What is position 0?

Position 0, or position zero, is the result highlighted on the SERP and placed between the organic results and the sponsored links. Favored by its larger size compared to the other results as well as by a boxed frame, it answers the user’s query clearly and concisely and is considered by Google to be a premium result.

What is the SERP?

The Search Engine Results Page, or SERP, refers to the results pages on search engines. Your position on the SERP is very important for your website, whatever its nature, since the better it is placed, the more visible it will be. These spots can be earned through the optimization of your site, either organically (SEO) or not (SEA).

Why is position zero so important?

Google is no longer what you might call a search engine but an answer engine. Its goal is to satisfy the user by giving them the most suitable and most relevant answer to their question. It is with this in mind that it created position zero, to indicate what it considers to be the best answer to the user’s query.

As we said, being among the first results guarantees good visibility. Faced with the competition of sites on the Internet, it is important to manage to rank in this spot, which is heavily promoted, in order to be able to claim leadership in your field. It is a reassurance factor, which significantly increases the click-through rate on a site.

Two studies to back this up:

• Ben Goodsell published a study on the site SearchEngineLand indicating that the click-through rate (CTR) on a site featured in position zero increases from 2% to 8%, with organic traffic increasing by 677%.
• On the site Stone Temple, Eric Enge highlights a 20% to 30% increase in traffic for the site ConfluentForms.com when it was in position zero.

Position zero generally answers queries found in the long tail. This last point is important, since it is also a way to anticipate the future in the face of voice searches that are increasingly used and whose queries differ from written queries. Indeed, during a voice search, the user almost systematically resorts to long-tail searches. In time, it will also be necessary to develop voice SEO to take users’ requests into account.

What types of information appear in position zero?

Three kinds of information can show up in position zero:

• Featured Snippets

Deemed useful by Google for answering the user, featured snippets are highlighted by the search engine and generally contain a title, a preview of the answer and the site’s URL. But they can also contain a bulleted list, a table or even an image.

A typical example of a featured snippet with a bulleted list:

Featured snippets come from the organic results, and the URL displayed is therefore often present twice on the SERP.

Several advantages become apparent when you manage to land this spot. The first is the increase in organic traffic, which, according to SearchEngineLand and Hubspot, ranges from 100% to 500%. On smartphones, it is the only result that appears above the fold and therefore the only result visible to the user without them needing to scroll. During a voice search, it is the only one that can be read out.

On the other hand, there is a risk: if the result displayed on the SERP is fairly complete, the user may not click on your URL.

• Knowledge Card

Knowledge cards are extracted from the Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base entirely built by Google. Google relies on the tags used across various websites to build a relevant and comprehensive database.

Knowledge cards give users a general overview of the topic they are searching for.

The URL that generally wins this spot is the site that best answers users’ searches. Knowledge cards seem to be designed for mobile users and are determined by a series of Google statistics, the main ones being: domain authority, the number of inbound links, content quality, and relevance to the query itself.

The advantages? Take the example of a company. The address, contact details and specialized products can be displayed in relation to the search terms. This gives users immediate information more quickly and will increase the click-through rate.

• Quick Answers

These answers do not systematically give their sources and display the answer directly in position zero. They notably concern questions on the theme of the weather, sports results or even mathematical calculations.

How do you get this position zero?

According to a study carried out by Ahrefs, 99.58% of pages in position zero already rank in Google’s top 10. That said, it is not necessary to be placed in first position, because according to Getstat, 70% of the sites that are featured are outside the first organic position.

There are several tips for reaching this Holy Grail:

• The majority of featured snippets are triggered by queries found in the long tail.
• The page you want to see rank at the top of the SERP must have high-quality content, and the answer to the user’s question must appear in the first lines, preferably in a fairly short paragraph, since let’s not forget: what matters most to Google is the user!
• Questions are more likely to be displayed in first position, so it is worth knowing the most common questions that users ask. To do this, you will need to identify them using tools such as Semji, which you can discover right now, Answerthepublic or Ubersuggest, which is a keyword generator.
• Stay within the optimal word count. Keep the paragraph that answers the user’s question short enough for Google to display it correctly. According to SemRush, the most common content length is between 40 and 50 words.
• SEMrush is an excellent analysis resource, but you can also use it to find which featured snippets you and your competitors appear on.

Position 0 is rightly considered the Holy Grail, given how much it helps you gain visibility and recognition.

To reach position zero, all you have to do is follow Google’s guidelines to the letter and properly optimize your site’s pages in order to best answer the user’s questions.

Easier said than done! Google’s criteria regarding content are increasingly strict, and creating pages optimized for the search engine can quickly turn into a real headache.

That is why Semji has developed a platform that helps you create content that is relevant for your target audience and 100% optimized for search engines.

The solution’s AI shows you the associated terms and questions and ranks them according to their search volume.

Semji also surfaces users’ intents on the query and suggests various optimizations:

• Optimal content length,
• Relevance of the title in relation to the chosen keyword,
• Consideration of user intents in the structure of the article,
• Recurrence of topics related to the theme,
• Presence of users’ questions on the subject,
• Number and presence of inbound and outbound links, etc.

All of these optimization criteria are taken into account within the Content Score, an SEO evaluation system specific to Semji.

The more optimized your content is, the more your Content Score increases and the more likely your page is to rank at the top of the results for the target query.

To learn more about Semji, request your demo right now!

To wrap up, also check out a “how-to” video, produced by HubSpot, on getting to Google’s first position:

How to Optimize for Google Snippet Box - YouTube

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How to Optimize for Google Snippet Box HubSpot Marketing

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