In 2017, Google started sharing answers to questions on their search results page. Answers to questions on Google are coming from websites all over the internet. It’s been super helpful for most everyone. You can find the answer you’re looking without visiting a website. You can get your answer straight from Google’s search results page.

When you ask questions on Google, the first result displayed is a featured snippet. This “answer” is what Google has found to be the most truthful or helpful to users.

If you’re completely lost, here’s what a featured snippet looks like in Google:

Questions on Google answered in search results page as a featured snippet.

Now that you’ve seen that picture, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m referring to. We’ve all seen answers to questions on Google. It’s becoming a large part of search these days! These featured snippets are starting to take over SEO. It’s something that you should be formatting your content for.

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So, I bet you’re wanting the answer to the question in the title now, aren’t you? Well, wait no longer! Here are two answers I’ve formatted to qualify as featured snippets.

How Can My Website Answer People’s Questions on Google?

Google refers to “answering people’s questions on Google” as a featured snippet. Think of it as an award for your content. To earn a featured snippet, you must answer a specific question. While your answer must be of the highest quality and 100% accurate. It must provide the answer/solution that users are searching for.

There are formatting standards you can apply that will help you earn a featured snippet. Correct formatting of your content will improve your chances of earning featured snippets.

How Can I Format My Blog to Qualify for Featured Snippets?

There are 4 key ways to optimize for Google’s featured snippets.

1. Answer length between 40 and 58 words.
   You want your answer to contain more than 40 words, but never over 58 words. (This changes regularly.)
2. Use text formattings such as H2 fonts and paragraphs.
   Present questions in an h1 or h2 font. Example: <h2>I’m Ron Burgundy?</h2>. Your answer must immediately follow your question in paragraph or bullet/number formatting.
3. The closer to the beginning of your content the better.
   You don’t want your last paragraph in a blog post to be where you ask and answer the question. The earlier the better.
4. Excellent content is key.
   Google does not rank content high in the search results if it is not well written. Also, it needs to be a legitimate answer to a question. Good content trumps all guidelines!

Did you notice both of my featured snippets?
In case you missed them, here’s an image the two potential featured snippets I wrote.

Continued Education

If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend reading on the MOZ blog. They share some of the best content about SEO on the web! They’re a great resource for continued education on this topic. (If you learn something from your research, please share it with me!)

Conclusion

Optimizing to qualify for a featured snippet is not difficult or complicated. Focus on answering a specific question. Make sure your answers contain the right word count. Get the formatting right with “h2” fonts and paragraphs. Keep your answers as close to the top of your content as possible. But, the most important thing is to focus on publishing excellent content.

You’ll end up with a featured snippet before you know it!

For local businesses, Google Business (aka Google Maps listings) reviews are key. They are one of the first things that show up when someone Google’s your business name or, in some cases, the products/services you offer in your area. Prospective customers will use these reviews to determine whether or not they will buy from you. So the question becomes, how do I create my own Google review link for my company? I’m going to walk you through a step-by-step of this in this post.

Getting customers to write a Google review can be a challenge. One of the reasons behind this is because Google doesn’t really make it easy to write a review. If you were to craft an email requesting for your customers to write a review on Google, you would have several steps of instructions on how to do so. The email would be a mile long (which everyone hates) and the customer would likely delete it.

To avoid this, the steps below show you how to create a direct link to your Google reviews page; making the process much easier for your customers. The easier the process the more likely the customer will write the review.

How can I link to Google reviews?

Thanks to Google’s Place ID Lookup Tool you can easily link to your Google reviews page! Here’s how it’s done in 5 steps:

1. Go to Google’s Place ID Lookup Tool.
2. Enter your business name.
3. Copy your place ID.
4. Enter your place ID into this specific URL (Listed below)
5. Send your review link to your customers.

Here is a quick video explaining how to link to your Google reviews:

Before I get into explaining the details of how this is done, I wanted to re-enforce the importance of Google reviews. More than ever, people are looking for reviews before deciding to purchase, or visit a place. Having more 5-star reviews than the competition can make or break a business. Everyone who wants to grow their business needs to focus on gaining more Google reviews.

5 STEPS TO CREATE A LINK FOR CUSTOMERS TO WRITE GOOGLE REVIEWS:

STEP 1: GO TO GOOGLE’S PLACE ID LOOKUP TOOL

Google’s PlaceID Lookup Tool lets you find the unique identification code for your business. This is what Google uses in their maps to differentiate you from other businesses in the area. For us, it will help route customers to our reviews.

STEP 2: ENTER YOUR BUSINESS NAME

Enter your business name into the designated field. Make sure you enter your business name exactly how it is shown on your Google business listing, as it that is what the PlaceID Lookup Tool will pull. See the screenshot below for example:

GOOGLE’S PLACE ID LOOKUP TOOL ENTER YOUR BUSINESS NAME

STEP 3: COPY YOUR PLACE ID

Once your business is displayed, your place ID will be listed under your business name. It will appear as a string of letters and numbers, about 25 characters long. Copy this code and paste it somewhere safe, like a word or pages document.

