The vanity of Google's enriched results
"[...] we're reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results and limiting How-To rich results to desktop devices"
In his article dated August 8, 2023, Google Search Central announced an upcoming change to the display of organic search results.
Rich results such as FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and How-To guides will be less visible. FAQs are expected to appear less frequently, while How-To guides will be displayed only in desktop search results. Note that, depending on screen resolution, some tablet browsers display desktop results for websites with responsive designs. But who doesn’t have a website with a responsive design in 2023?
The announcement from Google Search Central is clear: this is not a test or a hypothesis.
Table of Contents
Measure the actual impact of these new ad placements on SEO traffic.
Understanding Mobile-First Indexing in 8 Minutes
Don't neglect your desktop users.
FAQs in Google Search Console
This isn't the first time Google has rolled back some of its features.
Should we pay attention to Google's announcements?
Recommendation for Structured Data
Should we remove the structured data (microdata) from the "How-To" section?
FAQs and How-To Guides: A Popular Feature
Structured data that we implement and structured data that Google recognizes.
What does this mean for content strategies in 2024?
What Google Promises About SGE in a Video
Think of content as a service to offer.
Evergreen content is still useful (and that’s not about to change anytime soon).
Measure the actual impact of these new ad placements on SEO traffic.
Google uses what we call " mobile-first indexing." This means that web crawlers will crawl websites as if they were mobile devices and use these parameters to evaluate the relevance and performance of the websites.
That’s why it’s important to pay attention to your pages’ load times: for the user’s convenience, but also to optimize the time the crawler spends on the website. Good load times indicate a positive user experience while also facilitating the crawler’s navigation. Let’s not forget that the crawler allocates only a certain amount of time to each site—literally referred to as “crawl budget”.
Understanding Mobile-First Indexing in 8 Minutes
In the August 8 announcement from Google Search Central, the display of rich results for “How-To” queries applies specifically to mobile results. Therefore, if most of your SEO traffic comes from mobile devices, it will be worth monitoring the results over the coming weeks.
In these situations, we need to be careful not to get carried away by our enthusiasm when looking at our websites' performance!
In these charts, for example, you can see that mobile traffic accounts for the majority. However, that doesn't mean that visits from smartphones are the only ones you need to consider!
Don't neglect your desktop users!
FAQs in Google Search Console
To track a website's impressions in Google, visit the Google Search Console. In the “Performance” tab, it only takes a few clicks to sort and filter the impressions that interest you.
Filter performance by appearance in search results in Google Search Console.
Unlike market analysis tools such as SEMRush, Google Search Console provides you with an overview of your own website’s activity on the search engine.
A tool like SEMRush provides you with a breakdown of active listings based on specific search queries. Today, the tool reports that it tracks 25 billion keywords, which is why it’s so valuable for competitive analysis.
However, the tables provided do not accurately reflect what is actually happening, since an enriched result enabled for an irrelevant query is unlikely to generate much SEO traffic.
This isn't the first time Google has rolled back some of its features.
If we had to name just one, the 2010s saw the introduction of author attribution in Google search results. The author was displayed with a small image directly linked to their Google+ account. This feature not only helped highlight the author but also significantly increased click-through rates.
Naturally, the user’s eye was drawn to the face of one of their fellow human beings: a interest in photography, a dash of curiosity, and the click to the website was a done deal!
Announcement of the implementation of rel="author" in June 2011. Source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/06/authorship-markup-and-web-search
Today, even though the rel="author" attribute might be considered obsolete for SEO, Google is still far from having abandoned the idea of highlighting authors. Above all, it is far from discouraging website publishers from emphasizing that recognized experts contribute to online content. There are several ways to do this: author pages, “About” pages, online manifestos, etc.
Although the rich snippet that was once specifically dedicated to authorship no longer exists, all of the recommendations for E-E-A-T best practices are aimed at promoting relevant authors.
Even though rich snippets are evolving, the criteria for content that search engines want to highlight remain the same.
Should we pay attention to Google's announcements?
After all, why not just tell Google and its ads to take a hike? To be honest, we’d be tempted to say, “Yes, go ahead and do whatever you want.” We’ll elaborate later in this article when we discuss the impact of this announcement on content strategies in 2024.
However, while Google should in no way dictate your strategies for your projects (who to target, when to target them, how to target them, your development stages), make sure you don't create obstacles to your growth.
According to the Statista website, Google continues to hold more than 80% of the market share in France. Once again, this doesn’t mean you should ignore other search engines. But it’s clear that Google and its changes influence a website’s organic traffic. When certain sites rely heavily on organic results, the share of traffic (and therefore potential business) must be monitored.
Recommendation for Structured Data
As Martin Splitt (Developer Relations, Search & Web Ecosystem at Google (a photo of me with him)), structured data is information that is invisible to the user. It doesn’t appear directly on the web page, but it is definitely present in the source code. In a nutshell, it involves using an HTML tag to indicate the nature of a piece of information.
Implementing structured data is beneficial not only for SEO but also for many other reasons. If we define “for SEO” simply as ranking for competitive search queries, that’s undoubtedly an oversimplification. Users can search for information in many different ways and in a wide variety of situations.
Implementing structured data (and filling it out) is a best practice for documenting and enriching the content you publish online: not just to appear on the first page of Google, but also simply to create evergreen content that can be easily found even months or years later.
