As a social media and content specialist at Goldstein Group Communications, I work alongside a lot of great Account Managers and other tech “hyper-specialists.” Anyone in B2B Marketing knows that it’s an ever-changing field made up of a lot of different components. And not everyone in Marketing is a whiz at every one of those components, which is why we have specialists.
Marketing is not just about content or branding, it’s also about budgeting and ROI, strategy, keeping up on trends, and a very important acronym that helps get your message out to the masses – SEO, for Search Engine Optimization, of course!
At Goldstein Group, we are always learning; it’s part of our core values. One topic that I recently wanted to know more about in regard to SEO was “featured snippets.” A featured snippet is a Google-specific term that refers to the content in an answer box that appears after you search a specific term. If Google thinks your content is an answer to a question, your content could show in one of these answer boxes. Google pulls from the content that’s ranking on page one, but it also does pull from some lower-ranking pages.
I talked to one of our Search Marketing Managers, Molly Hegner, to explain why they were so important for our clients. Molly discovered in her research that webpages that rank #1 for a keyword and earn a featured snippet get more clicks as opposed to someone not featured. (Source: Ahrefs). HubSpot also reported that sites that show in featured snippets get twice the number of clicks. This makes sense considering that when trying to save time, we often go with our first options instead of continuing to dig.
According to Padraig O’Connor, HubSpot’s SEO Associate Marketing Manager, “businesses can’t afford to not optimize their content for featured snippets." Google also recently launched a feature where it will show more than one featured snippet. This allows you to select the choice that may be best for your particular query. Alongside new features, industry research is pointing to people using voice search more via Google Home which increases the importance of featured snippets.
As marketers, it’s clear we are going to have to think holistically when planning future campaigns for our clients. Not only do we need to craft our messaging on our sites with SEO in mind, we need to plan and take into account new technologies and the way our potential customers gather answers to their business needs.
Make sure you stay in the know by subscribing to receive our blog and email updates.
