Google is always evolving.
Tweaks to the algorithm and changes to how search results are presented are often lamented by frustrated marketers, but these evolutions can also present valuable new opportunities for making content visible to searchers.
Today’s SERPs are a far cry from the humble list of ten results and handful of sponsored links[1] that Google started out with.
In an effort to help searchers find their information faster – and with less clicking and scrolling – Google is incorporating a wider range of rich features[2] into its results pages.
I want to use this post to take a look at some of these features.
How can we ensure our content is best suited to Google’s ever-more intuitive results pages? And how can we make it stand out there?
1. Google’s Answer Features
Answer boxes[3] are increasingly being used by Google in an effort to provide searchers with answers to their questions, even without the need for clicking through to a site.
This can be annoying for marketers who have traditionally been working to optimize their content to garner clicks from Google. The more the SERPs provide answers to an increasing number of questions, the harder it will become to persuade searchers to click through.
This is all the more reason to start understanding how Google seeks to answer.
Searching around the term ‘doulas’ highlights how intuitive Google is at knowing what questions to answer (even if just a single word is searched for). Also, we can quickly see the diversity of answer boxes displayed from very subtle differences between search phrases.
Looking at the phrase ‘doulas,’ even though we haven’t