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An Actionable Guide to Use SERP Features to Power Pack Your Content Strategy

Many brands & marketers are guilty of approaching the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) features from the wrong perspective. In the past, people used to write content specifically to rank on SERP features, but that approach doesn’t work any longer. Today, modern marketers have realized that one cannot achieve success with any content strategy that doesn’t provide valuable insights to the readers and add value to their business.

Some of the top organic SERP features used on Google are 'Knowledge Graph', 'Featured Snippet', 'Related questions', 'Image pack', reviews, video, and comprehensive articles et al.

Now to drive home the advantage with the content strategy, we need to align SERP features with the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

The broader level stages being:

  1. 1
    Awareness/Discovery
  2. 2
    Consideration
  3. 3
    Decision Making

    Your SERP features need to align with each of these stages of the buyer’s journey to get the most out of your content strategy.

    Let us now look at the different buyer stages and how SERP features work in each stage.

  4. 1
    Awareness stage

    This is the phase in which the buyers are already searching with an intent to solve an existing challenge or their existing challenge is highlighted to them via a push advertisement. At this stage, our audience isn’t necessarily looking for the solution but keen to get a better understanding of their challenge & a probable solution/service/product.

    Here we can focus on: ‘Knowledge Graph’, ‘Featured Snippet’, ‘Related Questions’, Videos, and Images as part of the SERP strategy to power pack our content strategy.

  5. 2
    Consideration stage

    This is the stage where our audience starts to understand their challenge better with the help of the educational content we create around our solution or product. But the challenging part for us is they still are unaware of the best way to solve it and a lot of competitive analysis goes on here. They seek information from different solutions and want to learn more about how your solution can help them solve their problem better than anyone else.

    This is the buyer stage wherein we need to use: ‘Featured Snippets’, ‘Related Questions’, ‘Reviews’, ‘Videos’, ‘Trust Symbols’ on our owned assets and a healthy Social Media presence.

  6. 3
    Decision stage

    This is either the quintessential or at times the final stage of the buyer journey where our audience is pretty well aware of their challenge, has done a comparative study of different products and is now ready to make a final decision. At this point, our target audience exactly knows how to define the solution they are seeking, and now they want to know exactly what they should commit to for the product including pricing, duration, quantity etc. They are looking for the right trust symbols that prove that other customers have had a positive experience using our product/solution. This will make their decision making much easier.

    Here we need to focus on: ‘People also ask’, ‘Video Content’, and ‘Long-form Content’ to amplify the content strategy as part of the SERP features.

Our Takeaways

Google SERPs have been created to anticipate user needs, and with the help of SERP features, you can clearly decipher the buying stage your target audience is in. With a deeper understanding of the SERP features, you can maximize Google’s search engine algorithm to your advantage.

To start with, you can connect with a performance based digital marketing agency to ensure that the SERP features you use are in sync with your overall content strategy.

Backstage Creative Inc. has been helping businesses across the globe maximize their content reach, effectiveness and demand generation with industry best practices. You can book a complimentary 30 minutes consultation to discuss your business & brand needs.

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