How to Create Featured Snippets for Google with SEMrush Fernando Angulo | PoP 459

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How to Create Featured Snippets for Google with SEMrush Fernando Angulo | PoP 459

What are featured snippets on Google? Do you know what the different types of online traffic are and where they come from? How can you optimize your content for online searches?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks to Fernando Angulo about how to create featured snippets for Google.

Podcast Sponsor

When you’re in private practice it can be tough to find the time to review your marketing efforts and make improvements where needed.

Whether you are a seasoned clinician who’s current website needs to be revamped, or a new therapist building a website for the first time, Brighter Vision is here to help.

By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers will create you a custom website catered to your specific marketing goals. Better yet, they provide unlimited technical support to make sure it stays updated, and professional search engine optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches – all at no additional cost.

To get started for $100 off, head to brightervision.com/joe.

Meet Fernando Angulo

Fernando Angulo

Fernando is the Head of Communications Team at SEMrush. He has been with SEMrush since the beginning of the company’s marketing efforts and has built its all-star marketing team. Being one of the most recognized faces of the brand, Fernando is speaking at 50+ top conferences worldwide each year.

Fernando specializes in B2B search marketing, e-commerce, influence marketing, and trained marketing teams of companies such as Expedia, T-mobile, Prestashop, and Bing.

Visit Fernando’s website, and connect on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

In This Podcast

Summary

  • What is SEMrush?
  • Getting traffic to your website
  • Is blogging dead?
  • Brand exposure using featured snippets
  • Less pressure when writing your content
  • Tips to get your content featured
  • Voice Search
  • Checking if your content has been selected as a featured snippet

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is an online platform that helps you produce more online visibility. Whatever platform you have, you need traffic, you need to drive people to that platform. SEMrush helps people to drive traffic, to advertise, to measure the results, track the results, and fix the problems. They are a complete platform to increase online visibility.

Getting traffic to your website

  • Organic Traffic – Online, the main source of traffic is organic traffic. This is traffic that you get because of the keywords you have in your content.
  • Direct Traffic – When people know your brand/your name and go directly to your site.
  • Social Traffic – Comes from social media interactions, can be organic or paid social.
  • Referral Traffic – Traffic you receive from links, citations, or backlinks from other websites that are connected to your site.
  • Paid traffic – Traffic received from your ads.

Overall, the one that is working very well for people is organic traffic.

Is blogging dead?

No, it is far from dead, but, the amount of traffic is less than in previous years. Why? Because there are now other types of results that come up on the first page of Google. Featured snippets are a Google product that creates brand awareness. You might not get clicks but you will get exposure.

Brand exposure using featured snippets

For brand exposure, you need a search feature, the most useful of which is featured snippets. If you are solving people’s questions, you will have the opportunity to have that separate search feature. What is? Where to find? How to use? What are? Your content will contain these kinds of questions. In order to have this search feature, you need the following content.

  1. Paragraph – “What is?” This is where you answer the question (Eg. What is anxiety? Why is my kid acting out?) with the definition.
  2. List – “How to.” Here you provide a list with steps (Eg. How to defeat depression) that answer the question.
  3. Table – This is for comparative results. You will need the word “price” or “comparison in your sentence. (Eg. What is the price of a consultation?) The table featured snippet will compare similar products/services.

You can reformat the content that you already have to get further exposure using Google’s featured snippets. All of the above content can be in one blog post, no need to have separate posts. One blog post with 4000 words can have around 3000 featured snippets. This is the type of content that people will see first when they ask something on Google. You don’t need to reformat all of your content, adding lists or tables to some of your blog posts can be enough to give you the search results.

