The State of Search: Q&As and FAQs Coming to Position Zero

The SEO world has been aware of, and talking about, the concept of Position Zero now for quite some time; it is the widely used term for organic content that appears above the #1 spot on Google for specific types of search terms. We see different use cases pop up regularly: for simple informational answers (e.g., “Who is the CEO of Apple?” or “What is the numerical value of pi?”), geographical queries, and even interactive experiences. With the growth of voice search, the content that appears as an “answer” in Position Zero is becoming ever more important. So that’s why we’re always on the lookout for new variations of Position Zero content, like this bit of news from Search Engine Journal, indicating that Q&As, FAQs, and How-To results will soon fill the space above traditional organic results with unique new layouts.

What does this mean for our clients?

The evolution of Google’s content presentation, to include Position Zero in all of its forms, means we continue to move beyond an era of tracking just the “top ten” results as sequential links. At REQ, we are working on an upcoming release of our monitoring dashboard REQ Perceive^TM, to incorporate this kind of rich content, and we are always looking for ways to redefine our clients' narrative and their message in ways that are compatible with new Google formats. The introduction of Q&A and FAQ content just means more opportunities to use schema tags and rich snippets to try and pull relevant content directly onto page one.