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 of August 8, 2023Google Search Central announced a forthcoming display change in the search engine's organic results.
Enriched FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and How-To results will be less visible. FAQ results should appear less frequently, while How-To results will be reserved for desktop results. It should be noted that, depending on screen resolution, some tablet browsers display desktop results for websites with a responsive design. But who doesn't have a website with a responsive design in 2023?
Google Search Central's announcement is frank: this is not a test or a hypothesis.
Contents
Measure the real influence of these new displays on SEO traffic.
Understanding Mobile-First Indexing in 8 minutes
Don't neglect your desktop users.
FAQs in Google Search Console
This is not the first time that Google has gone back on its functionality.
Do we need to pay attention to Google's announcement ?
Recommendation for structured data
Should structured data (microdata) be removed from How-To?
FAQ and How-To questions, a popular feature
Structured data that we install and that Google recognizes.
What does this mean for content strategies in 2024?
Google's EMS promise in video
Think of content as a service to be offered.
Evergreen content still has its uses (and there's no end in sight).
Measure the real influence of these new displays on SEO traffic.
Google implements what we call Mobile-First indexing. This means that bots will crawl websites as if they were mobile devices, and use these parameters to assess website relevance and performance.
That's why it's a good idea to pay attention to page load times: for comfort, but also to optimize the time spent by the robot on the website. Good loading times are indicative of a pleasant experience for the user, while at the same time favoring the robot's path. Let's not forget that the crawler allocates a certain amount of time only to each site, literally called the "crawl budget". "crawl budget.
Understanding Mobile-First Indexing in 8 minutes
In the August 8 announcement from Google Search Central, the display of enriched How-To results relates specifically to mobile results. So, if your SEO traffic happens to be predominantly from mobile devices, a follow-up of the results over the coming weeks will be interesting.
In these situations, we have to beware of the over-enthusiasm we can feel when observing the performance of our sites!
On these graphs, for example, you can see that mobile traffic is in the majority. However, this doesn't mean that visits from smartphones are the only ones to be taken into account!
Don't let your desktop users down!
FAQs in Google Search Console
To keep track of how your website is displayed in Google, consult the Google Search Console. In the "Performance" tab, it takes just a few clicks to sort and filter the views you're interested in.
Filter performance by appearance in search results in Google Search Console.
Unlike market analysis tools such as SEMRushGoogle Search Console gives you an overview of your own website's activity on the search engine.
A tool like SEMRush provides you with a record of the displays activated according to specific queries. Today, the tool advertises the fact that it tracks 25 billion keywords, hence its interest in competitive research.
But the tables provided don't represent what's really going on, since an enriched result activated for an uninteresting query is unlikely to bring in much SEO traffic.
This is not the first time that Google has gone back on its functionality.
If we had to name just one, the 2010s saw the advent of the authorship display in Google results. Authors were displayed with a small image directly linked to their Google+ account. On the one hand, this feature enhanced the value of an author, while on the other, it significantly increased click-through rates.
Naturally, the user's eye was drawn to the face of one of its human counterparts: an interest in photography, a dose of curiosity and the click to the website was on!
Rel="author" announced for June 2011. Source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/06/authorship-markup-and-web-search
Today, even if rel="author" could be considered obsolete for SEO purposes, Google is still far from having abandoned the idea of valuing authors. Above all, it's a long way from not encouraging website publishers to highlight the fact that expert, recognized individuals contribute to online content. This can be done in a number of ways: author pages, about pages, online manifests, etc.
Although the enriched display that was once specifically dedicated to authorship no longer exists, all the recommendations in favor of good E-E-A-T practices follow the desire to favor relevant authors.
Even if rich snippets are evolving, the definition of content that the search engine wants to value remains the same.
Do we need to pay attention to Google's announcement ?
After all, why not give Google and its announcement a run for their money? The truth is, we're inclined to say "yes", do as you please. We'll argue the point later in this article when we discuss the influence of this announcement for 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're not creating obstacles to your growth.
According to the Statista websiteGoogle continues to hold over 80% of market share in France. Again, this doesn't mean we should abandon other search engines. But it is clear that Google and its changes influence a website's organic traffic. When certain sites are heavily dependent on natural results, the share of traffic (and therefore potential business) needs to 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 is actually 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 good for SEO, but also for many other reasons. If we define "for SEO" as ranking on competitive queries, that's probably reductive. Users can search for information in many different ways and in many different situations.
Implementing structured data (and filling it in) is a good practice for documenting and enriching the content you put online: not just for the sake of appearing on Google's 1st page, but also quite simply to promote long-lasting content that can be easily found even months or years later.
Should structured data (microdata) be removed from How-To?
"It depends.
