What is Google Answer Box?
Google Answer Box is the structured snippet you see at the top of the search engine results page. It gives you the answer to a question, or at least part of it, while also linking to the source of the information. Below is an example of a Google Answer Box.
What Happens When You Show Up?
Since Google Answer Boxes appear at the top of the results page, your click through rates will be in line with a typical position 1 link (typically at least 30%). Rand Fishkin from Moz considers answer box results “position 0”, and thinks that they are even more advantageous. You can watch his video about some high-level Answer Box strategies.
Let’s take an example of a keyword that has a monthly search volume of 10K. At a 30% CTR, you can expect around 3K monthly visitors if you are showing up in the answer box. This example would be a big win, but it’s just for one keyword. If your SEO team is able to get you in multiple Google Answer Boxes, you could start seeing your traffic increase by the thousand.
How Do You Show up in Google Answer Box?
Okay, so we sold you on why you need to be focusing on Google Answer Box SEO. But how does this process actually happen? The following steps are a quick summary of the actions you need to take:
- Find the questions your target audience is searching
- Since Google Answer Box only shows up on search queries that contain questions, you need to first start by narrowing your target keywords down to question phrases. You can find these in your keyword tool of choice by searching for “(your keyword) + (who/what/where/when/why/how)”.
- Address these questions with content
- If the keyword you are targeting is “how to fry a turkey”, then create a page or a post that explicitly answers the question. Keep in mind that SEO takes time, and depending on your website’s authority, it can take months to even start ranking for a keyword. In order to show up in the answer box, you almost always need to be on the first page of results.
- Format the content in a way that Google understands
- There’s a reason why Wikipedia shows up for a massive amount of answer boxes: their content is easy to read both from a user’s perspective and from a search engine’s. Read this introduction to structured data to get a better understanding of how to accomplish this with your content.
- Utilize technical SEO to speed up the process
- Technical SEO is any optimization that happens aside from the actual content. This includes indexing, meta-tags, internal linking, redirects, and much more. You can think of it as laying the foundation for successful SEO.
As more and more search engine results pages start to include answer boxes at the top, your company needs to think about how it can win this traffic opportunity. Contact one of our SEO experts today and find out how you can start optimizing your website to drive more traffic.
