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tlbodine · 3 years ago

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Reverse-Outlining Revision Method with Plottr

So in my editing guide, I give a step-by-step method for structural editing that I find really useful, and I wanted to do a visual follow-up to kind of show what that process looks like. I’m using Plottr for this, because I was gifted a copy of the software in exchange for them using my horror-writing beat-sheet as one of the templates, but you could just as easily do this with Scrivener, scrap paper, or any other organizational system you like.

Whether you’re a fellow pantser who struggles with story structure (hi!) or you’re an outliner who needs to make sure your draft matches up to your vision (or the second draft has a good structure), this will work for you!

Step One: Write a one-sentence log-line of the story + jot down the major themes

There’s space for this in Plottr. I’m doing Neverest.

Premise: A woman’s search for her missing husband’s body on Mount Everest sends her into the grip of ancient forces that don’t want her to leave.

Themes: Putting your name on something doesn't make it yours; colonialism and the urge to conquer and codify; relationships as a form of control and change vs understanding

You’ll also want to write a one-page overview summary of the story, similar to what you’d put in a query letter. Here’s mine:

One year ago, Sean Miller -- journalist and mountain climbing enthusiast -- reached the summit of Mt. Everest, and was never seen again. Unable to move on without knowing the truth of what happened, his wife Carrie flies to Nepal to meet with Sean’s best friend and former climbing partner, Tom. They assemble a small crew and begin an expedition up the peak in search of Sean’s body and a better understanding of what might have happened in his final days.

Guided by a travel journal left behind from her husband's expedition, Carrie ventures into the frozen, open-air graveyard of the world's tallest peak. But as Sean’s diary and Carrie’s experiences reveal, climbing the mountain is more than a test of endurance; it’s a battle of wills with an ancient and hostile force protecting the mountain — and the dead do not rest easy at the summit.

Doing this helps you to identify the core elements of your story -- the characters, the conflict, and the stakes. You should be able to answer the questions: who is the main character, what do they want, what’s stopping them, what happens if they succeed/fail.

In this case:

The main character is Carrie, the wife of a journalist who disappeared while summiting Mt. Everest (character)

She wants to find his body and get closure about his death/understand how and why he died (what does she want)

But there are supernatural forces at work that led to his death and now have the same in store for her (conflict/stakes)

Step Two: List out every scene in the book

Plottr is an outlining software, so it makes this step really easy (and conveniently color-codes things for me at the same time!). There are multiple views this can take, but this one screenshots well so I used this one for the example.

Basically what you want to do is write down everything that happens, scene by scene. You can color-code them however you want -- in my case, I have three narrative threads, so I made a timeline for each one. Then I just mapped out all the scenes -- across 24 chapters, each dot is a scene, and you can see that some chapters have multiple scenes and also that the primary and secondary plot alternate chapters.

When you look at it this way, you can tell really clearly that the tertiary plot needs some work -- it’s only there for four scenes in the first third of the story. I either need to cut it completely and incorporate any essential information into the other plots, or I need to expand it.

In this particular case, I decided to expand because 1.) my word count is low, and I’d like to fill in more story and 2.) a big theme I want to explore in the story is what it’s like to love someone who’s deeply passionate about something you don’t understand -- so this tertiary plot is a great place to explore that and fill in more characterization that should add some depth to the primary and secondary stories.

I can also see at a glance that I have a variable number of scenes in each chapter. Sometimes that makes sense (the green ones are diary entries, so it’s logical that one chapter = one entry) but sometimes it hints that those chapters could be a little thin and need more content. If I’m looking to add additional conflict, I should do it in those blue chapters that only have one dot as opposed to the ones with multiple dots!

