State Of Search 2015: Jennifer Slegg

Jennifer Slegg at State Of Search

The following is a live blog from State Of Search. Please pardon any typos or grammar issues as we really didn’t have time for much proofing between sessions.

Jennifer Slegg at State Of Search

Jennifer Slegg form The SEM Post takes the stage to chat snippets and competing with Google in a featured snippet world.

She quotes Eric Schmidt:

“In each case we’re trying to get you direct answers to your queries because it’s quicker and less hassle than the ten blue links.”

She also brings up that it’s far easier for mobile users.

She refers to Google’s “Know & Know Simple” which deals with “what is the users intent.

KNOW queries deal with broad topics and likely no definitive answer (“do people have a soul?” for example)

KNOW SIMPLE queries are the ones that you can get snippets in.  They deal with a  very specific short answer or diagram, etc. and can be displayed in a small space (think mobile scree).  Most seen in questions that can be answered in lists or just a couple sentences.

She describes to find out if you have featured snippets:

  • open search console
  • look under your queries
  • find all queries with “who” “what” etc or implied KNOW SIMPLE queries like “daniel radcliffe’s height”
  • click the box next to the query

Tip – if you r competitor has a features snippet but no image, if you can rank and image it will appear above as their image in their snippet and drive them crazy.

If you haven’t had success with your domain you can try YouTube as this video has successfully done for the query “how to boil water”.  If you want this you must use voice in the video.

You can lose them …

Lowes had a snippet for “water heater” and their content team added a whack of duplicate content and lost the snippet and they lost their “buying guide” due to duplication and their organic came it at #3.  Be careful with content or architecture wen you have snippets (or anything else really).

As we heard earlier, you need to be on the first page to get a featured snippet.

One issue can be Panda “cures” to push up word counts.  Deleting “thin” pages that had a great answer so it appeared as a snippet.

A key is to avoid the hard sell.  She’s seeing product pages appear in featured snippets when they focus on product information rather than going with a big pitch.

  • Featured snippets don’t skew to Wikipedia, etc.

For the query “how much is the xbox one” a few snippets appear.

To the question “if you’re building pages for snippets should you just post pages with the question and answer?”  She says “no, the pages that rank have the question and answer but also followed with content.   She also notes that markup is not a factor.

Another question involves PDFs and whether that works.  Jenn has seen one as well as images but text works best.