Mozcon 2016: Rob Bucci

DISCLAIMER: This post is written as a live blog from Mozcon. There may be typos and grammar to make my high school English teachers weep. Please excuse those … it’s a fast-paced conference with back-to-back sessions and no time for proofing or even proper writing.

On stage now is Rob Bucci of STAT Search Analytics to discuss a subject we should all care about - how to get featured snippets. He begins with opportunities:

• Getting a featured snippit increases conversions.  They trust that Google has chosen you.

To set the lay of the land, after crawling 1,000,000 keywords there was a jump from 9% to 15% of all queries had a featured snippet.  Conversions from them almost doubled as well. Snippet types:

• Paragraph snippets are the dominant snippet but declined to 63% from January to July
• Lists appear 19%
• Tables appear 16%

The format of the content determines the featured snippet.  Images appear on all types but not all snippets. Wikipedia owns 15% of all snippets with images. Universal Results: Places - 13% Video - 11% Images - 13% News - 3% Shopping - 1% You never see Places and featured snippets at the same time.  This is likely due to intent (snippets are for info, places are for intent).  Local SEOs don't get a lot of snippets.   People Also Asked boxed give an opportunity to users to tweak their query.  You can thus use this to inspire content and map out query space. Keywords Matter Snippets only show when Google believes you are searching as a query term. The frequency of snippets also differs by sector.  In health, finances, health and DIY have an over 50% chance of including a snippet. In January there was and under 1% snippet for subjective queries (things like "best" and "review") which is now at 18%.  Snippets are expanding. Snippets are in flux Google has gotten pretty good at determining the best format BUT they will pick the best available choice meaning that there is a lot of opportunity for those producing great answers.  This is ideal in sectors like finance. Tip - look for weak snippets and produce great content in the format Google wants. What about other snippet types? "How" queries are not consistent in that each query has a different intent. Tip - Research the features snippets in each query space and format your content to match. Tip - If you see a snippet in the US but not in your country (if you're from outside the US) this is an opportunity.  Design content around the snippet type that's winning or that makes sense and be there when they're looking for you. He asserts that featured snippets aren't going anywhere. He reminds us that we need tools to track this.