Step Three: Look at the overall shape and adjust for pacing and genre

Plottr has a bunch of templates pre-loaded into it that make this easy, but you can also just google various different story structures and beat sheets such as Save the Cat or the 3 Act Structure etc. But just look at the overall map of story beats and see how they line up with the outline you’ve made:

This is just a small snapshot view, but you get the idea -- when you look at the scenes side-by-side with the beat sheet, you can see some things. For example, it sure would make more sense if the flashback scene where Carrie decides to embark on this journey got its own chapter and lined up better with the “putting the players in action” plot point rather than being smooshed into the first chapter with the introduction to the world! The fact that I’ve got it smashed into that first chapter is probably a sign that my opening scenes/chapter itself is a bit thin and needs to be fleshed out a little more.

Step Four: Figure out what you need to adjust and make the changes accordingly

So after looking at everything mapped out this way, I’ve got a little list of things I need to do:

Come up with more scenes for that red plotline

Rearrange some things a little bit to better fit the structure I want

Figure out some more blue scenes to fill in the gaps caused by rearranging things and smooth over the pacing/amp up the conflict/alleviate some areas where critique partners hae expressed confusion

I also moved around the categories in Plottr (you can drag-and-drop storylines and chapters) to make it a bit easier to see everything all at once. Basically you can edit the story’s outline first, to save you the confusion of manually moving around whole paragraphs/chapters in your actual story document.

Now, I haven’t finished that step yet for this particular project (there’s a lot of brainstorming to do re: filling in those gaps!) BUT I did want to skip ahead to show you the next step (let’s pretend this is a TV cooking show where the finished pie is pulled right out of the oven).

Step Five: Re-Type everything based on your new scene list

This is a really neat thing about Plottr. If you swap from the “Timeline” view to the “Outline” view, you get these editable text windows where you can type whatever you want, and it’ll keep it organized into chapters and scenes.

So, just pull up your original in one window, and the Plottr screen (or other outlining/drafting device) in another. Dual monitors are great for this but we make due. Now, retype the original document into the new document, making changes as you go to fit the new outline and also cleaning up language and so forth as you go. For example, this time around I’ll be changing Carrie’s blue timeline scenes to present-tense instead of past, so I’ll rewrite them in present tense in the new window.

Once all that is said and done, in Plottr you can export the file directly into Scrivener or Word. (If you’re not using Plottr, you’ll have to figure out for your own self how to transfer the final product into a final document -- I trust you can sort through that). From there you’ve got a fresh clean copy of a second draft all ready to go for the final copy-edit/proofread/polish/formatting and then you’re off to the races!

I hope this was helpful for you! I talk more about editing in my Gumroad guide here: https://tlbodine.gumroad.com/l/jkLpr

If you’d like to receive all of my existing + future guides and support me in making more content like this, consider subscribing to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tlbodine

And you can pick up a copy of Plottr here: https://plottr.com/

This post isn’t sponsored or anything, but I did get a free copy of the software from the developer and I think it’s pretty neat. It’s still in beta so new features keep getting added, and the team that makes it are very nice and responsive to feedback.

#writing advice #writing tips #outlining #editing #how to edit #editing advice #writeblr #writing #share to save a writer

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cloudoclock · 4 years ago

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1 Year Later : My Sixth Form Masterpost 😊🧐

Last Summer, I decided to make a Masterpost of all the tips I gathered for people moving from year 11 to college of sixth form, as well as those who need any academic aids.

Today I decided to make a review of the masterpost I made for sixth formers last year. I’m now going into year 13, so I’ve had time to think about what’s best for me and as a very determined student, I thought it would be a good idea to look back at what I thought I needed.

