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three years ago I fell through a deck to get your attention so that I could trigger a huge opportunity for bloggers dude and now three years later we're asking the question does it still make sense to try to optimize blog content to try to win Google Snippets [Music] I'm talking about Snippets are those little pieces of content that show up at the top of a search results page where it's essentially giving you the answer there's really four types of Snippets that we can win and a couple types of Google Snippets that we can't win the four types we can win are paragraph type Snippets list Snippets table Snippets as well as video Snippets now sometimes Google will just give a rich answer snippet where they just tell you the answer and don't really credit anybody the other thing that they'll do is Knowledge Graph Snippets which are essentially just a whole bunch of information pulled from all over the web about the topic you're asking about those Snippets don't really help us but the other ones that we can win can be a huge benefit to us bloggers but in the last three years we've seen some changes with Google Snippets three years ago people thought the sky was falling Google was essentially stealing our answers putting them right there on the serp and they were just gonna take over the the whole serp basically people were afraid that Google would just show all the answers kind of like like they are about AI today today we've actually seen what seems like Google's sort of backing off of Snippets which is why we're asking that question does it make sense to keep doing this to optimize content to win those Snippets that's why we decided it was time for another study and now we've done the biggest snippet study we've ever done to find out one what's actually working today to win Snippets and two to figure out if Snippets are even relevant enough to keep trying to optimize for them now that second question is actually the easier one to answer after doing this study and that's because three years ago we were seeing that for the types of search queries that we would actually write an article for you know I'm not talking about when somebody types into Google what's 5 times 37 there's really no reason to write a blog post for that but for the actual types of Articles we would write we found that 74 of search queries had a featured snippet of some kind three years later we're finding that still 68 of those types of search queries show a featured snippet that's a little bit of a decline but you know what it's not it certainly wasn't Google completely taking over the serp but it's also a change decrease that's really small practically speaking and relatively insignificant giving the overall amount of change that's happened with Google over this same three year time period so the point is this over two-thirds of relevant search queries still feature a snippet and here's the really good news 97 of those featured Snippets are featured Snippets that we can actually win as bloggers now but before I go on to how to win these Snippets which we're going to cover here in just a minute I want to talk a little bit about a really important question which is why would we want to win Snippets at all people ask us because the assumption is if Google's just answering the question right off the bat won't people just get their answer and click away now first of all if that's true then not winning the snippet isn't actually better because if people are just going to click away because the answer is provided then anyone winning the snippet is a problem for you nobody would get the view I actually find the opposite to be true when I win the snippet I find that since my content is not only at the very top of the serp the very first thing people typically see but it's also featured it stands out the font is bigger with my logo there and then a nice link to the content that's a great way to get my content featured and to bolster my reputation I also find that the more often that I rank number one or zero as they call it when you win the snippet the better the rest of the content on my site does the more often that we rank really high on Google the more authoritative our web website is treated so when it comes to ranking on Google backlinks are great right they get more Authority for our blog posts and they get some traffic to our websites good keyword research or search analysis is really key to make sure that we're picking topics that really address actual search queries also writing good content that does a good job of addressing those search queries is just key to make sure our content ranks well and that we win Snippets but if we do all those things and we don't have any piece of that blog post that's optimized to win a snippet it's kind of like building 95 percent of that deck when you optimize your content to be able to win those Snippets it's kind of like an opportunity to jump to the front of the line even if the rest of your blog post would have ranked somewhere else on the first or second page of Google we have an opportunity now to jump right to the top and we're often seeing newer websites that would struggle to rank number one for anything actually be able to win the snippet and really boost the rest of the traffic and the rest of the content on their websites and we see newer websites able to win Snippets when they probably would struggle otherwise to get their content even on the first page of Google this actually helps to boost the rest of the content on their website like I talked about a minute ago so now let's talk about the important part which is how you actually win these Google Snippets we win the Snippets by creating answer targets answer targets are what we call specific answers specific pieces of content within our blog posts that are specifically catered and optimized to be able to be picked as a Google snippet now another cool thing we found in this study which has changed quite a bit over the last three years is that today 73 of Google featured Snippets are paragraph style Snippets so this is the most important one to make sure you get down for those of you in Project 24 we do have a full course with 15 lessons in it talking about all the different types of Snippets and how to win each one with some really really cool strategies but for this YouTube video we're going to focus on these paragraph style Snippets because that's kind of the 80 right or at least 73 percent that's going to get you uh most of the way there as you can see pair paragraph Snippets are a really short concise paragraph style answer that shows up at the top of the serp sometimes accompanied by an image but sometimes not now optimizing to win this kind of snippet is actually pretty easy however it's important that we find the right balance if we over optimize the content then the algorithm sometimes thinks that you're creating content for the algorithm and not for humans but under optimization essentially can make it so that your answer Target isn't even noticed by Google and never gets selected as a snippet so let's talk about some specific guidelines for optimizing your content now real quick in case you're new here this channel is all about how to use content to be able to drive traffic to your business if you like that kind of stuff you might want to continue checking out videos on this channel we have a ton of content to help you grow your income all right now back to the topic at hand the first principle that's really important is we have to create content that really merits showing up on the first or second page of Google if your content is of a low quality but you have a really optimized content for a snippet it's probably not going to work it did work in the past but a lot of people took advantage of this and focused a lot on writing really good answer targets but not really worrying about crafting a good article otherwise and Google caught on so make sure that your content follows the helpful content guidelines that Google's put out so that you really Merit ranking there near the top already next we want to write a concise answer to a specific search query that both answers the question but also alludes to their potentially being more information available we also want to make sure that we keep it between about 50 and 320 characters so we're not talking about a very long paragraph here we found in our study that the longest paragraph snippet was 320 characters long and that the median was 268.
