The all-powerful prefix "Is": a case for using the magic snippet
All author's thoughts expressed in this publication are personal (and hypnosis is not possible here) and do not necessarily coincide with the position of the Mos.
I am far from a brilliant knowledge of world literature, but it seems to me that it is the Prince of Denmark named hamlet who is credited with this saying: "to have a distinctive fragment or not to have a distinctive fragment?"
It was from the moment of the appearance of these fragments before the General public that sites began to protect them in every possible way.
I and my associates were not averse to taking part in this Bedlam. And for the entire period, how long our tests, searches, victories and disappointments lasted, we managed to find a couple of interesting information points that we felt it necessary to share with humanity. I will show you all the way we have traveled, show you our achievements (although I do not have the ability to show traffic numbers).
I would like to note that two things prompted me to present our achievements:
the issue featured snippets cheat sheet;
thematic webinar Feature Snippet Essentials by Britney Mueller.
So, what are the recommended fragments? In fact, this is nothing more than the area localized at the top of the search results page. It allows you to respond laconically and as accurately as possible to user requests. And it can also cite the site.
What is the importance of recommended fragments?
The importance of the demonstrated piece of source code is important because it is an additional SERP function that can be secured.
As a rule, the recommended fragment based at the top of the search results page allows you to ensure maximum visibility in search engines and significantly increases the popularity of brands.
Our recommended fragment of the plan of attack
We explore, explore, and again explore the best ways to achieve goals.
Make a selection of keywords to focus on. Change the layout of the content on the landing page.
Run tests and measurements, and then repeat this path again.
Explore, explore, and explore again
To be honest, we spent a lot of time researching the recommended fragments. We have considered a lot of different methods of searching for distinctive features of snippets. In addition, we monitored ways to optimize existing and new content for them. In addition, we took into account the opinion of Kelly Gibson about the signs of volatility of fragments.
Were we able to achieve all our goals based on new knowledge in this new period of discovery while building our new fragment tactics? Not at all. We know this business thoroughly, having devoted more than one and a half years of practical activity to it? "Three times no! However, we continuously continue to grow and develop in this direction.
Select keywords that will become goals
We set our sights on the big head keywords at the start. In fact, they were terms with vague goals for searching users. And the first presidential term that came under our sights was Hrys. This is nothing more than a personnel information system-sexy, right?
Note: with an eye on the experience gained, I would like to focus more on long tail keywords during testing of this strategy.
Probably, this process could be optimized by speeding up, by removing attention to long tail keywords, rather than huge head concepts.
Updating the content on the page
We worked closely with our team of authors to update the content published on our blog pages as soon as possible.
In addition, the concept of using H2s And H3s has been changed (we actually started using Them only now!), using lists, etc. in order to facilitate the perception of content on pages for both users and search bots.
Most of the publications that we try to rank based on the features of the fragment, we have H2 expressed by the question. Well, the next line after H2 we try to give an answer to the question. Empirically, we realized that this strategy is quite successful (see the screenshots below in the publication). I would like to note that we came to this conclusion not immediately, but after some time.
Measurements, experiments, repeats
The first post on the blog pages that was tested was a publication called "What is HRIS". In General, this article was a success, it got a place for the main term that was planned (HRIS), but we did not manage to win the shown fragment. We took it as a small fiasco and continued working.
And from that moment, interesting moments began.
Demonstration of a successful fragment
It was established shows a portion of a trigger that could pay dividends. And chance helped us in this. And what did it turn out to be?
Constitute.
Indeed. That's about it. Just by providing this to some of our publications, we started to select the recommended fragments. We began to perform these manipulations with all blog posts and received an increase in recommended fragments every minute! And I believe it was this classic HR situation that gave us the key to the "is" trigger.
So we kept it up.
The demonstrated episode won for " employee orientation"
The demonstrated episode won for "hr business partner".
The demonstrated episode won for "employee development plan".
What skills have we acquired?
Looking ahead, I would like to note that all this is anecdotal evidence. We didn't pay attention to a lot of links, didn't make runs on any number-crunch, and didn't pay attention to statistical summaries.
We have given examples of only a few examples that we have noticed, the repetition of which works for our benefit.
Blog/HR glossary - it was found that it was easier to get recommended snippets from our Glossary pages or from blog posts.
At first it seemed that no optimization is carried out on the pages of the blog would not help to achieve this.
This is not the clown in Mr. king's book. "Is" only at first glance seems to be a big trigger word that allows you to win the shown fragments. The results of the monitoring showed that a couple of examples of the list of recommended fragments were actually found, but most of them turned out to be paragraphs, and therefore the trigger word for them was "is".
Definitions - it became clear to us that the definition of the main term we were trying to achieve was usually what got defined.
Our copies on the pages will be provided with H2 with the keyword (say, what is the orientation of employees?) and in this case, a copy of the paragraph will contain the answer to the question asked.
Updating previous posts is a unique move that we were able to discover that when we started reviving old posts by providing them with the trigger word "is", nothing actually changed, even in cases where there was a lot of fresh information on the pages. We managed to cover only selected fragments with new information that was posted on the blog pages. And there were a lot of publications placed on a couple of pages that showed fragments, they were lost. We made sure that we did not touch the sections of the page from which the fragment was taken, but despite this, it was lost (some of it was recovered, and some of it was lost).
Conclusions
The main points that are worthy of attention.
First, although the example seems to be anecdotal, I believe that they demonstrate some practical developments that can be achieved by anyone who wants to get the recommended fragments.
Second. The entire process took about a year or a year and a half, and it is not yet complete, as our team is still searching for optimal methods of working with content.
The third. We got a lot of bumps on it. Here I showed only one example, and there were a lot of them (a summary of the post, the full text of the publication, dictionary terms, blog posts-all this turned out to be invalid. Therefore, in our search, we went further: measured, checked, and improved.
As a result, I want to shout to our team of authors. We constantly interfered with their creative process, but they were phenomenally efficient (effective teamwork is the key to success in any SEO project).
Tell us what methods work in your case. If you have any questions, please contact me in the comments below.
Note: on January 23, 2020, Google announced that it would stop displaying double snippets on the home page. You can read more about this in Google Search Liaison. This can significantly affect the value of recommended snippets for promoting the company, as well as the number of clicks that the listing receives. However, do not rush to panic. First of all, measure, observe the impact on your project, and then think about radical measures. However, if you still decide to act radically and eliminate your recommended fragments from the results, read this documentation.