GOOGLE’S PLACE ID LOOKUP TOOL COPY YOUR BUSINESS ID

STEP 4: ENTER YOUR ID INTO THE FOLLOWING URL

Next you will want to take your Place ID and enter into the following URL to create your full, usable link:

https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=PASTE PLACE ID HERE

When using the above link, the url with the place ID should end up looking like this:

https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJv4SF3a_K5YgRdGQa_eMOoZI

PRO TIP: Since the URL is long and impossible to remember, you should run the link through a URL shortening tool. Seeing that Google has discontinued their URL shortening tool, we recommend using Bitly.

Here is what the URL looks like after using Bitly’s free URL shortening service:

GOOGLE’S PLACE ID LOOKUP TOOL SHORTEN THE URL WITH BITLY

Our new URL is https://bit.ly/2RiicaG. That’s much better, and shorter, than the previous, https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJv4SF3a_K5YgRdGQa_eMOoZI.

STEP 5: SEND THE REVIEW LINK TO CUSTOMERS (GET CREATIVE!)

Now that you have a short link for customers to use to review your business on Google, you can send it out to customers. Here is exactly what they’ll see when they click the link:

GOOGLE’S PLACE ID LOOKUP TOOL LEAVE A REVIEW ON GOOGLE

Please note: this window will only appear in their browser allowing them to easily leave a review if they are signed into their Google account.

PRO TIP: Before ending this post, I wanted to give you one final idea on this. Just sending links often doesn’t work. I recommend using an image asking for reviews. The visual will help encourage people to click the link. Here’s an example:

Beautiful, right??? If you want to use that image, feel free. Here’s the direct link for it: https://creatingabrand.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Click-here-teo-leave-us-a-review-on-Google.png

As I mentioned at the beginning, it is important to begin collecting Google reviews from your customers. It is what will cause you to stand out and gain more traction.

What is one creative way will you be sharing your new Google Business Review link?

Google is changing. The future of Google search results is unknown by most. In fact, I’m willing to bet that the team at Google themselves don’t know exactly where it will go.

Now you may be saying, “How could they not know what the future of Google search results looks like?”

Great question. Did you know that in 2017 Google conducted over 270,000 algorithm experiments? That adds up to approximately 740 search experiments per day! Out of all these experiments, 2,400 changes became part of Google’s search algorithms. That equals approximately 7 updates every day.

7 changes, every day, to one of the most complex algorithms ever created? That’s impossible to keep up with. Google has a countless number of artificial intelligence systems running these changes.

Related Post: Is Google’s New AI “AutoML” Actually Skynet?

Because of this, Google doesn’t always know what changes will take place. Pretty crazy, right?

Although no one knows the future of Google search results, I want to share a couple of my predictions in this post.

My Prediction for the Future of Google Search Results

#1. Image thumbnails in Google search results = Higher ranking.

I’ve mentioned this before, but now it looks like it’s starting to happen. A recent report by Mordy Oberstein from RankRanger shows that Google’s mobile search results now show image thumbnails 45% of the time. That’s a 183% increase in the chances you’ll see these thumbnails for yourself.

What does this mean? This means that you need to make sure to set a featured image on every page, even if you choose to not make it visible on the page. In the future, content found on search results will rank high if it has a featured image to display as the thumbnail.

#2. The “First page” of Google search results will no longer be a thing.

If you’ve noticed on your mobile device, there are no longer pages of search results listed on Google. Today it’s a button that says, “More results.” Say goodbye to the classic, beautiful search results page links:

To take this a step further, the “More results” button will disappear, and it will turn into an infinite scroll option, more like Instagram. I’ll explain.

People love to scroll, there’s no denying it. As Google prepares to implement thumbnails into the search results, it will look and feel more like Instagram already. By making it an infinite scroll, it will ensure that people find what they’re looking for quickly, efficiently and the way they like to find information. (That is Google’s ultimate goal.)

If you want to have your results show up higher in this infinite scroll Google world, it’s time to learn more about alternate ways to rank; aside from using keywords. I wrote a blog post on this here: It’s Time to Stop Trying to Rank for Keywords

#3. We’re going to see more answers in search results.

This is the greatest feature Google has added in the past few years. Having answers to questions right in the search results without having to visit a particular website or reading through more than a few sentences is a search results game changer!

This feature has changed the way most people search. Actually, my first and second points above do not matter IF the answer you’re looking for is automatically displayed by Google at the top of the page.

We’re going to see much more of this. The answers displayed with get better and better. Make sure you know how to rank for this. I wrote on this topic previously, you can read the blog post or listen to the podcast episode here: How Can My Website Answer People’s Questions on Google?

#4. Local results will become king.

We’re already starting to see local search dominate the results pages. This is especially true with mobile devices. The search results are close to you.

When you search “cool shopping mall” and you’re physically in Florida, you’re not going to see a page that ranks high for “cool shopping mall” if it’s in California. You’re going to see the closest (optimized) malls to your current location. 4-5 years ago, you would have seen results from anywhere in the world.

This is a topic that I am still learning. I learn a lot from Neil Patel and he happens to have the best blog post I’ve ever read on this topic. You can read it here to learn more about ranking for local search.

Conclusion

Google is changing. Stay ahead of the curve.

• Add featured images that Google can use as Thumbnails in the future of search results.
• Don’t fixate on the first page of search results; it will be going away.
• Optimize to answer people’s questions in Google search results.
• If you’re local, develop your long-term strategy for ranking to be found.

I hope that the 4 predictions I shared above challenge you and help you to prepare for the future of Google search results!

McFly out.