Long gone are the days of 10 blue links in Google search. Today’s search results are full of rich features that are intended to help the end user. The problem is that many organic listings are now past the scroll. In this video, I’ll share some other ways to get your site to stand out by leveraging “position zero” and other SERP features.
Table of Contents
The Evolution of Search
Search has changed a lot over the last few years and it’s no longer about those 10 blue links, it’s about so much more. And we’ve talked about SERP features and we’ve talked about how we can expand what users see when it comes to our site in search, but sometimes we overlook the other opportunities.
Now, when you look for a term, let’s just say “sports car,” right? We type that in. You used to see things like these blue links. “10 best sports cars.” But as you can see up here at the top, I typed in “sports car,” now we have all of these info cards and tons of information. What the car is, what it looks like, what’s the starting price for each one of these cars. By simply typing in “sports car” I have all this information.
Now, I have some other plugins here that tell me some stuff, but if we just ignore those and we look strictly at the search results, the next thing down is images. And again with these images, I have the scrolling up here. It’s not till I scroll down do I even start to see the blue links that are associated with it. Once I get a little bit further I’ve got videos. Then I’ve got, “People also ask for.” I’ve got top stories. The search results are not what they used to be by any means. Now, I can open this up in an incognito window, which is not going to look at any of my history. I can do something again. I can go “sports cars.” I don’t really look at sports cars a lot, but for me, that just came to my head. Now, this is what it looks like without all those tools around me. Google is making me scroll down before I see any of these websites.
Increasing Your Search Rankings with the Help of SEO
There’s a lot of site owners who have looked at this and said, “Man, this is not fair. Where’s my content? I put so much information in the content.” But what Google said is, when people type in “sports cars,” they want to see images. So as a site owner, I might want to put things on my site, like these different images, and also mark up things like, what is the car? What is the price of the car? What are some images of that car? now that I could use to hopefully be in the search results. And this is where having good content, but also adding structure to your data, marking up your images, and making sure you have stuff, if you’re in this industry is going to play a big role.
Let me do another one. SEO. Oh, that didn’t work. So it’s here. We’ve got two ads right here at the top, and I’m not going to let them know my location at the moment, just because I don’t want a local pack in right here. So we’ve just got ads. One, two, three, four. And then over here we’ve got the knowledge card. We’ve got information here in images, one, two, three. We’ve got a Wikipedia snippet. We’ve got SEO software. We’ve got people searched for, which these are things that are related to SEO, website, backlink, home page blog hyperlink.
Ranking Position Zero
Right here at the bottom, this is position one. Normal positioning. This is what we would call “position zero” in some instances because this is technically organic and it’s showing up right next to all of these tools. I have to scroll down.
So I’ve got position one, “People also ask for” box, then position two. Now, as somebody who’s wanting to do SEO or wants to make sure that they rank, this is something that you want to pay attention to. You want to log in, you actually want to go to incognito, and then you want to start doing some searches for these core terms that you’re going for, and see what are the other ranking opportunities. Because once I put an agency here, now I’ve just got three ads and now I’ve got this local pack that’s showing up. And then I’ve got the “People also ask for.”
One thing I know, I need to have these answers on my website. If I’m in this location, I’m going to want to do some advertising because now the number one position in maps is an ad. But also make sure that I’ve got reviews, make sure that I’ve got my local structured data set up, and make sure that I’m meeting these needs. Because honestly, if you’re down here, you’re not getting much traffic, if any at all. Most people are going to stay either in these ad positions in this local pack, and that’s probably about it.
It’s a little harder, but we have to look at the different features, the different ranking options that we have available to us. I’ll do one more just to show you that every type of keyword is going to deliver something different. It’s not all the same right now. So let’s do something like “RF modulator.” This is something that’s a little more technical. This is also something you can buy. So right here we’ve got ads right here, or buy now. These are ad placements. We’ve got an ad here. And then what’s the next thing? Video.
This is in position zero, “People also ask for.” Again, I have to scroll all the way down before I find an organic listing. Now, I’m going to scroll down further and it does some local packs. It also is going to show me some images. These are all different options that you have to rank, it’s not only the 10 blue links. And you have to understand what Google is showing because they’re showing you what people are expecting to see.
So make sure that you go on, that you look at these different keywords, you look at how the search engine results look, and then you need to know what type of content and then you can also mark it up. Create videos. Add schema to your videos and put them on your website. Put them on YouTube. Make sure that you’re answering the questions of the “People also ask for.” Make sure that if you’re selling a product that you have reviews and that you use schema reviews here to show that in the search results.
Ranking for Your Target Keyword Today
There are so many more ways to rank today, so we need to shift the way that we produce our content and shift the way that we look at SEO in general because we have things like position zero, people ranking above that first position. And then we have SERP features, which are all of these things like ads and videos, and “People ask for,” and the knowledge box, and local, and images. And the list goes on and on as Google continues to find new and creative ways to show the search engine listings.
If you’ve got any questions on this or you’d like some help in kind of figuring out how to do this better, please comment below. We’d love to continue the conversation with you online. Until next time, Happy Marketing.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in December 2019 and has been updated.
