Affiliates may be inclined to reorganise webpages and embrace AMP features after Google changed the way in which relevant content is displayed when carrying out searches.
As an alternative to just providing links to a website, Featured Snippets will allow content to be highlighted in an orange box, directing visitors towards to the exact answers they are looking for. The new feature is exclusive to particular searches on Google Mobile that feature Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) content in its snippet block.
Alongside the highlighted text, the information may be accompanied by an image, as well as a snack bar at the bottom of the page which will inform consumers that they have ‘scrolled to section’ with an option to ‘Go to top’ to view the remaining information on the web page.
Both affiliates and content producers should be aware of the new feature if they are to focus on SEO in the coming year. If content is produced with an AMP version and much of the content is shown in the featured snippet section, visitors using Google may be directed away from the web page header, and redirected towards the middle portions of the page.
This is set to be positive for those focusing on SEO in the coming months, but with regards to increasing ad clicks, conversion and other key metrics, it may have negative impacts.
As consumers are only shown the highlighted information, traffic on other parts of the webpage will most likely be impacted.
The feature is currently limited to shorter queries such as “what is [x]?’.Longer, multi-step questions such as “how do you do [x]’ are not yet shown to provide a resulting markup.
The feature is set to be rolled out across the board with regards to highlighted content appearing on several devices, however it is not yet clear what search terms are going to invoke an AMP markup.