Less pressure when writing your content

With a little bit of research, most people can put this kind of content together very quickly. There’s not as much pressure as there is when trying to come up with a great, compelling story with a hook. There is an internal algorithm (the Flesch-Kincaid formula) that measures how easy your content is to read, it shouldn’t be that complicated. The featured snippets score 87% which means that 12-year olds will understand the text. The rest of your content can be a bit more complicated but to show up as a featured snippet, apply the following:

  • Paragraph – After the title, must be around 46 words
  • List – eight items in your list
  • Table – two columns and two rows is fine

Tips to get your content featured

Have a really good article

  • Title/question and +-46 words explaining what’s in the title
  • In the whole URL – have at least 33 external links. So, for every question, link it to an external source related to your topic that offers more value. If you are writing 2000 words, you need a link every 150 words.
  • Website must be https, it must be secure.
  • Images/videos – on average, you need 16 images per blog post.

Voice Search

80% of voice search results are featured snippets. In the US, the percentage of implementation, of featured snippets, is only 3% so the opportunities are really high for everyone. Most people are not using voice search properly, it is mainly just kids asking questions. Fernando believes that in the next 5-10 years, voice search will be the main way to do a search.

In order for practitioners to improve areas in their websites to optimize towards voice searches, they need to follow the same process of answering a question. It’s important to have a definition in your content, answering “what is” or who is” for example. After reformatting your content, it can take as little as 3-4 hours for Google to index it and feature you. Check if your domain has featured snippets (see instructions below), make sure that you have all of the keywords and especially images, as images are a major point. Then check your competitor’s domain. If they have more results, check their formatting and make sure that you have the right formatting.

Checking if your content has been selected as a featured snippet

There are a few tools available to do this, SEMrush is one of them. Go to semrush.com, add your domain into their “organic research” feature. Scroll down to the search feature and they will tell you how many features you have and how many you can have. Using these types of tools will be a big help for you to create the content that you need in order to receive a featured snippet.

Useful Links:

Meet Joe Sanok

private practice consultant

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE]:
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 459.

When you’re in private practice, it can be tough to find the time to review your marketing efforts and make improvements where needed. Whether you are a seasoned clinician whose current website needs to be revamped, or a new therapist building a website for the first time, Brighter Vision is here to help. By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers will create you a custom website catered to your specific marketing goals. Better yet, they provide unlimited technical support to make sure it stays updated, and professional search engine optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches, all at no additional cost. To get started, for $100 off, head over to brightervision.com/joe. Again, that’s brightervision.com/joe.

I feel a sneeze coming on. Like it’s gonna just overpower me. But it’s that like, subtle sneeze, where it’s just annoying and you know? [Unclear], well welcome to the podcast. So glad you’re here. We have been kicking out podcasts, usually twice a week, for a while now, because we’ve just interviewed so many people. And we’re actually scheduled all the way through… we have podcasts recorded, interviews recorded till early August. So, some amazing episodes. We’ve got some great people coming up. This week I’m really excited because you know when you Google something, and then it gives you those little step by steps before you even have to go to a website. So say you Google how to change a tire and it just shows you a little snippet where it says you know, first stop the car, second pull out the jack, third lift up the car, fourth remove the tire. That’s called a snippet. And today we’re going to be talking all about snippets with Fernando and oh, I should have looked at how to say his last name before I introduced him. Dang it all. I’m in a bit of a time crunch, but, with Fernando from SEMrush. And I’ll say his name correctly when I introduce him when he’s actually on the show. Angulo, that’s how it is, Angulo. I don’t know why that was hard for a second, like I looked at it and the word scrambled, it’s too early in the morning. My tea has not kicked in yet. But those snippets, it’s really a great opportunity for therapists. In fact, he looked one search term up and found that there are no snippets for it. It was a search term that I was like, are you serious, that is a really good search term. And so, he’s gonna reveal the one that’s really impactful for therapists. I’m sure now there’s gonna be thousands of you out there doing it, but he walks you through how to create featured snippets for Google. So, this is a really important episode. So, let’s dive right in.

Well today on the Practice of the Practice podcast we have Fernando Angulo. Fernando is head of Communications at SEMrush. He’s been with SEMrush since the beginning of the company’s marketing efforts and has built an all-star marketing team. He specializes in business to business search marketing, e-commerce, influence marketing, and training marketing teams for companies such as Expedia, T-Mobile, and Bing. Fernando, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.