So keep it somewhere around that length next we have to make the content stand alone if you start your answer paragraph with words like yes or no well the correct answer kind of depends on how the question was phrased and so yes or no requires additional context from outside your answer paragraph it's going to be really hard for Google to use that as a snippet but along those same lines we don't want to end it with keep reading for more information because that includes Google in that there's not a complete answer here we need to give a complete answer even if we're going to allude to there being some other variables that could impact the answer one way that we do this a lot is by mentioning specific factors that can impact the answer while still giving people a specific range or a common answer you know the most common one that's out there this is kind of hard without like a lot of specific examples I think I'm going to need to make another video soon that shows you a whole bunch of examples of really good Snippets that might be in the works we also don't really want to start this answer Target with pronouns like it or they that alludes to something again that we've already set up in a previous paragraph again if it has to refer to other things outside of that paragraph then it's not standalone next we want to make the answer fairly formal I normally like to write my blog post with kind of an informal neighborly tone but for these answer targets we want to make sure that it's a little bit more encyclopedic in style I don't mean that needs to be like an English essay but we do want to be a little bit more formal or at least less casual next we want to make our answer Target visually stand out but not too much in the past we used to bold this entire paragraph and that really helped right it helped readers to be able to easily identify this quick answer to their question and really we put it very almost first in the blog post with just a little bit to sort of Tee It Up now we're finding that when we bold the entire paragraph Google sees that as a potential over optimization and if they see that on all the blog posts on your website then they start to think or at least the algorithm does that you're optimizing for the search engine and not for people that's because Google can easily see those tags those bold tags and then it makes the algorithm notice that content as important what I like to do is to find sort of the one sentence of that paragraph that really is like the meatiest part of the answer right maybe not the part that gives all the caveats or that lists out the other factors that impact what the answer really should be for you but that one sentence or even that one phrase and I absolutely want to bold that I also do like to typically include this fairly early on in the blog post again still near the very beginning however it's kind of cool we found that less it's less important today than it was three years ago where your answer targets are we found Snippets that were pulled from the very end of blog posts Snippets that were pulled from just anywhere in the middle we did find though that most of them well over half came from at least the first half of the article but again I don't think that that really matters that much in terms of Google being able to select your content for a snippet and next we want to tee up the answer Target we wouldn't want to start a blog post necessarily necessarily with this answer paragraph typically what we want to do is have at least a sentence or two before it that basically make it clear the question that we're about to answer it doesn't always mean directly stating the question but sometimes you can sort of State the question not in the form of a question and make it clear what information you're about to give teeing up that answer paragraph right before the answer paragraph gives your answer Target a much higher likelihood of Google recognizing what question you're answering so they know exactly where to use it as a snippet oh there's just so much more we could talk about here about Snippets again that's why I have a whole course with 15 lessons about it but honestly there's a lot more I want to share with you about this study that we did that can help you understand where to put your Snippets what types of Snippets to use and in what situations which is why I wrote a blog post about this so I could cover some of those other details that are a little bit harder to cover here in a YouTube video I'll link to that blog post in the description and I'll pin it in a comment below and keep it up vloggers are doing awesome in fact you guys are earning more than ever as bloggers if you want to hear more about that and miss the video I encourage you to go click on it uh it's a pretty good one shows you exactly how much blog are earning today so we'll see you all next time foreign [Music]