Should we remove the structured data (microdata) from the "How-To" section?
"It depends."
Pros and Cons
| Pros |
|---|
| Retrieving Structured Data Following a Notice from Google |
| Cons |
|---|
| Do not delete your structured data following a notification from Google. |
| Be cautious if a large proportion of SEO traffic is generated by "How-To" results on mobile. |
| Useful information has been removed from the website. |
| Other search engines and other ways of searching make structured "How-To" data useful. |
| Deployment of an additional technical resource. |
| Risk of errors and omissions. |
| A setback is possible—is that a disaster? |
| Website instability and technical risks, as with any structural change. |
Yes, rich snippets in Google's organic search results are great opportunities to drive traffic. No, let's not remove them if they take away useful information from the website.
Since the announcement also directly addresses the difference in display between mobile and desktop, let’s reiterate the recommendation for webmasters to provide identical structured data on both versions.
"Werecommend that you use the same structured data for desktop and mobile pages."
Bookmark this: Structured data markup supported by Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/search-gallery
FAQs and How-To Guides: A Popular Feature
Users are generally accustomed to asking questions and searching for information on a search engine. Voice queries (i.e., on a mobile device) are also most often phrased in natural language—that is, using complete, well-formed sentences.
Consequently, although these results will not be as prominently displayed in the coming weeks, it is still worthwhile to address these questions by creating pages dedicated to them.
WIRED's Playlist for the Autocomplete Interviews: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLibNZv5Zd0dwjZFCTVZ8QdKq194CkwXjo
Since 2016, WIRED has been conducting interviews directly inspired by Google search suggestions. These suggestions also appear, among other places, in the “People Also Asked” section. To date, they have accumulated nearly 20 million views.
Structured data that we implement and structured data that Google recognizes.
Implementing structured data in the source code of your web pages helps make the work of web crawlers and algorithms easier. This allows them to more easily identify the elements we want to highlight in our content.
Ten years ago, we were able to give Google a helping hand with a feature built into Google Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console). The Data Highlighter was a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool for literally highlighting sections of websites and assigning microdata to them. In fact, the interface for doing this is still available.
Documentation on how to mark up data in Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/data-highlighter/
Video presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrEJds3QeTw&t=1s
That said, even without any specific action on your part, Google is able to recognize certain formats.
First, let’s not forget that robots crawl websites and analyze their content. Advances in the algorithm make it clear that the search engine is fully capable of recognizing what we’re talking about in most cases. This is a key reason why entities are so interesting to work with, and why the concepts of semantic proximity developed by Babbar.Tech deserve our full attention.
"EntitySEO is the future of how search engines will determine which content to rank and how to interpret its meaning. Combine this with knowledge-based trust, and I believe that entity SEO will shape the future of SEO over the next two years."
That’s why it’s a good idea to vary the formats in which your text is written. The use of tables, bulleted lists, numbered lists, or simply the proper use of subheadings are all structural elements that make reading easier—for both the user AND the search engine.
Will featured snippets (the SEO result right below the search bar) be less visible? Don't neglect all the other rich results!
What does this mean for content strategies in 2024?
Saying that FAQs and how-to guides are a thing of the past is undoubtedly an exaggeration. Several industry professionals have also suggested that the emergence of AI-powered results was a direct cause of this decision. Why? Because limiting the number of zero-position results (results enriched with featured snippets) creates space for SGE to realize its potential.
SGE: Search Generative Experience
Here's what Google promises us in this video:
Think of content as a service to offer.
Evergreen content is still useful (and that’s not about to change anytime soon).
Evergreen content generally refers to content that is designed to remain relevant over time. The updates it requires are minimal and, for the most part, predictable. Although this type of content often generates less traffic than content directly tied to breaking news, evergreen content frequently surprises us with its longevity.
The more relevant it is, the more likely evergreen content is to:
drive traffic over the long term,
enable the user to identify the brand as a relevant resource,
enable the search engine to identify the site as a useful resource.
"GoogleSearch's helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure that people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results. This page explains more about how the system works and what you can do to evaluate and improve your content."
Conclusion
A person doesn't necessarily have to visit the same website dozens of times to decide that it's relevant. However, there's a good chance they'll remember that brand when the time comes that they need its services or products.
How-to guides and answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) aren't meant to appear as featured snippets in Google.
These are services and content formats that we develop on websites, but also in a variety of other ways.
The demonstration videos at home improvement stores are "how-to" guides, and the informational brochures at doctors' offices are FAQs.
It’s absolutely out of the question to stop thinking about your content strategy this way. Yes, every piece of content and every page represents an opportunity to drive traffic. But even if a piece of information applies to only 5% of your traffic, perhaps it interests 60% of your customers?
Now more than ever, we must remember that SEO is a fantastic acquisition channel for a project, but it by no means reflects the entirety of its business plan. Even pure-players are realizing that acquisition is merely a gateway and does not replace all the subsequent stages of a business, such as pre-sales support or after-sales service.
This is the story of the chicken and the egg in the world of content marketing.
Do we have any information we want to share?
Or should we share what people expect from us?
To generate interest and attract an initial audience, it’s a good idea to create content about what’s expected of us. But is that the reason people will come back, talk about us, and recommend us?
Create content that aligns with your project—in terms of the information and level of service you want to convey.
