Breaking News! Featured Snippets Are Getting an Update

Featured snippets are on everyone’s minds lately and for good reason. Did you know that these days, more than half of all searches end without any further clicks? This valuable SEO tool offers content creators like yourself new opportunities to market their work—and just as many new ways to boost SERP rankings. Ready for an update?

As with most things Google, things are ever-changing. Google’s Vice President recently announced a Featured Snippets update that’s designed to keep up with the increasing needs of a digital audience—and we mean that literally.

Google’s newest update will allow Featured Snippets to change as new information about particular topics or articles comes in.

In short, Featured Snippets will become smarter and more competitive than ever. How can you use this update—and featured snippets as an element—to boost your business’ success?

Here’s the Scoop: Relevancy Matters.

Featured Snippets already describe the information you’ve searched for. However, these snippets must be manually updated every time their applicable content changes. If not, then the snippets become outdated and may no longer provide relevant content to searchers (or proper SEO representation for your content. )

To remedy this, Google released a “highlighting” update in Q1 of this year. The update ensures that the search engine can more readily identify relevant, recent data—as opposed to data that hasn’t been updated in some time.

This constant differentiation between evergreen content and fresh content presents a few challenges, though. Google can’t only organize its SERPs by the age of the content in question. This is where the crawlers come in. This new algorithm will read through available snippet options and identify the content that will be most meaningful to searchers.

Computers Are Speaking Our Language

This leads us to another complication and intriguing development in the world of search engine crawlers. In order to identify relevant snippets, Google’s crawlers need to be able to fully understand the way humans communicate. They’ll need to comprehend basic sentence structure across all available languages, but there’s more to it than just words. This also means memes, emojis, sarcasm, and humor.

It might be some time before Google’s algorithms can write up a joke like the average Twitter user. Still, this latest updates proves that personable AI communications are in the not-too-distant future.

Tips and Tricks for Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets will now automatically refresh based upon your content updates. What kind of tricks should you use to continue ranking well on Google’s SERPs?

• Get mobile: Mobile consumption is the way of the future. If your platform and snippet aren’t mobile-compatible (40 to 60 characters long), then you’re limiting your reach.
• Break up your content: Make sure you divide your content with appropriate H2 and H3 headers. It’s a simple trick to gain a savvy technical SEO advantage—because traditional SEO isn’t going away anytime soon. You can also integrate your keywords into these headers for a double-whammy.
• Table your Topics: Tables and infographics (when appropriately compressed) provide crawlers with a quick overview of your content. These formats also allow snippets to better reflect your relevancy.
• Bullet Points: This additional level of structure, too, performs well with Google’s crawlers.

As Google evolves, so does SEO. Regularly updated featured snippets promise to keep content creation interesting, so keep up! Continue to establish your industry authority with valuable insights into your content, and you’ll master the best Featured Snippet game in no time.

Conclusion

Is your company in need of help? MV3 Marketing Agency has numerous Marketing experts ready to assist you. Contact MV3 Marketing to jump-start your business.

Image attribution: bloomicon – stock.adobe.com