Position Zero – It’s a Good Thing

In my keynote at the Conduit conference in Philadelphia on April 6, 2019, I mentioned something called “position zero” as an aspect of SEO but didn’t really explain what it was and why it might matter to tech comm.

“Position zero”, also called a “featured snippet”, is a relatively recent addition to a Google search results list. It shows up in the list above the first hit – ergo “position zero”. It has a summary and a description of the site from which it came. For example, searching for “B58 Hustler” in Google gives this result.

The featured snippet appears above or, here, to the right of the first search result. It’s usually followed by a “People also search for” list of other questions in text form or, in this case, in graphical form.

The featured snippet is determined organically. According to “SEO above position 1: What's Position Zero?“ by Kent Campbell at https://blog.reputationx.com/what-is-position-zero-seo,

A few things play into which webpage's content is featured as the snippet:

      1. First page results. It’s necessary that your page is on the first page of search results for your given search query. Usually in the first five results. 

      2. Relevant information. The answer you provide has to be the right answer, and the information on the page must be relevant to the search term overall.

      3. Useful formatting. If you’ve formatted your answer like this answer is, or if you’ve got a nice table of information, Google will be more likely to display it.

So, what does this mean for tech comm? Until now, our searches have been internal to the authoring tool, like Flare’s search engine, or external, using Google, each giving the usual long list of hits. Ideally, our material will appear within the first ten hits, more ideally near the top of that list, but the exact position hasn’t been crucial. Until now…

We’re now moving from screen-based content toward voice-based content. We’ll want to appear at the top of the list of search hits because many users will go with the first hit because they won’t be able to remember the first three, let alone the first ten. Some users might respond to the first hit by asking the search engine for the next hit, but it will be the rare user who goes deeper down the list. So, the old rule of thumb that any item outside the first ten hits won’t be seen is changing. Now, any item outside the first one, possibly two, won’t be seen. That’s going to affect how we apply SEO to our content.

I expect to see conference presentations later this year or in 2020 on what’s required to reach position zero. Look for a blog post on the subject here in the next few months.