, many marketeers see featured snippets as a tool that they can use to their advantage 1) to increase brand awareness 2) drive more traffic to their webpages and 3) improve organic search rankings.
And today I am specifically going to talk about this last aspect, which is improvement in ranking, and share with you my experience.

Just want to emphasize – todays’ presentation is dedicated to the impact, which Featured Snippet optimisation efforts make to ranking, regardless of if you got into the Answer Box or not.
The classic Answer Box is providing a sufficient answer to the query, eliminating the need to look further for the info, and not offering a link to the source – like on the screenshot on this slide.
When we say Featured Snippet, we usually mean the Answer box with the link to the source – however, there is no very strict definition, - also term Position Zero is often used, ---- So in this presentation I will also use all of the names, meaning the same thing.
The Featured Snippet may be in the format of paragraph, a table, or a list.
The Featured Snippet example I could not resist sharing with you as Webcertain pops out in the Answer box has the link to the website.

This way the Featured snippet turns from no-click to the valuable asset, - which potentially may have a significantly higher CTR, comparing to even top-page organic results
– for example, in Ben Goodsell case described on Search Engine land, the CTR jumped from 2% of ordinary organic result to 8% of the Featured snippet , - with the traffic increase of 500%.

------ an interesting fact is that the image used in Featured Snippet may be taken from the different source than an actual answer – in this example the logo are taken from the actual search engines portals,
but we have seen it in another project –
In general, more and more featured results have started to appear in search results.
Featured snippets proportion [of all queries] is still very volatile - Google keeps tweaking the algorithm on a regular basis , for example in April* this year we noticed that it seemed to be some kind of algorithm update or testing, as you see on graphs on this slide.

** several researches were carried on, trying to explore some data to answer this question – “How many queries trigger the Featured Snippets?”. On average, it has been found that between 8 % and 12% of queries trigger featured snippets at this point, BUT! ….

*https://www.rankranger.com/google-serp-features
** https://featuredsnippettool.com/index/resources/
Google is actually rolling the Featured Snippets facility differently in different countries, and not simultaneously - as any other their updates, algorithms, tests, etc usually starting from the US, and then rolled out across the Globe.

Audience behaviour, marketing technics and SEM development – the combination of the factors make the proportion of queries triggering Featured Snippet fluctuate from *close to 0 (for example in Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia) to 22% in Canada, and circa 12-15% in many countries – the data is taken from Rank Ranger, by the way, if you are interested.

* https://www.rankranger.com/google-serp-features-countries
Here is my point - if you are in the International business, and wish to run the few pilots, check the markets where you could potentially get better ROI on your marketing efforts, rather than putting all your focus on UK or US, for example – of course, a bit of info digging and analysis needs to be done, but the investment into preparation work will definitely pay off!

Webcertain specialises in assisting with digital marketing the businesses, often operating in many (or at least few) countries – so we are in the good position to compare how the same ( - or similar- ) technics are performing in different regions and countries.

We noticed that UK has a lot of answer boxes triggered by many searches (Rank Ranger confirms that on average, for over 10% of queries) , and the marketing landscape is very competitive.
In other countries triggering of answer box is not as developed – yet.

I personally believe that other regions will catch up very quickly, but for the meantime we still have that window of opportunity.
“How to get the feature snippet” is a hot topic for some time now, and it’s a loads of recommendations out there, which you probably have heard of not once – and I am not going to repeat them.
I just want to share few tips from our own experience.

So, the first one - Fight for an existing answer box! its much easier to REPLACE the info with the one from your page, than to get Featured Snippet CREATED from scratch, - though you have realistic chances to do so, only if you are already rankling on the first page.
There are tools which allow you to check for which queries, triggering Featured Snippet, your website already ranks high.
and by the way, for which queries your website may already winning the Featured Snippet.
We are using Ahrefs, for example.

To have a good chance to supersede the current Featured Snippet entity, you need to rank in the position 2 to 5, so its relatively low-hanging fruit.
Investigate the existing answer box content format and style, and amend your content to (in a way) mimic the current Featured Snippet – but making your content a little bit better, - a bit more comprehensive, better structured, clearer and more engaging.
Nothing radical, you already ranking high – just a few improving touches. Perhaps, you just need to re-arrange your content from a paragraph to a table, or a list (Google likes lists)

Indeed, it depends also if the authority of the source featuring in position zero, is comparable with yours - it would be difficult to outrank WikiPedia or Forbes 
If you think, that despite an already high ranking, you hardly can move your competitor from the Position Zero, there is another trick – to explore expansion of the core keyword. Perhaps there would be some more niche terms appealing for your business?

We know from the User Intent Researches, if search engine results of the first page do not match the context in which the search query was made, users tend to ADD more keywords to specify the initial request, - without changing the core search phase.

Exactly as I did in the example I am sharing with you on this slide – ad you see, the expanded, log-tail keyword triggers another Answer Box, with the content matching more precisely my amended, clarified request – sourced from another website.

So, have a look at existing answer box entries for broader term [of the topics of your interest], expand on it ( via keyword research and search console insights, finding out if there are any long tail keywords which bring traffic to your website already ) , and try to reflect in the page content that element, which distinguish the search intent behind the long tail keyword, from the broader generic query.

Apparently, 50% of search queries are four words or longer* – and with Voice Search growing, the proportion of long tail queries is likely to increase even more.
Long tail keywords are in general are associated with higher CTR , respond very well to on-page optimisation, and better reflecting the context of the core keyword.
But what if what if there is no existing Feature Snipped being triggered at all, for the keyword of your interest? Or perhaps you are nowhere near the top 5 results for the query, which is specific for your business, and you are interested to in?

