The Changing SERP - Staying on Top of the Competition - AJ Kohn

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$transcript = "Today I'm going to talk about going beyond blue links, but before I do that, I'm going to talk a little bit about who I am. My name is AJ Kohn and I run a company called - oh, boy, clicking slow, that's not good for me - Blind Five Year Old. We are a digital marketing firm that specializes in search. We're here in the Bay Area, been around since 2007, appeared on sites like Search Engine Land, Techmeme, TechCrunch, Street, presented at SMX and MozCon and now presenting here.

I came from Pennsylvania, born and raised, and I then went to George Washington University where I studied Marketing. After that, I went into Advertising. It's not as glamorous as Mad Men, let me tell you, not at all, though I got to work on cool accounts. I worked on the Army National Guard account, Nissan Infinity, great stuff, loved advertising, and didn't want to live, sleep and die advertising though. So I went into fundraising, and fundraising was great because I got to do a whole old-school direct marketing - direct mail, telemarketing. I was doing it for education, so you can feel all better about all my telemarketing stuff.

But I knew if I was going to go any further, that the way I was going to get there was the internet. Marketing was going to go online and I wanted to chase that. So I came up here, and I ran in, and I did the roller coaster - 1.0, boom, dot-bomb, nuclear winter came out, did 2.0. When I got out in 2.0, I landed a company called Alibris and that's where I discovered AdWords. I used AdWords to grow the consumer business there 3 years straight, 25% year over year over year. Loved it. I have the Google mini-fridge to prove it, all right?

But I started thinking. I was like, \"What if I can get all of that traffic for free?\" SEO I got really interested in it and the Google tax was going up by that time too, all right, 5 cents CPC, that's what I was playing with back then. It doesn't happen that much now.

So let's segue then into SEO and talk about rich snippets. Rich snippets, what are they? They're not your ordinary results. They're cool results. They got extra links. They've got pictures on them. They've got little screen grabs. Why do we like these things? Oh, no, I'm going to go here first because this is going to come into play later. They've been around for about 5 years. Google actually was the last search engine to embrace search snippets. Everybody else was actually ahead of them, but they finally caved and said, \"Okay, we'll put some pictures and stuff on the search results. Let's do that.\"

It got serious about 3 years ago when they released Schema. They turned it up to 11 and said, \"Mark up everything. Everything. Put structured data everywhere. We want it everywhere, so that we can really understand. Talk to us like we want to be talked to.\" This is the result. You get these great, fun snippets, and they are eye and click magnets. Every eye-tracking study that you will look at confirms that visual results get looked at and clicked on more than others, so you want this. If you want another case study, actual numbers, you don't believe that that's going to get more clicks.

Now we're going back and forth. Let's go because this is a good one. Duncan Hines. This isn't a study I did, its' a study by Tenthwave Digital, I think. Just by implementing recipe snippets, they saw 12% to 17% increase in traffic to those pages. That's it. Put some structured data on the page, slap it in there, get it out, get that nice, big picture up there, and suddenly traffic goes up. This is why we like this stuff.

So, let's talk about one of the more popular snippets out there, because it'll be a way to get here. That's the review snippet. Everybody wants those stars. This is my dentist - great dentist. But you want those stars. Everyone's looking for those stars, because people zero in on them. Google is tired. You've seen it already, I know. They're tired of doing you're work. It's been five years. It's been three years now since they came up with Schema and they said, \"You know what? If you're not putting structured data out there, screw you.\" Here's an example and it's a pretty big one. If you do a search now... Come on. Amazon, no more stars. About six to eight weeks ago, stars on Amazon results, bye-bye, gone. You can look at it and you can use the rich snippets testing tool that Google has and you can look at it and you say, \"You're right. Look at that. No structured data anywhere on an Amazon page.\" That's it. The bit.ly linked on there is my bookmark, so if you are ever doing structured data testing, use that so that you don't have to copy and paste. You can just do one click and the page you're on, it'll open up this. It'll save you hours of your life from copying and pasting.