Websites and Resources

Revision world - I did not use this at all this year. The only useful thing that came out of this website was the ability to make mind maps because I always get lost when I do them by hand - although there’s many other sites for that. 2/10

Specs - Going to your exam board website and printing out your specifications are a big help because you can outline your own self study throughout the year. Keeping track is essential. This was very essential for my Media class and English Literature because they are essay based and the spec is perfect for planning. 8/10

Specimen Papers and Walkthroughs - we all know how useful practice is and finding up-to-date papers are essential for calming yourself into the exam mindset. Walkthoughs on Youtube are also great because it gives a condensed version of the exam thought process. As someone who struggled with improving my essay writing to A Level standards, specimen papers are essential to my own planning and actually understanding how arguments are executed. 8.5/10

Powerpoints or Prezi- this one is a bit of an odd one and does require a bit of digging. Search up “a level (subject) powepoint/presentation” and there may be a presentation from teachers on a unit from your subject. On Prezi there are loads of presentations that are easy to follow and vary in content. This was unintentionally the most useful resource for Media Studies. In my class, our teachers would set us up in groups bi-weekly and just give us an element of media to make presentations on. Luckily when you do a search along with “slideshare” there’ll be an array of student-made presentations. I don’t encourage copying but it cuts down on time spent searching for main facts. 10/10

Youtube - of course everyone’s favourite site is a useful resource. However, it is very easy to get distracted so look at specific channels and playlists. I actually didn’t use youtube too much this year, but I think it’s great for advice videos. 5/10

Emma studies - this is truly my prinatable queen annd planner life saver. She has all these free printables and layouts that you can just put in your binder and in your books to keep up with your work. However, I haven’t been journaling since COVID properly started in February, so I need to figure that out haha. *Note she hasn’t really been active in a while

Study Methods

Cornell Method - Not useful for someone like me. I did not practice this method enough because of its inefficiency and have now realised its totally useless for my style of work. I advise that you get a Skillshare and watch the entirety of Ali Abdaal’s study class or go look on his Youtube channel. The summary section is counter is a waste of space as I would probably rush it to just do it. Although the questions section is the most useful part, its more efficient to write the questions as a title and make additions after.

Colour schemes- Once again, another very very pretty add-on to notes but I stand by the rule of a MAX 3 colour scheme. I must reiterate that this is an add-on and it is best to stick to one colour pen, rather than switching between pens.

Rewriting Notes after class - now I know the idea seems long winded and a waste of your time, but ... I now realised it is actually A WASTE OF TIME. I earnestly entreat you to watch the skillshare class I mentioned. The act of re-writing extensive notes from class is not active recall, even though the act of writing is partially benefitial. I would advise writing down key points and specific points for the exam, but not much more. Repeated exposure to these facts or ideas is much better because you do all the summarising in your head. Obviously, this is the time you can make reformed notes, but doing it for every lesson is strenuous in the long run. The learning doesn’t take place on paper so save the environment.

Music

My light playlist - this playlist is pretty chill and a bit of a autumn night vibe.

Reading playlist - there’s pretty good scores on here for reading sessions for a bit of a switch from the usual (I really loved this during the autumn term, especially for English)

White noise- I loved this and some exam hall sounds on youtube.

Supplies

Home Binder/ expanding file - Unfortunately, I am yet to have a system that works with binders. It really does help to have a small file to hold all your papers, but I would use online files and not print unless necessary.

Binder for lessons- For STEM, language and perhaps essay classes, I think you definitely need a place to store all that content. Make sure you declutter often!

Refill pad/ notebook- I hated my perforated books and I’m starting to grow hatred for wirebound books (maybe its the way I store them), but I like having an easy notebook on the go.

Post its/ page tabs- I personally think these are a little wasteful if you are not using them consistently. Page tabs are very good for books if you need to focus on themes, characters or as points for essays.

Planner- please, please, please get a planner. You need a planner regardless of how you do it - online, bujo or on daily memo sheets.

USB - not many people talk about having a usb, maybe because we are in the digital age of sharing. When you need to quickly open docs or powerpoints in school, or in the library or at home, no one has time to wait for google drive. I learned how important it was to have a usb in gcses and it is worth the extra effort.

Tips and advice

The jump in self discipline, workload and effort at a level is different for everyone, but it is helpful for you prepare in whatever way you can, so that the hit isn’t so scary. I got hit so hard and was giving up by November; those videos about being tired are no joke.

