When most people think of “content,” blog posts are usually the first thing that comes to mind, followed perhaps by ebooks, webinars, and other content pieces available to website visitors. But some of the most important content isn’t readable on your website: it’s the SEO content that gets traffic to your website.
Of course, one of the main goals of SEO has always been to capture the first search engine results page (SERP) to drive traffic to your website. But in recent years, it’s gotten tougher to do so, as search engines have “reorganized” their front pages to show different types of content.
Furthermore, Google in particular has pushed as much of its own content (from its extensive databases) as possible to the front page, sometimes knocking organic listings off page 1 (or several scrolls down on a mobile device) altogether.
So your SEO team has to be smart about capturing as much space as possible on the first page of the SERPs. That means consistent, strategic use of SEO content to entice new visitors to your website.
These highlighted boxes are considered “position zero” in SEO, in that they’re even higher than ranking first in organic listings. Snippets can include paragraphs, numbered or bulleted lists, tables, and guides to more content, such as “People also ask.”
The most important thing to note about Featured Snippets is that they focus on answers to specific questions. Thus, the best way to capture Featured Snippets is to ensure that your on-page content answers questions from your customers or prospects succinctly and well.
This mini-dossier appears in the top right column of the SERP, usually for brand searches. For recognizable companies and brands, this info is filled in by Google, so there’s not much you can do to capture this spot.
However, if your company is less well known or relatively new, you can directly influence the information that appears in the Knowledge Graph. First, claim and verify your company on Google My Business. Then optimize your listing:
Not only are videos and images often given their own space on the first page of SERPs, text from image and video descriptions can also land in featured snippet paragraphs, doubling the visibility of the result.
But first, relevant, informative descriptions must be there for your images and video. Image and video descriptions are one source of SEO content that often gets ignored, likely because images are considered “nice to have,” whereas text content is “have to have.”
Rich SEO content for images and videos means that:
Obviously, this SERP space applies to local searches, but if your company serves a local audience, it’s a good place to be. Only the top 3 listings show in the local pack, and their positioning is largely determined by volume of reviews and average review score.
The same optimization principles for Google My Business listings apply here, because that’s where the info for Local ranking comes from. However, reviews are the most important type of SEO content here, as there are only 3 spots available.
To increase your chances of appearing in the 3-pack, monitor your company’s reviews, respond quickly to them, and do what you can to right any wrongs cited in reviews. Also, ask happy customers to write your company a review on Google. Reviews are somewhat out of your control, but you can take steps to improve them over time.
Finally, at the bottom of the SERP, are the listings that have been a cornerstone of SEO content since the beginning. Just because these results appear lower on the page than “packaged” results such as Featured Snippets doesn’t mean they’ve diminished in importance.
Remember, the snippets don’t appear for every search query, and they don’t all appear for the vast majority of queries. As of 2017, research by Ahrefs indicated that only about 12.3% of all search queries had results that included a Featured Snippet. While that proportion has surely increased since then, it’s still under 50%.
So your organic listings are still one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website, and optimizing them is still essential. Meta content seems so basic that it’s taken as a given, but sometimes the basics can have the most impact.
A client in the educational space was missing out on organic traffic because their meta content wasn’t optimized:
Their average CTR for organic queries was 3.36%.
After one month of implementing SEO content best practices, all their meta content was optimized:
Two months later, the site’s average click-through rate for its organic keywords was 4.90%, a gain of 37.5% in just 90 days. Because organic visibility had improved during those 90 days as well, the total impressions for those pages increased by 39.5%. As a result, average monthly traffic had more than doubled.
So be sure to make SEO content part of your team’s overall content strategy. If you’d like to learn more about content strategy, or just discuss how SEO content fits into it, let’s talk about your content, your traffic, and your website.
Once you’ve attracted visitors to your site, show them why your solutions are best for them with mid-funnel marketing content. Learn how here.
Content that converts is crucial to the bottom of the marketing funnel. Learn how to create effective content for this stage.
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