To do this, we plan monthly pieces of content in the form of blog posts, landing pages, interactive quizes and other forms of content assets - with the aim of ranking it highly in Google for a variety of keywords that potential leads will be using.
Recently, the team have been determined to find out the best ways to get featured snippets. Because what’s better than getting a number 1 ranking for a client? A number 0 ranking! Featured snippets appear at the very top of the SERP, and it’s exactly where we want our clients to be.
With that in mind, we decided to do a thorough guide for our client SellHouseFast.uk, in order to engage searchers who have had a buyer pull out of their house sale.
To come up with this topic, we analysed the buyer’s journey for a customer of a 'we buy any house' company. Deciding someone who had a sale fall through would be ideal to bring to our client’s website, as they are already at the consideration stage of a purchase, we proceeded to find low-competition keywords with decent search volume.
There are a few tips and tricks to getting a featured snippet, but as with anything if you want to appear prominently on the SERP, you do just have to write great content that answers the searcher’s intent.
The team ensured the content was useful and consulted the client as well as estate agents to make sure all advice was accurate. Then the content was structured in such a way that Google could crawl the page and understand it thematically – using appropriate h2s, a table of contents and relevant internal links.
The piece of content written for our client is in position 1-3 on Google for 15 super-relevant keywords. It ranks on the SERP for over 158 keywords in total, with 9 featured snippets secured for the client – not only helping them gain clicks, but also indicating that they are a thought leader in their field. Great for sales leads and great for the brand reputation!
We worked out that if SellHouseFast.uk had relied on PPC to gain these results, they’d have the pay the princely sum of £ 268,057 – every month.
Securing so many featured snippets also means we have increased the click through rate (CTR) for our client. The average CTR across all industries is just 1.91% - yet our guide’s CTR is at the 8% mark.
This guide also keeps the reader on the website for an average of 5 and a half minutes, which is above average for the industry (which is usually around 2 and a half minutes) – indicating that the content is engaging and useful to visitors.