Your friends are not always the best people to organise study groups with. Unless you are sure, that work is going to get done, its best that you find people that you can get serious with. I still stand by this because I know not everyone has a nice study space at school and the sooner you get used to focusing alone or better yet with a teacher, the better.

If you feel yourself losing focus and even after taking a break, you’re uninterested,stop and refresh at another time or the next day. You’re brain is doing so because it cannot fit anything else in there and forcing yourself isn’t helping anyone. If you continuously burn yourself out, you will find it difficult to come back to the work because you’re constantly reminding yourself of how much of a chore it is. - I got burned out twice and never recovered. Please take care.

Ask your teachers and your head of year questions. The magic word “ucas” is going to be popping up and soon enough you’re going to be worrying about your personal statement.(Its popping up right now for me </3) If you have a query, find a time to talk with them because it is invaluable support. If you’re like me, write on a piece of paper the questions you have and meet your teacher in a free or at lunch so you can be comfortable and get down what you can. They’re a lot more understanding than I thought.

You can buy all the supplies and ask all the questions but implementing these keys are all on YOU. If you feel yourself slipping, be honest and accept it because if you keep running from it, you could seriously damage your physical and mental health. Keep a diary so you can notice patterns in your energy.

Your best is your best. Succcess is subjective blah blah blah and no one can take that from you. When you get your results, you know what you put into those exams/coursework , so you are entitled to disappointment or joy.

This took me a while to make so I appreciate any comments or reblogs. I love you random person. If you got to this point I would appreciate it if you could follow my general account on Instgram @fairy_lierre, as I’m going to rest my studygram. Stay tuned for lots more on a level advice and life update <3

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kadobeclothing · 5 years ago

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How AI Tools Dropped One Agency’s Reporting Time by 97%

As marketers in 2020, there’s one major thing that we have in common: We’re driven by data.

Regardless of whether we’re copywriters, social media managers, videographers, or web designers, data is key to helping us determine which projects are successful, which strategies might require more of a budget, and which tactics we need to leave behind.

