Having a coveted position for certain keywords in search can lead to great opportunities for your business. But what does it take to get there and how long is the process?
Karen Bone for Search Engine Land (part 1):
We’ve been using Siri as an integrated personal assistant since the iPhone 4S launched in October 2011, so voice search isn’t exactly new. But the interest in how it provides answers has become a new hot topic.
We know the assistants are pulling many of those voice-based search responses from featured snippets or “position 0” in the search results.
Both Bing and Google have talked about further developing featured snippets for more comprehensive responses. As a result, we’ll see more testing, volatility and opportunity for these search results in 2018.
This creates an even bigger, two-fold incentive to have our content shown in a featured snippet:
- You’ll end up being the single voice-based search response.
- You’ll rank at the top of the search engine results page on desktop and mobile in the coveted position 0.
As great as all of this may sound, you should do some important research and analysis before looking to capitalize on these opportunities.
For example, when users receive the featured snippet response, how much traffic will actually be driven to your website if the users now have their answer?
And then there’s the question of whether it’s worth bothering with forecasting at all if we know position 0 and voice search are the “next big thing.”
If you need to make adjustments to your site to capture those voice searches — whether it’s new page template updates or entirely new content — you’ll likely need a forecast to justify the expense.
You won’t know the full extent of those potential changes until you’ve gathered the data and analyzed it for the opportunity.
- Gather data from the site.
- Analyze the data.
- Identify your target keywords.
- Do competitor analysis.
- Take action — What do you need to change?
Increasingly, businesses are looking to leverage the voice-based search trend and target position zero. However, just because it’s trending doesn’t mean it’s the most valuable opportunity for your business. In theory, each player in a space wants to command that coveted ‘position 0’ for search, but that doesn’t mean they can. In the follow-up article, Karen reviews the process of the featured snippet and what it may take to achieve it.
Karen Bone for Search Engine Land (part 2):
There are two primary reasons for targeting the coveted position zero (0), also known as the featured snippet:
- To sit at the top of the search engine results page.
- To capture queries within voice-based search results.
When your goal is to be number one in the search results, you’ll need a strategy to achieve a featured snippet of your page’s content. This requires in-depth research and analysis of the opportunity, including investigating your competitors and knowing which keywords to target.
In my previous article, I covered the five steps you should take when developing this particular strategy. But with a project of this size and the presumed resources needed to execute it, chances are you’ll need to justify its importance to your team and, more importantly, to your client.
What’s the best way to do that? Provide a thorough forecast that demonstrates an increase in the conversion rate or dollar value. In this article, I’ll explain exactly how you can calculate a forecast for achieving a featured snippet.
Click-through rate of ‘position 0’
In a 2017 article titled “Another Study Shows how featured snippets steal significant traffic from the top organic results,” author Barry Schwartz implied that “position 0” may get about an 8.6 percent click-through rate (CTR).
However, that number depends heavily on a number of factors, including whether the snippet content satisfied the search query if only a portion of an answer was featured, or if a video was offered for viewing.
Between a number of articles and other assumptions we’ve seen, it’s clear we haven’t really pinned “position 0” to the organic click-curve rates on page one search results.
Assumptions and forecasting
When calculating a forecast, you’ll need some key metrics:
- Keyword search volumes.
- The CTR for the target ranking position.
- Your landing page conversion rates from organic traffic.
- If you have an e-commerce site, I recommend including your average order value as well to generate a total revenue forecast.
When creating a forecast on target organic positions, the team at Ayima (my company) strongly suggests generating your own click-curve rates if you have enough data, rather than using the generic numbers. This will provide a more accurate, industry-specific result while taking into consideration other features on the search engine results pages (SERPs) such as paid ads, maps and knowledge panels.
Of course, “position 0” isn’t visible within today’s click-curve, so we have to generate our own CTR based on specific considerations:
- Keep your forecast conservative relative to your queries and industry.
- Don’t use a “position 1” CTR for your forecast on “position 0.” They are close but very different.
- What is the user’s intent based on the search query?
- How likely is it that they’ll convert at this stage of your conversion funnel?
- Is the query highly competitive, and does it have a higher monthly search volume than most long-tail keywords?
We use a conservative 1 percent CTR, rather than something closer to 15-20 percent in our forecasts because we believe there are too many variables to suggest otherwise at this time. That could change when Google Search Console starts providing CTR data for keywords ranked in “position 0.”
According part two of the article, by comparing your forecast to the potential cost of resources, you’ll get a better idea of whether it’s worth pursuing featured snippets for your website. For many small businesses, factors depend on your geographic target area, local area competitors, and potential audience within that area.