[FERNANDO]:
Hi, welcome. Thank you for having me here.

[JOE]:
Yeah, I am so glad to have you here. You know, I’ve heard about S-E-M-rush, or SEMrush, for a while. But I don’t know that everyone has – maybe just start with, what is… First, is it SEMrush or S-E-M-rush, or is either one applicable?

[FERNANDO]:
Oh, it’s both actually. Basically, people in the US were… basically, we have the largest amount of our users. Right now, we have about 5 million users. They pronounce it like you did, S-E-M-rush. In Europe is basically it’s SEMrush, but in every single language, country they are just pronouncing as it is, for example in Spain is SEMrush or in Russia is SEMrush. So, it is how you pronounce it. We are pretty fine with the with you, if you can remember the brand, of course.

[JOE]:
Absolutely. Well tell us a little bit about SEMrush. What is it, and then we’re going to talk a little bit about voice searches? So, things like Alexa and Hey Siri, things like that in a few minutes. But what is SEMrush?

[FERNANDO]:
Sure. So, we are online platform that helps you create, produce more online visibility. So in this case, if you have an online project, a website, a blog, an e-commerce or whatever the project it is, you need to drive traffic, you need to drive people, users, to see the product services that you’re offering or the content that you’re creating. So, in this part, we are helping companies, brands, freelancers to create content to drive traffic, to advertise, to measure the results, to track the results. And of course, to fix the problems, the on-page problems that the website can be. So, we are a complete platform to increase your online visibility.

[JOE]:
And is it an addon to something like WordPress or Wix or Square, or does it integrate with those, or is it separate from that?

[FERNANDO]:
Well, actually, we have a plugin for WordPress, because we are data providers. Basically, if a company wants to know what is happening with between Wix or their competitors, Wix is actually one of our clients so they can see, okay, there are a lot of website builders out there, we need to know the market proportions of this industry, and we want to understand our market share. So they can go to SEMrush and see who are the competitors, how many competitors are in that industry, and see how big the competitors are in terms of organic traffic or beta ads, advertising, or social media, or direct traffic. So, we are doing lately… actually, one of the latest tool that we recently added to our tools is the market research. It is a complete online market research tool. So, you can just put the name of the company, the name of the business that you have, and we’re going to build the whole segment. So, if you are a dentist if you are, I don’t know…

[JOE]:
A psychologist, a counselor? Yeah.

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, you can just put there your domain. And will tell you how many competitors you have in your city, in your country or worldwide.

[JOE]:
Wow. So, let’s… I want to hear a little bit about what’s working in building traffic because I know that that’s really your expertise, just for general websites, and then we can get into voice searches. What’s working right now in getting traffic to people’s websites?

[FERNANDO]:
So basically, in online, the main source of traffic still is the organic traffic. So that’s the traffic that you’re acquiring, because of the keywords that you’re ranking. So if you have enough content and if you have some of the best keywords that are explaining the meaning of your business, of your products, you can have a lot of visitors, you can have a lot of clients, a lot of users; just as an example, we have different sources of traffic. The main one, I will say is still organic. Then we have direct traffic, which is when people they already know your brand, or they know your name. They’re not searching for you on Google or Bing or any other search engine. They just know your name, they trust you. Actually, if you are planning to go for a trip to Europe, you maybe will go to the domain of the airline company, or to Skyscanner; you’re not gonna go exactly to Google to say, fly to here. But Google, they having a special feature that is called Google Flights. So, they want to have that traffic as well on their own. So that’s why they’re building their own results that are called surf features. Those are Google results. But that’s, that’s another story that we’re going to be commented. The other source of traffic is the social traffic, which is coming from social media interactions; it can be organic as well, or paid social as well, and the last portion of traffic is what we have [unclear] traffic, which is the referral traffic. That’s a traffic that you are receiving from mentions in forms of links, or citations, or backlinks from other websites that are connected with your site. That’s just saying that your content is good, that’s why I’m gonna put your link. And the last part of the traffic of course, is the paid traffic. If you are doing ads, Google ads, display ads, or if you’re doing some YouTube ads, whatever the ads is going to be, you’re going to be receiving traffic from that as well. And overall, the one that is working very well is still organic.