But those who thrive on data also know its one major downfall: it can take hours to collect and organize. Even if you have an analytics software that tracks a campaign’s traffic, engagements, ROI, and other KPIs, you’ll likely still need to take time to organize these numbers, analyze them, and come up with an understandable way to report on your projects to your team or clients. In the past, marketing firms and agencies tasked full-timers with reporting-related duties. And, although much of the data collection process has been automated by various analytics software, marketing teams and firms are still losing countless hours on manual data reporting. This is a problem that my Cleveland-based marketing firm, PR 20/20, ran into a few years ago. As part of our process, we create monthly performance reports for each of our clients. When we create them, we pull the data from HubSpot and Google Analytics. Then, we write a report to explain the data to our colleagues, clients, and project stakeholders. These reports allowed our clients to make better sense of the numbers they were seeing and formulate their strategies around where they performed well or needed improvement. But, although they were helping our clients, creating them was holding our team back. While our clients found the reports valuable, the process of pulling the data, analyzing it, and drafting the reports easily took five hours per client, per month. This took our marketers away from tasks that could have been productive in the long run, such as brainstorming new ideas and strategies that could noticeably help their clients. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how to streamline reporting with AI, using our own experiment as an example. How to Streamline Your Reporting Processes with AI Step 1: Research your AI software options. Whenever you’re attempting to experiment with or implement a new strategy, you’ll want to research the topic thoroughly. For example, you’ll want to recognize your budget and then look into software that fits into it. You’ll also want to determine the pros and cons of any software you consider. This will help you better familiarize yourself with the world of AI and which tools can actually help you. Because the topic of artificial intelligence comes with a lot of online hype, thorough research will also help you to distinguish which products are actually worth investing in and which are overhyped and overpriced. Prior to deciding that we wanted to streamline our reporting strategy, we’d been researching AI through resources at our Marketing AI Institute. The Institute is a media company that aims to make AI more approachable for marketers. Since we launched the company, we’ve published more than 400 articles on AI in marketing. We’re also tracking 1,500+ sales and marketing AI companies with combined funding north of $6.2 billion. After learning about how AI had already streamlined dozens of marketing-related processes, we decided to explore how automation and artificial intelligence could help us with our clients at PR 20/20. We became obsessed with how smarter technology could increase revenue and reduce costs. In the process, we found natural language generation (NLG) technology that wrote plain English automatically. Essentially, NLG takes structured data — such as information on spreadsheets — and turns it into written or spoken language. You’ve encountered NLG anytime you’ve used Gmail’s Smart Compose feature. Or, when you hear Amazon’s Alexa respond to your voice queries. Once we discovered a potentially helpful NLG software, we decided to run an experiment to see if the AI technology could partially or fully automate our performance report writing process. 2. Pick software that works best for your team. After doing your research, you might learn the basics of how AI technology such as machine learning or NLG works. Now, the next step is to search for software that works for your business. Here are a few things you’ll need to consider: The cost: You’ll want to consider the cost of any of the software’s subscriptions or fees, as well as the cost to implement it. For example, you may need to contract or hire an engineer to prepare your data and take any steps to make sure the software works smoothly. Maintenance needed: While higher-priced software might be intuitive enough to require lower maintenance, others may need to be monitored and updated by someone who’s very tech-savvy. Be sure to understand what you’ll need to do if something isn’t working properly so you don’t incur any emergency costs. Usability: As a marketer, you won’t want to rely on a full-time engineer to use AI software to run your reports. You’ll want to shop for software that your less tech-savvy team members can eventually get trained on and learn. For example, a software that lets you adjust your settings or make basic adjustments in an easy to understand dashboard will be effective for multiple team members and require fewer software experts to manage. As you pick out software, you’ll also want to track down case studies, reviews, or user testimonials that describe how a company used the software to run reports or complete a similar activity. This will give you an idea of if the product you’re considering has a good track record or credibility in the AI software industry. When it comes to finding affordable AI-powered software, there are a number of service providers that similarly use NLG to draft analytics reports or generate dashboards that you can then share with your clients or stakeholders. Here are two highly-regarded examples: Domo Domo is a data visualization and reporting tool that integrates with major data and analytics platforms including Google Analytics. Once you connect these platforms, you can use a dashboard to set up and generate data visualizations or reports for your clients. These visualizations include pie charts, other graphs, and word clouds. Preparing the data that Domo will report on also requires minimal maintenance. The platform offers guides on how to create datasets or spreadsheets that its algorithms will recognize as well as a drag and drop guide which asks you to upload specific information such as “Monthly Budget.” Here’s a quick demo that shows Domo in action:

Adaptive Insights This reporting software allows you to generate reports or reporting dashboards that your team and clients can edit and cross-collaborate on. Like Domo, it also includes a handful of data visualization capabilities.

Aside from data visualizations, you can also add boxes to your dashboards that show you scorecards that note whether you’re hitting your goals or not, as well as filters that help you drill down on specific aspects of your project. Here’s a demo explaining how small businesses such as nonprofits can benefit from the software’s dashboard reporting features:

