Barry Schwartz reported over on Search Engine Roundtable today, a change that SEO’s are reporting seeing.
They’re seeing screenshots like:
And
In case you missed it, what we’re seeing added is a “People Also Searched For” to the featured snippets box.
Why Is This Important?
You may be asking why this is important. There are changes to the SERP layouts almost every-other-day and generally we post about them on Twitter but rarely do we blog about them.
The reason for blogging about it this time, is the importance of what it signals and what it means for SEOs and site owners.
This signals that Google’s confidence in their selection of content for the featured snippet is very high. The next task on their plate then is not to coax a user to digging deeper into the subject with a click, or allow the searcher to get distracted and head over to Facebook or elsewhere to talk about their newfound knowledge.
No, the next task on Google’s plate is to distract the user and lead them into another search result. One they can monetize.
A Glimpse Of The Future
This is of course a guess, but I believe this is a good precursor to what the future holds.
A future where the content format presented attempts to keep users within a closed environment.
Now, one might say that this will be the end of organic search if accomplished. I suspect that’s not the case and that in the coming months and years we’ll start to see ways for content to be monetized via the SERPs in a similar fashion to how they’re monetized on YouTube.
But this one change definitely illustrates what’s coming.
Time to get ready.