The message that Google is sending at this point was pretty clear to me. I hope it's clear to you. No mark up, no dice. Structured data is a requirement now if you want to get these type of results. They are not going to do your work for you anymore, but let's say you do work. I get my clients do the work. I say, \"You need to do this. This is great stuff. Implement this stuff,\" but something happens. You implement it and you're like, \"What? Nothing. No love,\" and it does.

The rich snippet echo system is pretty bizarre and it changes and it's continuing to change. The post that I did about this just recently I found it's changing even more than I thought. So let's talk about hits 'cause you will go in and it will be surreal, super surreal. I swear it will be surreal. There we go. So here's one that I love - an underused snippet, the breadcrumb snippet. How many people use the breadcrumb snippet? Excellent. I love this snippet. No one talks about it. Look at that, more links to your site. Instead of that long green URL, you get extra links to your site. That means more traffic.

The problem is that snippet doesn't render using Schema vocabulary. You got to use this other vocabulary called Data-Vocabulary. When you go to that page, you know what the Data-Vocabulary page says? \"Hey, we're out of business. We were replaced by Schema.\" So it's a little strange. I don't know why Google continues to do this. I confirmed it with them 'cause I got confused. I was with one client. I said, \"Oh, we got these great breadcrumb snippets out. What's going on? We're not getting this. What's' going on?\" They said, \"Oh, you got to use Data-Vocabulary.\" \"Really? OK, great. Thanks for telling me.\" They updated the page. Now the page actually tells you to do it, but if you're just trucked along, you won't look at it.

Now what about authorship? Authorship was awesome. Everybody was super happy, but it's sort of like project runway. One day you are in. I'm on. One day you're in and here you are in the snippets, smiling faces, authorship image and then next day you're out. Here we are in 2014, 2 years later, and your faces are gone. Even more recently I noticed video snippets started to vanish. Absolutely. I'm not going to go to deep into what happened here. There is a blog post and you'll see the bit.ly link for that later on but there was a change - suddenly a heck of a lot less video snippets and a lot more video snippets from YouTube. So what happened here? What's really happened is there's an algorithm. There's a rich snippets algorithm. That rich snippets algorithm has been connected with the search quality algorithm and in the large part to the Panda algorithm.

So I'm going to talk now about the algorithm with the algorithm. We got go deeper. Let's get to squinty Leo. Come on, squinty Leo. Clicker. There we go. There's squinty Leo. There we go. Here are the different versions. I'm not going to use the clicker for a while. I'm going to talk on this page just for a little while. All right, very clearly there is a connection between the quality of a site and whether or not you get snippets now.

So I had a client who in early 2014, their snippets disappeared. They also happen to be a Panda 1.0 victim and for the next maybe 3 to 5 months, I made the dev team's life miserable. It was like, \"You must have screwed up the mark up somehow,\" and I chased down every single piece of code that might be conflicting and all the things in Google Webmaster Tools where it said there were errors. I did everything. Nothing worked. I cursed Google. They cursed me... well, the dev team, not Google. We put it on the backburner. They would remind me every month or so, \"Hey, what's going on?\" I said, \"I don't know.\" And then Panda 4.0 hits. They get out of Panda jail. Ranking goes through the roof, 130% increase in traffic, and on that same day, the snippets appear. Boom, like magic. Thankfully I had another... well, maybe not thankfully, but thankfully for you I had another client who was hit by Panda on that day. That client had snippets and on that day, they got the Panda drop 40%. You know what else happened? Waved bye-bye to those snippets.

So it was very clear to me. There is a connection between Panda, and site quality, and rich snippets. This makes sense. If the search quality team at Google has said, \"You know what? We think this site kind of sucks,\" why are you going to have a rich snippet that's trying to draw more attention to it in the SERP? We just saw here it's a click magnet. It's an eye magnet. So if the search quality team says, \"We're kind of thumbs down on this,\" why are you going to put a spotlight on it in search results? That is absolutely happening. It doesn't explain the video snippets issue and that's where the relevance of the site to that query comes in.

