Fernando Angulo with Jason Barnard at SEMrush Meetup Tel Aviv 2019
I start by overdoing his surname in the song. Then he tells me that he did 152 events last year. Then onto featured snippets – and SEMrush’s study of 80,000,000 featured snippets (with hints as to how to get them). I link the 20th March update with the big uptick in featured snippets on that date. Fernando gives me the lowdown on how featured snippets are evolving. Fernando sees beauty in featured snippets and tells me about the most beautiful tabular featured snippet he has seen (Australian). Featured snippets are for brand awareness and consideration – embrace them, and you will flourish. Don’t ignore preposition keywords – that is how people research the purpose of a product. Apparently the search results for queries around iPhone are very, very different across countries – and that becomes very obvious (and important) for the latter stages of the purchase process. Onto the factors for ranking as the featured snippet. Then 55% of featured snippets have a ‘people also ask’, as do results with images, carousels and videos – this is the start of predictive search and Google preempting our needs. Loads of countries don’t have featured snippets in their language – and that is an amazing opportunity (unless Google gets really good at translation). Then onto the number of words in different languages and the ensuing ambiguity and the need for context… I push things too far (as usual) and get over-theoretical about Polish, Russian, Hebrew… Finally, Fernando tells us that ranking factors will no longer be a factor in our thinking in the near future. Finally, if you can solve the users’ question or problem quickly, then you will win the game.
