Content marketing has become quite tricky in recent days. It is not only due to the increasing competition among different online portals that have made the job of content marketers tricky but also the unpredictable manner of Google’s algorithms has increased the difficulty level significantly. The techniques, which used to be the most impactful in the year 2018 have become useless this year while the ones, which never received the limelight has now gained immense popularity in determining the SERP of your page. Therefore, if you want to grow as a content marketer this year and improve the SERPs of your pages, it will be wise for you to glance through this post. Here you can find a brief discussion on different biases of Google, updates on zero results, featured snippets and mobile web.

Staying mobile is the need of the hour

Gone are the days when Google used to give the maximum importance to the desktop or laptop users. Owing to the increasing demand of the mobile web browsing the ranking policies of Google has also changed significantly. To make mobile browsing even more effective, mobile web services have also undergone immense changes of late. Therefore, anyone new to the field may find the task to be quite daunting. However, once you get the understanding of the basic concepts related to mobile web browsing the task will become much simpler and you will be able to yield better results. When considering Google’s policies for web mobile browsing, the term ‘Mobilegeddon’ is something that needs mention.

The year 2015 paved the way for creating mobile-friendly content and introduced marketers to new techniques to rank higher in the field. While mobile-friendly update paved a new way, it was just the beginning and the web world has kept on evolving significantly since then. Google which earlier considered gave equal importance to both content creators, as well as searchers, have no concentrated only on the users. Therefore, to become successful, it is essential to understand your targeted users in the best way. According to the reports, SERPs are undergoing several changes and it is essential for every content marketer to generate content for more clicks. The reports also indicate that the number of organic clicks among the mobile users has dropped in the recent days and getting organic search is now a major challenge. To become successful, you need to create content for your targeted audience and make the best use of the available space.

The growing popularity of snippets – Mobile web users now prefer to get their search results without getting into the sites and just by reading the snippets on the search page. Therefore, if you draw organic search to your page, try to fit the appropriate information in the snippets and draw visitors to the page. The snippets should be informative and convincing enough to draw more users to your page. The more accessible is your data, better is your SERP. To make snippets more popular, Google has introduced the concept of featured snippets and has provided it a ‘page rank zero’ which means it is superior to the content in page rank 1.

Creating featured snippet is not just a great way for the content marketer to improve the popularity of the site but also it is an equally important technique for SEO professionals to boost the ranking of their webpage. By creating effective featured content, you can be assured of garnering more clicks and secure better visibility of your content. This is not all, SEO professionals can absolutely achieve their dream as featured content helps in increasing the conversion rate as well.

Though featured snippets play an important role in determining the success of your page, there is no proven way of getting your page visible in the featured snippets of the search engine. According to the search engine giant Google, whenever the search engine gets a query from any user, it programmatically searches and detects the pages which the best answers to the queries placed by the user and gets them displayed as featured snippets on the search results page. Even though there is no surefire way to get your page on the featured snippets of Google, it does not mean that you will have to depend just on your luck. You can always use informative content and better optimization skills to get your page on the featured snippets. Always remind the rule of thumb that Google has purposefully introduced snippets for assisting users in a better manner. That means, if you can create helpful content, your chances for featuring in the snippets will always be higher.

Answer the queries of searchers

Though there are several techniques and ideas to improve your SERP, it is not enough. You should always have the urge to answer the queries placed by the searchers. The better is your answering ability, increased is your chances of getting into the featured snippets of Google. Web pages, which do not provide an answer to the queries of people generally, are not able to make their place in the featured snippets, as this has been specifically created to solve queries.

Finding the right question

Just creating a page that answers to the queries of people is not all. If you want to be successful, you also need to find the right queries. Detecting the common queries is important for you to increase the chances of getting into the featured snippets. If your site answers to questions asked rarely, it will be very difficult for you to get rewarded for your effort.

To conclude, it will be right to say that understanding the mind of your targeted visitors is important and for that it is essential to narrow down your focus only to a particular group. Also, it is important to step into the shoes of your visitors and determine the queries that can be usually placed. This will help in increasing the visibility of your site and also enhance your scope of getting into the featured snippet.