3. Prepare your data so your software can understand it. Regardless of which product you choose, you’ll likely need to prepare your data in a way that your software’s robot or algorithm could easily recognize and analyze. For example, before beginning our own experiment, we needed to prep the data by structuring it in a way that was compatible with the very basic NLG software we used. The software required structured data in columns and rows to generate text. So, first, we had to pull HubSpot and Google Analytics data into spreadsheets. Because doing this manually would take too much time and limit the potential time saved with automation, we used APIs and built our own algorithm using Google Apps Scripts to pull data into a Google Sheet. Next, we standardized how each performance report would be formatted. We knew NLG software would be unlikely to handle completely custom reports well. So, we created a template for these reports that didn’t change each month. To create a format for each report, we identified a set of 12 common questions we were trying to answer for clients each month: How much traffic came to your website, and how does that compare to the previous month? Last year? How engaged was last month’s website traffic? What were the top traffic-driving channels? Was there fluctuation in overall traffic, and if so, what caused it? How did the blog perform last month? How engaged was blog traffic? What were the top-performing blog posts? Were there any changes in blog traffic last month, and if so, what caused them? How many goals or new contacts were generated last month? What were the top converting pages? Where did goals or new contacts originate? Was there any change in total goals or lead volume, and if so, what was responsible? 4. Develop a template or set up a dashboard for your reports. A good AI software will either allow you to create documents or even dashboards, as your reports. These assets can then be sent to your team or your clients so that they can easily look over and make sense of what all the data you’ve collected means. Once we’d structured our data and developed a standard report format, we had to translate our standard report format into an NLG template. The template was essentially a completed version of a performance report. When the NLG software runs, this report gets copied into the NLG software. Then rules are applied to the copy to programmatically update what’s written based on the structured data provided. Specifically, we assigned: Variables: Parts of the template that are swapped out with a data point. Conditional Statements: Branching if/then logic that selects the appropriate wording to Synonyms: To give the content some variety, synonyms can be added to vary the words or phrases used in the report. The NLG software will randomly insert one from a list of options that humans create. Rather than the NLG software solely writing out a report, which could result in incomprehensible sentences that poorly discussed the data, we created the template so that the software would merely fill in the blanks of each report with specific data points. The end result was a template that, when paired with a spreadsheet, automatically produces a unique report for each client. The final output could be a CSV, Word, or Google Doc file. 5. Test the software before implementing it. Even if you’re working with a credible AI software, you’ll still want to test it and troubleshoot any issues that come to light. This prevents any AI-related incidents from occurring when the tool is actively being used by employees or on tight deadlines. We ran hundreds of tests to guarantee the reports came out accurate and read well. And we eventually perfected the process to consistently produce clear, accurate automated performance reports. If a software provider that you work with offers a trial or discount for testing out their product, leverage it. This will allow you to witness first-hand if the cost of the product outweighs its benefits, or give you time to identify if there is a more suitable product that you should be using. 6. Once implemented, measure your results. Like in the testing phase, you’ll want to monitor how well your tools are working when they are actually implemented in your office. When you do this, here are a few things that you’ll want to evaluate: The amount of time that the software is saving employees, or if there were any bugs, how much time the software cost. The amount of other productive or revenue-generating tasks your team was able to get done with the extra time you had. The ability of your team members to be trained and adapt to the new software and reporting processes. As we tracked our new automated performance reports, we found that our tools took a fraction of the time to produce the same report that we took hours to create. Additionally, the level of detail in our client reports is now consistent across all accounts. Before we implemented AI tools, the reports were only as strong as the account team’s comfort level of analyzing marketing performance reports. Now, at midnight on the first of the month, our reporting program starts to pull in the data, communicates with the NLG system, and then automatically creates Google Docs with the fully written report. The only manual part of the process now involves spot-checking the data for accuracy, applying some styling, and then sending. What once took us five hours per report now takes 10 minutes. While the original process needed to be managed by multiple teammates, only one staff member is needed for spot-checking. In this scenario, our company benefited from NLG technology because our new process allowed us to increase revenue from happy clients, improve the quality of our data reporting, and reduce costs of time and labor originally associated with reporting. Resources for Automated Reporting Although our team is able to access AI providers and experts for our in-office experiments, other small business marketers can also take advantage of this strategy somewhat affordably. However, keep in mind that AI implementation can take time. For us, we needed to put time into building structured datasets, as well as our Report template so that our AI software could read our analytics and draft reports properly. If you’re interested in testing out your own AI experiments, but don’t know where to start, check out the HubSpot Academy course, “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Marketing: Live from MAICON.” It will teach you how to apply AI in marketing using a holistic framework and begin conversations around piloting AI in your business.