[JOE]:
Now with organic, I’ve heard people say, ‘Blogging is dead’. And I don’t agree with that. What would you say in regards to regular blogging and organic traffic?

[FERNANDO]:
No, of course, it’s not dead; it’s far from being dead. But we need to be honest here, and we need to say that the amount of traffic is less than the previous years. Why? Because there are other type of results on the first page of Google; in this case, Google is like the first source of organic traffic, because they are the search engine. When someone is searching, for example, how to open a bank account, how to arrange an appointment with my consultant, how to interchange my shares from stock market? So, wherever the question is, you can receive a beautiful surf feature, in this case, a featured snippet, which is an organic result, but it’s also a Google product. So, in this case, yes, you are not receiving any click, but you’re receiving exposure. That’s the thing that we call brand awareness. People know that you exist, but maybe they’re not going to be clicking on you.

[JOE]:
Yeah, and what are some of the best ways to get that brand exposure, to get those backlinks, to get other people to help promote your work?

[FERNANDO]:
So, in terms of brand exposure, you will need to be, you will need to earn those surf features and the most useful one is the featured snippet. Basically, if you’re asking, if you are solving people’s questions, you will have the opportunity to have that separate… that surf feature. Questions for example, starting with the term ‘what is’, in this case, ‘What is your service, your product, your industry?’ ‘How to use your service, your product?’ ‘Where to find…?’ So, those basic informational keywords that are actually questions are the most convenient ones to have right now. And that’s really easy to do. Maybe you already have that content on your website; Actually, most of the pages, they have the frequently answered questions. So, but in order to have a surf feature you just need to have three type of content. First type is the paragraph, so after you are creating the question, ‘What is…’ for example, any kind of symptom right, ‘What is fever?’ or ‘What is…?’ whatever the [unclear]…

[JOE]:
Yeah, it might be more like ‘What’s anxiety? Why is my kid acting out?’ Kind of more of those behavioral health symptoms?

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, first we need to go with the definition right. What is depression? Then, how to defeat depression? First, we start with ‘what is’. After that, we need to go with only forty six words after that of a paragraph text, so that’s the perfect format to receive paragraph featured snippet, or with the next question, with the next logical question that is, ‘how to’, you need to create after the question ‘How to defeat depression’, for example, you need to create a list of eight items or eight steps in order to receive that featured snippet with a list, which… pretty much, if you’re asking anything starting with ‘how to’ you will receive a list featured snippets for example, how to change a tire? How to cancel a bank account? How to open Gmail account? You will receive a beautiful list, so for any question starting with ‘how to’ you will have a list. But if you don’t have the list in your entire content, you will never receive that. And the last type of content that you need to create right now based on a question is the table features snippet. So, we have the paragraph, then the list, and the last one is the table. For receiving or for optimizing for table features snippet, you need to have, of course, the words ‘price’ or ‘comparison’ in your sentence. So, for example, what is the price of consultancy of the expert, whatever is the name, or how much it costs this service versus this other service. So, that’s the last question that you can use for just creating a table with the name of the service in comparison with other services that are basically similar, and the prices, and some specifics. So, you can have also that result there in a beautiful table featured snippet. So, it’s basically just reformatting the content that you already have for having more exposure on Google’s first results.

[JOE]:
And would each of those be separate blog posts or would those all be in one blog post?

