In part one, Fay Friedman and I spoke about E-Commerce SEO vs Other SEO & Common SEO Audit Issues in part two we spoke more about duplicate content, featured snippets and people also ask. We first talked about duplicate content and duplication of URLs. I referenced when Gary Illyes from Google went deep into the topic of how Google does its dupe-detection. Fay said there are so many basics that people forget about with duplicate URLs, such as www vs non-www, HTTP vs HTTPS, canonical URLs and so much more. There is so much around duplicate content that people forget or don’t have time to deal with. Now in Google Search Console, via domain properties, it consolidates a lot of the more basic duplicate URLs. Google is generally pretty good at handling it but the job of an SEO is to not make Google think which is the canonical but for an SEO to tell Google which the canonical URL is.
She said often restructuring content can help you achieve featured snippets in Google Search. She said think about how voice search works, and read the content out loud and read it as a question and answer. If it sounds like a question and answer as how people would ask a question and someone would answer that question, then you may be able to rank for a featured snippet. Make sure to use the Q&A tone with voice search. One tool she loves to use is a tool named Answer the Public which helps you build out content that does well for featured snippets.
Then make sure to markup the page with FAQ and Q&A schema to enhance it more. Google has said structured data doesn't help you rank better but it does help your content standout. She said it is harder to rank one page for multiple featured snippets but it is possible. I briefly mentioned the speakable markup feature Google released years ago, I still use it by the way.
Featured snippets leads right into the people also ask feature in Google. If you have a piece of content that is optimize well for featured snippets, then go to the people also ask box and you can see there what other questions people are asking. Take those questions and use that for content ideas to try to rank for more featured snippets on Google. This not only gives you content ideas but also tells you what Google finds interesting and useful. Fay said that often it is easier to rank for featured snippets once you already rank for featured snippets, which makes sense.
She shared on example of how a competitor took their content and stole their featured snippet but the DMCA request came to their savor to win the featured snippet back.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
