3 Must-Read SEO Articles From Around the Web

Below are some of the must-read SEO articles form around the Web this week.

1. Which Sites Win the Most Featured Snippets – STAT
Have you ever wondered what steps you could take to help ensure your Website is selected for Googles’ answer box and knowledge graphs? You’re not alone.

STAT, a search analytics software company, recently released a white paper that presents the findings of an analysis of more than 1,000,000 high-CPC queries.

STAT Featured Snippet White paper

In their Whitepaper, they offer some great tips for optimizing your content to be selected in featured snippets. Here are few that stuck out.

1. Make sure your content has more than 1,000 words
2. Add tables tags (table tags)
3. Add lists (ol and li tags)
4. Make sure your H2s have exact match or partial match keywords
5. Make sure these pages are shared out on your social media accounts

2. How to Use BigQuery for Large-Scale SEO – Moz
Enterprise SEO over the years has become dependent on big data analytics to conduct full-scale analyses. Most SEOs don’t have the technical expertise or dev resources to setup a SQL server, so they get stuck trying to conduct VLOOKUPs on millions of rows worth of data in Excel.

But are they are options available?

Google thinks they have found the middle ground with BigQuery. BigQuery is a managed warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Moz recently shared a blog post from Dominic Woodman who offered some reasons why to use BigQuery or data analysis, which included:

1. Use it when Excel cannot handle your large data files (millions of rows!!)
2. It’s in the cloud so it can scale
3. You pay as you go (Nice, right?)
4. You can set it up without any programming skills (music to my ears)

Google’s BigQuery

3. What your boss actually wants from your local search reports – Search Engine Land
If you’re an in-house or agency SEO professional, reporting is one of the most important ways to show your progress/value to your clients or bosses. But what do your clients and bosses actually want to see? What do they actually care about?

Lydia Jorden, a digital strategist at Greystone Techology, published an article on Search Engine Land that offers a few metrics to consider and how to implement. Here are a few of them:

1. How local search performance affected sales
2. Using Google Analytics e-commerce tracking to provide value for local search reporting
   a. Segment the visitors who purchased your product or service on your Website
   b. Segment your traffic sources to make sure you only capture true organic and referral traffic.

Have you read any other valuable articles on the Web this week? Feel free to share them in the comments below. Happy reading!