[FERNANDO]:
Oh, yes, definitely. All of them can be in one blog post, actually, there are some really good URLs; so, one single blog post with about 2000 words or 4000 words that can have around 3000 featured snippets, 5000 featured snippets. So that’s the type of content that people will see first when they’re asking something to Google. And that’s the thing that you need to do, not one per post. And no, you don’t need to just reformat the whole blog, that you have the 100 blog posts that you’ve been writing the last three years, but only one but a really long one with a lot of work, but with this specific format for that.

Actually, I need to tell you this; at the beginning of the year, I was in India, and I saw there that banks, mobile companies are using this technique a lot. So, for some of them, I can remember one of them that is BankBazaar.in for ‘India’, all of their pages or the blog post content, they have only the list and tables. Then I was checking on semrush.com, how many featured snippets they have? And I was really surprised that they have around 200,000 featured snippets. So just having that format for your content, just having a list is enough for starting receiving those kinds of results.

[JOE]:
Wow. That’s amazing to me. I mean, I want to apply this to a private practice. So, say, they were doing a blog post about depression, they might have a section that says what is seasonal affective disorder? So, a certain type of depression; they’d have a paragraph about that. And then maybe it would be – and tell me if I’m wrong here – but maybe then it would be a list of eight steps of ‘How to get rid of seasonal affective disorder or how to treat seasonal affective disorder’, and then it would walk through you know, light therapy, you know, individual counseling. And then maybe the table would be, ‘The benefits of individual counseling versus group therapy for seasonal affective disorder’. And then they might talk about the cost of individual therapy compared to group therapy. Would that be a good structure for say, a blog post about depression?

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, that’s perfect, that’s a great structure, because with the first question, ‘what is?’ you’re getting their awareness, because that’s a broad question. So, you can have like 100,000 people searching for that. With the second question, ‘how to?’, that’s a more actionable question, more informational question that you, okay, now I need to learn step by step what to do. And the last one is the conversion question. So, the transactional question that is telling you, okay, I want to use the service. Now I need to get into my budget and see how much this service costs. So that’s a perfect format. Yeah.

[JOE]:
What I like about this format that’s working right now is that, you know, when you’re writing a blog post where you feel like you have to come up with stories and engagement and a hook, that takes a lot of brain space to really write that kind of blog post. These kind of blog posts, most of us, I mean, we’re masters and PhD level folks that have learned these things, we could rattle these off right away, like, what is Major Affective Disorder, you know, what is Suicidal Ideation? What’s the difference between bipolar disorder and just, you know, a regular major depressive episode? Those are things that most of us, you know, with a little bit of research could write a ton of blog posts on, versus feeling like I have to write this great story that’s compelling and has a hook. And so, it takes a lot of the pressure off. This is the way that the snippets are working within Google.

[FERNANDO]:
Oh, yes, you have all the knowledge, you can create all this content, and it hasn’t to be that complicated for this type of results. Because those results they have an internal algorithm that is checked by an algorithm we call the Flesch-Kincaid formula that is measuring how easy to read is this text. So, for any type of text that is shown on a featured snippet, the scoring is 87%, which means that 12 years old kid is need to be able to understand that text. So, this results are mean for being read for 12 years old kid. So, it’s need to be a simple text. The rest of the text that you can explain all the associations, all the specifics, can be there as well but just for this format, after your title, your main title, just use 46 words on average for the table, more than eight items or till eight items; for the table, just two rows and two columns will be just perfect.

[JOE]:
Wow. And for the average website that hasn’t been doing this, I mean, you know, we’re not a Bing or you know, a giant company that you’ve worked with. But these are smaller businesses that are attracting local audiences, for the most part. Is having one really big article helpful enough, would you recommend doing four or five? How many of these 2000 plus word articles would you recommend for a practice that really wants to get to that next level?

