Relevant Content More Important Than Ever With Google’s Expanded Featured Snippets & Knowledge Panel

Creating relevant content for your site and telling Google about it is about to become much more important in a digital strategy if you want to generate traffic.

Ranking in the local 3-pack is the ultimate goal as that’s where the majority of your leads will be coming from. However, with Google’s latest announcement that it is expanding a few key areas on its search ranking pages, having your content appear at the top and within its features is going to be crucial for growth.

Longer Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panel information is on the way, Google recently announced. The search engine guru is constantly adapting to bring users the most relevant and accurate data in the fastest possible manner, and it believes that increasing the information in these two features will complement this goal.

These changes have actually already been made for particular keyphrases. For example, when searching roller blades on Google, there are new areas that appear in the results that encourage the searcher to do some further exploring:

The idea behind this is that Google does not want users to simply search for answers – they want you to discover and learn. By adding more images, videos, and related searches to its Knowledge Panel, users can easily identify related products, people, and places within a single search. Here’s another example when searching for Steve Jobs:

Google also announced that it is expanding the number of characters it will show to users within Featured Snippets. Previously, a maximum of 160 characters could be featured in the snippets, and Google has now decided it will show up to 230 characters.  This obviously means that a person searching will be able to learn more about a specific query than they could previously, which falls into the plan for Google to be the world’s largest (and fastest) source of information.

RELATED: Local Pack Website Content Now Appears Directly In Google’s Search Results

We already knew that having content optimized properly so that it can appear in Featured Snippets was important, but it could be even more important now that more content can be displayed. Could this prevent a searcher from continuing to scroll because they found their answer thanks to the extended character limit? It’s unlikely but at the same time very well possible.

Either way, creating relevant, rich, and fresh content as part of your marketing strategy remains key to generating great traffic from Google. Featured Snippets and the Knowledge Panel aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

If you have not already done so and want to have Connection Inc review your website and give you a free 30-minute consultation where we show you how to generate more local customers from your website, click here.