More search engine result page (SERP) real estate means higher clickthrough rates for better SEO!
Occupying more space provides additional links & content to engage with, better context, and looks more impressive than competitors.
Here are 7 strategies to expand your SERP real estate:
1. Explore Google’s feature guides, which details structured data opportunities. All of these can add rich snippets to your regular listings, if appropriate for your business. The latest trend is exploiting FAQ schema.
2. Earn featured snippets, or boxes at the top of the organic results, that answer the search directly. These address question-based or long-tailed subjects.
Organize your content like an outline, with headers addressing related questions or specific intent, then use short paragraphs, lists & tables under them to make these more likely.
3. Adding a Table of Contents, with anchor links leading to headers on-page from the top, will often activate sitelinks. These can also enable through good header use like H2s & H3s in an outline format. However, it may not always link directly to them, making a ToC preferable.
4. Create rich multimedia that includes videos, images and even podcasts. These both activate sections within the search results, or enrich regular listings (especially images on mobile), depending on the query.
5. Branded searches often pull information from something called the knowledge graph. This comes about by forming an entity, which often requires a Wikipedia page in practice. Other strategies related to this include fresh YouTube or Twitter accounts, which will populate these feeds in search results.
6. Run Google Ads campaigns. These are at the very top for many queries. Of course, you have to pay for these!
7. Before this all seems too complicated, you can simply enter your targeted query into Google, noting unique sections within the SERP. SEO tools like SEMrush can automate this effort.
For example, newsworthy content has Top Stories. E-commerce has many unique SERP features, especially as Google seeks to incorporate a shopping experience. After this step though, develop a strategy to enable more SERP estate that addresses that search intent as well!