[FERNANDO]:
Let’s take a look. If you are writing on a specific article, just answering people’s questions, solving people’s problem, one article can give you… let’s put it into numbers. You need to have the title and after the title around 46 words. So, you can write several questions, I will say more than 20 questions. So, you will have the H1, H2, H3, H24, you will have several subtitles over there. Solving people’s questions in different ways. Questions related to the specifics of the business, of the practice, questions related to how to implement that. So, all this about the questions, about one single topic. So, if you have one single topic, let’s talk about depression, right? I just enter it in Google. In the US, what is depression? There is nobody who has the featured snippet for that keyword. And that’s crazy. So, nobody. So, you everybody has the opportunity to have that keyword. I see there…

[JOE]:
So, say I wrote – wait, I want to pause you right there. So, say, right after this, I went and wrote what is depression? I wrote a big article about it. How do I then try to get Google to make that the featured snippet? Do I have to submit anything or is it just they guess, and they try to find it?

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, let me give you the hints. First hint here is you need a really good article. For having that result, you only need to have the title and the appropriate format, which are the 46 words explaining, because that’s going to be the snippet on the first page of Google. But instead of, but you need to have something more; for the whole URL, you need to have at least 33 external links. So in every single question, you need to link to an external source, for example, it can be University, an investigation, or media report, something that is really related to your topic, and that has more value. So, 33 external links. We need to add something more here, then your webpage needs to be HTTPS. So, it needs to be secure. Also, the amount of links, just repeating this, because it’s really important is 33 at least, so every 150 words, if you’re writing 2000 words, for example, you need to put a link to an external resource. And if we’re talking about images, videos, just need to have images for most of those results. In an average, the usage of 16 images per blog, per post. That means if you are writing, for example, what is depression? As I write right now, I don’t see any results. But the people also asked [unclear], which are related questions. So, the first related question that I see here is ‘How does depression affect human behavior?’, which is a more long tail keyword, right? But I don’t see any images. I don’t see any videos. And I don’t see any consultants around the place that I’m looking. So you can have also different schema markups there that saying, okay, I’m a specialist, this is my office, if you are asking for this question, just take into account that my office is near you. So, there’s a lot of things that you can build here.

[JOE]:
Wow, okay, we’re gonna be doing some things different on Practice of the Practice to really look at what are those kind of questions that we’re answering through our website. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because I mean, you just gave so much value there, but around voice search. So, I know that my daughters love asking Alexa all sorts of different questions like, Alexa, tell me a joke or things like that. And people can say Alexa, play Practice of the Practice podcast. So, we’re on there, but how can people optimize for search in Alexa, in Google, I mean, all of these voice recognition softwares.

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, and that’s actually the good news for today. Because when we are talking about surf features, especially with these three featured snippets, we made a research base on voice search results last year with the SEMrush team, and we analyzed 20,000 search queries, which they had featured snippets or any other search feature. And we have some really great result. First result that we found out was that 80% of the voice search results that we had; they are taken so the source of the information are featured snippets. So, if you are…

[JOE]:
So, 80% of the searches – of the voice searches – end up pulling from the featured snippets?

[FERNANDO]:
Yes. Which is crazy, right?

[JOE]:
Wow.

[FERNANDO]:
Nobody’s using this feature right now. Because this is starting in some countries. For example, in the US, the percentage of implementation is 3%, only 3%. That means that the opportunities there are really, really high for everyone. But their other type of results that are called the ‘people also asked’, that are also taken as a source for voice searches, those results, for example, the ‘people also asked’, are 11% in our research. So basically, if you want to have voice search results in the future, because today, as you mentioned, maybe that type of technology, the voice search, the voice recognition is really, really high right now. But basically, most of the people are not using it properly. Kids are using it a lot asking question, why the sky is blue? Why the dog is not blue? Why I cannot sleep? Where are the monsters, why [unclear], so all the questions are taken by this assistance. So, I believe in the future and in five years or maybe 10 years, this is going to be the main way to do search, but that’s only my opinion.

[JOE]:
Well, I’m so glad you brought that up because I was just out at Podcast Movement in Los Angeles in February, and they were talking about at that time, Google had just switched to when people are searching to then offering podcast episodes as answers, and they’re auto transcribing those episodes behind us podcasters’ backs, so that even the words we say are words that they’re able to search, and say, this podcast would best help you to answer your question.