In such situations, the brand new page, created specifically with Featured Snippet in mind, may be a way forward.

Yes, I need to admit, it is a bit more costly, and time – consuming – yet can bring positive results, which I am going to share with you later on.

Before we talk about the impact made, I would like to mention -the keywords that trigger the Google Answer Box vary from language to language and country to country, so it is important to conduct language-specific research done a native speaker, relevant to the specific region,
to identify the best keywords to target, based on your industry and the competition.
Starting from last year, Webcertain had a massive increase in requests for Answer Box optimisation, probably since it has been talked about non-stop within digital marketing professional community – and armed with the tips theory knowledge, we enthusiastically ventured into the new activity.

I need to be honest, to get into Position Zero is not easy, and when we managed to do so [for our clients], we only stayed there for few weeks – BUT, by doing it, we realised long-lasting side effect, which perhaps, even overweighs the initial goal – a significant ranking improvement, and in today’s presentation I exactly would like to focus on this aspect.
Sometimes it could be disheartening, if you access your chances as quite slim, to actually get into Featured Snippet – so my point is, try anyway, your effort is likely to pay off even if you did not achieve to be shown in Answer box!
Late last year we did an Answer Box optimisation project for one of our long-term clients, a world-known provider of document management technologies, such as printers, photocopiers and multi-function peripheral devices.

Few topics/core keywords were selected for few countries, - and I prepared few slides, explaining a work done -- for a each single query, for few countries.
First, we looked into the keywords the client wanted to rank high for, with a potential to appear in Featured Snippet due to the nature of the search query (how to…)

You see different variations of the keywords on this screenshot, but ultimately its the query of same intent .

We knew it was a long shot, - the ranking is not that impressive, and the ranking pages a bit random, majority being deep-level PDFs. - so the main intention was to test how – and if! - can we influence the SERPs with Answer box optimisation.
We identified the page from the existing resources folder, but the content was so thin, that we needed to re-work it completely, so it was literally like creating the new page.
We tried to answer the question comprehensively, in the format favoured by Google.

I know the screenshot quality is a bit poorly, but its mainly to give you an idea how the page looks like.

You can see that in the very first paragraph we answer the search query, - with the heading being an exact match of that query – as a list with bullet p[points, which we know is favoured in Featured Snippets.

Then we expanded on related aspects, offering few most important comments on the topic, and link to where more comprehensive content for this subject is hosted, on our clients site.
Don’t hesitate to employ few H2 if necessary, as it helps Search Engine to understand the context.

Search engines like heading structure, and also its easier for users to read and process the information too.
The page has been published by the client, and in the few weeks we noticed quite a significant improvement in ranking, for the selected keyword.

The second query, now ranking in the position 6, is just floppy, lax way of typing the search query, omitting the element “how to”
Not only we saw an uplift in ranking, but indeed the increase in traffic – on the screenshot you can see search console data, - despite the metrics are not disclosed, you can clearly to see the trend.

One of the best things is this traffic is from non-branded terms – which often is an important task for the global brands.
The research approach is the same as in the first example.
Once again, the H1 repeats exactly the search query we are aiming to optimise for.

The content is structured in smallish chunks – this portions of content also looks good and appealing to read on mobile! – have few links incorporated and recommended further reading in the end of the page.
I am going to skip Research and Page creation stages for this example – the approach is just the same, - and jump right to the results, which the most interesting part anyway 

From the 6th page to the position 2 & 3 – its difficult to believe that in few weeks the updated page can actually perform so well!

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Once again, Search console confirms that the traffic is coming to page steadily.
Just one more, last example from Italy – only the results slide! -
Here is interesting to note, that the search query , which is incorporated in the URL name, is ranking even higher than very similar term, which is just more grammatically correct form of the same search query.

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You see, the traffic is continuously coming to the page, and only increase with the time.

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So you not think the success was specific just for an Italian market, I have few examples – only results, as the approach to research and p[age creation was the same! - from Germany. Germany is very saturated, competitive market.

Yet we were able to achieve I am not afraid to say – amazing results in regards to he ranking, from not ranking in the first 100 positions straight to the first page!

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Traffic in figures is not as impressive, but its still coming to the page, and its only one page of few we have optimised, so it does contribute to the overall traffic increase.

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Another example of jumping from not being ranked on the first 10 pages to position 7!

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And traffic confirms an advantage to be on the first page of Google!

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You can see ion this last example for Germany we again made it to the position 7.

Perhaps its just a lucky number 

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Good thing to notice is that impressions and traffic continue to grow, even after the optimisation project has been finished.

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So, I hope I have convinced you that using the Answer Box optimisation technics may improve traffic and ranking, and quite dramatically – I mean, if the usual on-page optimisation methods are exhausted, looking at the page form Answer box optimisation angle may help to boost ranking regardless if the you actually managed to get into Featured snippet or not.

We also believe that we secure the future opportunities for further optimisation, in order to make that leap and land into Featured Snippet.

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I just would like to mention one thing in the end of this presentation, – especially its important for the agencies, like us, working with the clients – any the most amazing result is temporary, unless you put the efforts in maintaining it.
I just would like to mention one thing in the end of this presentation, – especially its important for the agencies, like us, working with the clients – any the most amazing result is temporary, unless you put the efforts in maintaining it.

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