This is a brand new global change. The change will affect 100% of all search listings worldwide. This means a reduction in multiple listings on Google Page 1 and if you have a featured snippet listing your organic listing will be on Google Page 2 or below.

For example, if I search "How to Brush your Teeth", The result is the following:

The organic appearance for this listing now appears on Google Page 2

1) You need to understand that if a result appears in the answer box, this is now 1 of the 10 organic results on Google.

2) If the answer box is answering the patient/users question on Google, Google has responded to the patient's question on their own website. The patient/user is unlikely to click-through to your website. Effectively Google is stealing your traffic with your content. I repeat Google is stealing your traffic with your content!

3) You will most likely see a decrease in Organic Traffic via Google Analytics if you have a listing in the featured snippet. Bear this in mind when speaking to your SEO manager.

4) Most likely, your blog articles or pages with FAQs will be affected by this update.

What do I do?

Now a natural question to ask is; will this affect my organic leads? It's too early to say, and I suspect unlikely because the searcher had an "informational query" not a "transactional query" - so Google isn't really the enemy 🙂 The good news is, if you had a Google featured position, which many of our clients do and you've kept it; you now have Google position 1.

There is no such thing as Google Position Zero anymore! To find out more, reach out to your Account Manager.