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, that’s correct. That’s why I was mentioned at the beginning that SEO is not dying, guest blogging is not dying, because people are consuming a lot, lot of content and they will be consuming more fresh content. So that’s why if you have, for example, an old blog post three years old, that was solving people’s problems, so how about you don’t have any featured snippet, but you are ranking, that’s the other thing. If you’re ranking already with some keywords, for example, what is the depression? And you are in the second place I see here, a couple of big companies like Wikipedia, for example, or YouTube, then Psychology Today, then Medical News Today, but they don’t have… they’re not working with these results. So, they don’t have the proper format. If you are in the first page of the results, or if you’re ranking in the first 10 positions, you have a high opportunity, probability to have that result. So, Google is going to be happy to have that result. So, you just need to go reformat your content with that keyword. So, you have the keyword in your question? Perfect. Don’t touch it. Just touch the text below. 46 words, very plain text, very simple text and add an image.

[JOE]:
Oh, I love even the external links tip too. So, Fernando, in our last couple minutes here, maybe what are a couple things that practitioners can do to optimize for Voice Search? I mean, you kind of know what’s coming in the next couple years. They can go back to old blog posts; they can write new blog posts for featured snippets. Specifically, for Voice Search, what can practitioners do on their website or in other areas that can help position them for the future?

[FERNANDO]:
Yes. And I need to go back to my first series of questions here. So for voice search in the future, and basically now it’s going a lot, the questions that are starting with the finishing of something, what is, who is or where his – definition of location, the definition of a person of a brand. That’s something really important that you need to have. Even more is a definition of some service or some product that you are promoting. That’s even more, you need to have that today as a feature snippet, okay, not today. Tomorrow. You can just reformat the content and in about three hours, I was doing that in Australia last year, you have your keyword there, you’re reformatting your content. And in about three or four or five hours, Google is gonna index that. And voila, you have your featured snippet. So first, check if you already have those question keywords ranking in the first 10 positions. The second thing, okay, you don’t have an…

[JOE]:
Oh wait, real quick: how can I check if mine has been selected as a featured snippet?

[FERNANDO]:
Oh, yes, that’s a very interesting question. So, there’s a few tools that can do that. Of course, SEMrush is one of them. You need to go to semrush.com, add there your domain in a feature that we call organic research. So, in organic research, just add there your domain and scroll down a little bit to see the surf feature. So we’re going to show you all the surf features that you have, if you have images, if you have the videos, if you have site links, if you have the local [unclear], if you have the featured snippets, and we will show you how many you have, and how many you can have. Because the keywords that you have, maybe you are ranking in the second page of Google, but that keyword contains a featured snippet that nobody is using, right? So that’s something that you need to be aware of. So, using this type of tools will be a big help for you to create the content that you need to receive a featured snippet.

[JOE]:
Wow. And maybe just one or two more points around how to optimize for Voice Search.

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, the second point here will be, okay, you’ll see that you have some featured snippets. The next point will be you need to put there in organic research in SEMrush the domain of your competitor because, I was telling you as well, only 3% of implementation in the US; that means that most of the companies they are not aware about if they have a featured snippet or not. I was asking a lot this in conferences, how many of you, how many featured snippets you have? And I was asking a random guy in the audience. He was telling me, I don’t know, I don’t have featured snippet. Okay, just tell me your domain and I will check it. He told me his domain. I added to organic research on SEMrush. And I found out that that they that he had around 5000 featured snippets, and he was like, woah, I didn’t know that I have so many. Because some of them are taken by Google by default, because they have kind of the format is not bad but is… better than nothing, right? So, they are pushing some type of result. But if companies, people are not aware about that, you can go just check your competitor’s website. Check if they have some featured snippets; check the format, check the words, check if they have the image. If they don’t have it, just go to your website, build a better… create a better content, add an image – because an image is a major point.