For and against
| Pros |
|---|
| Withdrawing structured data following a Google communication |
| Cons |
|---|
| Do not remove your structured data following a communication from Google. |
| Precaution if a large proportion of SEO traffic is generated by How-To results on mobile. |
| Useful information is removed from the website. |
| Other search engines and other ways of searching make structured How-To data useful. |
| Mobilization of additional technical resources. |
| Risk of error and oversight. |
| Regression is possible, but is it a catastrophe? |
| Website instability and technical risks as with every structural change. |
Yes, enhanced displays in Google's natural results are great traffic opportunities. No, let's not remove them if they take away useful information from the website.
As the ad also directly addresses the difference in display between mobile and desktop, we remind webmasters of the recommendation to provide identical structured data on both versions.
" We suggest that you keep the same structured data for desktop and mobile pages. "
À bookmarker : Structured data markup that Google Search supports : https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/search-gallery
FAQ and How-To questions, a popular feature
Users are largely accustomed to asking questions and getting information from a search engine. Voice queries (i.e. on a mobile terminal) are also most often formulated in natural language, i.e. with complete, well-formulated sentences.
As a result, although these results may not be as attractively displayed in the weeks to come, it remains worthwhile to answer these questions by creating pages dedicated to them.
WIRED playlist for Autocomplete Interviews : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLibNZv5Zd0dwjZFCTVZ8QdKq194CkwXjo
Since 2016, WIRED has been producing interviews directly inspired by searches suggested by Google. Among other things, these suggestions also appear in PAAs (People Also Asked). Today, they have accumulated nearly 20 million views.
Structured data that we install and that Google recognizes.
Implementing structured data in the source code of your pages is a useful way of facilitating the work of robots and algorithms. This makes it easier for them to identify the elements we wish to enhance in our content.
10 years ago now, we could give Google a helping hand with a feature integrated into Google Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console). The data highlighter was a Wysywig (What you see is what you get) version of literally highlighting pieces of site and assigning microdata to them. By the way, the interface for this is still accessible.
Documentation for tagging 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, Google is able to recognize certain formats.
On the one hand, let's not forget that robots crawl sites and analyze their content. Algorithm advances make it obvious that the search engine is quite capable of recognizing what we're talking about in most cases. This is one of the reasons why entities are so interesting to process, and why the notions of semantic proximity developed by Babbar.Tech should be given our full attention.
" Entity SEO is the future of where search engines are headed with regard to choosing what content to rank and determining its meaning. Combine this with knowledge-based trust, and I believe that entity SEO will be the future of how SEO is done in the next two years. "
That's why it's worth taking care to vary the formats in which texts are written. The use of tables, bulleted lists, ordered lists or simply the right use of headings are all structural elements that make reading easier... for the user AND the robot.
Will featured snippets (SEO position just after the search bar) be less visible? Don't forget all the other enriched results!
What does this mean for content strategies in 2024?
The end of FAQs and How-to's is undoubtedly an exaggeration. Many industry professionals have also suspected the advent of AI-powered results as a direct cause of this decision. Why? Because by limiting the number of zero position displays (featured snippet enriched results), it creates space for SGE to unfold its potential.
SGE: Search Generative Experience
What Google promises in video :
Think of content as a service to be offered.
Evergreen content still has its uses (and there's no end in sight).
Evergreen content broadly refers to cold content that is designed to avoid obsolescence. Updates are minimal and mostly predictable. Even if this type of content often performs less spectacularly in terms of traffic than one directly linked to a hot news item, evergreen content often surprises us with its longevity.
The more relevant it is, the more likely evergreen content is to :
bring in long-term traffic,
enable the user to identify the brand as a relevant resource,
allow the search engine to identify the site as a useful resource.
"Google Search's helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure 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 assess and improve your content. "
Conclusion
A person doesn't necessarily need to visit the same website dozens of times to realize that it's relevant. However, there's a good chance they'll remember that brand the day they need its services or products.
Guides (How-To) and answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) were not born to be featured snippets in Google.
These are services and content formats that are developed on websites, but also in many other ways.
Demonstration videos in DIY stores are How-To, and awareness-raising leaflets in doctors' surgeries are FAQ.
It's absolutely out of the question to stop thinking about your content strategy in this way. Yes, every piece of content and every page represents a traffic opportunity. But even if a piece of information only concerns 5% of your traffic, perhaps it's of interest to 60% of your customers?
Let's remember more than ever that SEO is a magnificent acquisition channel for a project, but that it is by no means the reflection of its entire business plan. Even pure players realize that acquisition is only a gateway, and that it's no substitute for all the subsequent stages of a business, such as pre-sales support and after-sales service.
This is the chicken-and-egg story of content marketing.
Do we have any information to pass on?
Or should we write content about what people want from us?
To create information and attract an initial audience, it's a good idea to create content about what's expected of us. But is it for this content that people will come back, talk about us and recommend us?
Create the content that matches your project: the information and level of service you want to convey.