Casey Henry over at Wistia - I don't know if anybody from Wistia is here - did a bang up job with the analysis here. He identified the trend. Basically the sites that now have video snippets are those sites which have an expertise in unique video. They are video producers. They are serious about it. The days of hacking the universal search results with a video snippet, which let me tell you there was a cottage industry of that, that's over. You're not going to get that. You have to be committed to video and be a true video pioneer. So, great, you got a TED video. TED, no problem. Daily Motion, great, no problem. But your random site and whatever is probably not going to get it right now.

They're probably going to move this to other ones. I can't talk about it but there's a general interest site that used to have recipe snippets. After Panda 4.0, those recipe snippets went away. My supposition is they're not known for recipes. It's just a couple of recipes on a couple of pages. Mostly though it's a general interest site. So I think what were really looking at is they're only going to render a rich snippet for your site for something that you deserve, that you have an expertise in.

The last one is the one that got the most interesting and I don't have time to talk about it in-depth here, so you should go and read the post about it, because I went down the rabbit hole trying to figure out if Google was doing things with a number of results and snippets. They removed authorship photos and then that sort of communication, they said, \"We were cleaning up the visual look of search results and we didn't want too many author photos.\" They're obviously concerned about it looking like a Las Vegas neon blinking light strip. They don't want that. So I think there's going to come a time when they might decide, \"You know what? We're only going to render three or four snippets for this query. There might be nine available, but we're only going to get it to four,\" or potentially, and this is the other issue which I saw when I did the research, they're going to aggregate this in knowledge panels.

What I found in the second part of this and it's in the post, there is a connection between rich snippets and knowledge panels. So for many book queries, if you have a star, a rich snippet review aggregate query, that stuff gets aggregated and you get a link in the knowledge panel as well. So if you want to play in the knowledge panel in the future, it's huge for you to start using rich snippets or to continue to use that structured data.

So I'll go back to clicker. You can do everything right. You can do everything right, have all the structure data, it all works, and you can still see those stars go right down the black hole. So here's how you can figure out what happens, to know that you're in snippet jail, I guess. So here's I'm looking for Dr. Waldo Frankenstein. You can see the fourth result there from Vitals does not have a review aggregate snippet. If I use the site colon query, and put site:vitals.com, and then I do the same query for Dr. Waldo Frankenstein, same URL, same page, and it has the snippet. This is the way that you can tell at a glance, very quickly, \"Yup, Google has decided that you're not good enough to have a rich snippet in a regular search. We see it. We know you have it. We just choose not to show it to you.\" Now I have no idea Vitals was a Panda victim. I have no clue, but I do know they are currently getting suppressed with the review aggregate snippet pretty much all the time.

I think that's it. No, that's right. I missed one. Too long, didn't listen. If you like tl;drs, this is a tl;dl and we've got the three fills. So these are the takeaways. Structured Data is required. If you want to get the visual results in search, you need to use structured data. If you want to play in knowledge panels in the future, you need to start using it today. Don't take the markup at face value. It's confusing. It can be sometimes brittle. It can sometimes be backwards. Do all of the detailed works to make sure that these things render.

The Duncan Hines study, dig into it because there's a really interesting part in there where they figured that some of their rich snippets traffic went down and it was because the star rating was 2. The problem was that if you just left a comment but didn't rate that recipe, it would have a zero star, and so it was dragging down all of their star ratings. They fixed that bug and suddenly traffic returned. Mind your p's and q's.

The last one, the rich snippets algorithm. It's serious business. If you get bit by it, it's a bigger trend that you have to start thinking about right away and it can hurt a lot, because that means you're going to lose traffic and you're going to lose visibility. You might even lose visibility in knowledge panels in the future.

With that, I'm done. Thank you very much. ";

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