So, for, for example, for this type of searches, how many companies in Canada, right? So, for the last two years, Wikipedia was at the top, last year was the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, this year is Salesforce, a CRM company, a SaaS company. So, what happened there? The thing is the format; if you have the appropriate format, you are solving people’s questions, people’s problems, solving people’s problems, you can have that result. And the last link here, you are not investing only on brand awareness, you’re also investing on the future of search which is going to be Voice Search at some point, either all or layer. So, you need to have these featured snippets for the most convenient keywords right now. A couple of days, actually a couple of weeks ago in our company. So, for us, what is online competition or what is competitors online, competitor research, is one of the key keywords for us. So, our SEO team, they received that result and all the company, the whole company, was just saying, you’re great, well done. So, we were celebrating those results, because those are the kind of quality [unclear] that we are measuring right now. Is not traffic, because of the traffic, because of the [unclear] traffic. It is the quality result that Google is showing, adapting your own results for people’s problems. So, we are creating content for people and we’re creating content for Google.

[JOE]:
So, so awesome. Oh my gosh, Fernando, you are a genius. There’s so much that I am going to take away from this. I’m glad that this isn’t coming out for a couple months so that my competitors will be behind me. No, I don’t usually have that much of a competition inside me. The last question that I always ask, Fernando, is, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

[FERNANDO]:
Well, first of all, if you are not technical, if you are not related to digital marketing, that’s not a problem. You are good at what you’re doing. And you are good at providing the services that you love. And if you are doing that, you can write about that or you can create videos about that, or you can create audios about that, like this podcast, for example. So, the channel that you’re using for delivering your message, for promoting your services, needs to be taken, not only by Google, but any other platform. But they need to be integrated in one source that can be your web page. So, having a web page is not a bad idea, it’s a great idea actually, it’s an investment on the future of your own practice. So, start doing that, start creating content in the way that is going to be more easy for you. Is content, right content, is video, do the video, is audio, do the audio, but you need to have something, a place that people can just gather and see, okay, I love this. This professional.

[JOE]:
Oh, that’s so good. If people want to connect with SEMrush, what’s the best way for them to connect with you and to learn more about the service?

[FERNANDO]:
Sure. I’m a real public person. I have accounts on any social network. You can you just can search for Fernando on Google or LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I actually have a Tiktok account lately.

[JOE]:
I do too. I’ve been posting a couple of videos there and kind of testing it out to see if I want to commit Tiktok. I’m not sure my audience is there, but it’s at least worth being knowledgeable of.

[FERNANDO]:
Yes, you need to be where the audience is. Basically, most of the people are everywhere. So, diversifying doesn’t sound like a bad idea. And yes, you can find me as well on semrush.com, I have my profile there. And let’s keep in touch.

[JOE]:
Awesome. Fernando, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.

[FERNANDO]:
Thank you very much, Joe. Thank you for inviting me.

[JOE]:
I mean, the opportunity to have featured Google snippets, I mean come on. Fernando really walked us through exactly what to do. And I would love to know what you do to try to do that. And then even more, what are the results like, let us know. I always love hearing how people take action from the podcast and then from there, they get results. Also, head on over to brightervision.com/joe. Brighter Vision is the best place to get a website, and it’s so affordable with that monthly fee. You get all of your IT support, all of your hosting, you get a beautiful website and they’re constantly inventing and creating and staying at the cutting edge of websites. And that trickles down to all of you, all the Brighter Vision clients. We also give some massive discounts for Brighter Vision clients that are also Next Level Practice folks. And so Brighter Vision has all sorts of free things for you if you’re a Brighter Vision client that also is a Next Level Practice person. So, head on over to brightervision.com/joe to get started. If you are a Next Level Practice member, let them know that too right at the front end. That’s going to help you get even more discounts. So, thanks so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. In the next episode, in episode 460 – that’s gonna be on Thursday – Andrea Woolf is going to talk about being a woman of impact and you’re not gonna want to miss this one.

[JOE]:
Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate, authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.