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isearchgoood · 5 years ago

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The Featured Snippets Cheat Sheet and Interactive Q&A

Posted by BritneyMuller

Earlier this week, I hosted a webinar all about featured snippets covering essential background info, brand-new research we've done, the results of all the tests I've performed, and key takeaways. Things didn't quite go as planned, though. We had technical difficulties that interfered with our ability to broadcast live, and lots of folks were left with questions after the recording that we weren't able to answer in a follow-up Q&A.

The next best thing to a live webinar Q&A? A digital one that you can bookmark and come back to over and over again! We asked our incredibly patient, phenomenally smart attendees to submit their questions via email and promised to answer them in an upcoming blog post. We've pulled out the top recurring questions and themes from those submissions and addressed them below. If you had a question and missed the submission window, don't worry! Ask it down in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going.

If you didn't get a chance to sign up for the original webinar, you can register for it on-demand here:

Watch the webinar

And if you're here to grab the free featured snippets cheat sheet we put together, look no further — download the PDF directly here. Print it off, tape it to your office wall, and keep featured snippets top-of-mind as you create and optimize your site content.

Now, let's get to those juicy questions!

1. Can I win a featured snippet with a brand-new website?

If you rank on page one for a keyword that triggers a featured snippet (in positions 1–10), you're a contender for stealing that featured snippet. It might be tougher with a new website, but you're in a position to be competitive if you're on page one — regardless of how established your site is.

We've got some great Whiteboard Fridays that cover how to set a new site up for success:

Launching a New Website: Your SEO Checklist

10 Basic SEO Tips to Index + Rank New Content Faster

How to Rank: The SEO Checklist

2. Does Google provide a tag that identifies traffic sources from featured snippets? Is there a GTM tag for this?

Unfortunately, Google does not provide a tag to help identify traffic from featured snippets. I'm not aware of a GTM tag that helps with this, either, but would love to hear any community suggestions or ideas in the comments!

It's worth noting that it's currently impossible to determine what percentage of your traffic comes from the featured snippet versus the duplicate organic URL below the featured snippet.

3. Do you think it's worth targeting longer-tail question-based queries that have very low monthly searches to gain a featured snippet?

Great question! My advice is this: don’t sleep on low-search-volume keywords. They often convert really well and in aggregate they can do wonders for a website. I suggest prioritizing long tail keywords that you foresee providing a high potential ROI. For example, there are millions of searches a month for the keyword “shoes.” Very competitive, but that query is pretty vague. In contrast, the keyword “size 6 red womens nike running shoes” is very specific. This searcher knows what they want and they're dialing in their search to find it. This is a great example of a long tail keyword phrase that could provide direct conversions.

4. What's the best keyword strategy for determining which queries are worth creating featured snippet-optimized content for?

Dr. Pete wrote a great blog post outlining how to perform keyword research for featured snippets back in 2016. Once you've narrowed down your list of likely queries, you need to look at keywords that you rank on page one for, that trigger a snippet, and that you don't yet own. Next, narrow your list down further by what you envision will have the highest ROI for your goals. Are you trying to drive conversions? Attract top-of-funnel site visitors? Make sure the queries you target align with your business goals, and go from there. Both Moz Pro and STAT can be a big help with this process.

A tactical pro tip: Use the featured snippet carousel queries as a starting point. For instance, if there's a snippet for the query "car insurance" with a carousel of "in Florida," "in Michigan," and so on, you might consider writing about state-specific topics to win those carousel snippets. For this technique, the bonus is that you don't really need to be on page one for the root term (or ranking at all) — often, carousel snippets are taken from off-SERP links.

5. Do featured snippets fluctuate according to language, i.e. if I have several versions of my site in different languages, will the snippet display for each version?

This is a great question! Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do international/multi-language featured snippet research just yet, but hope to in the future. I would suspect the featured snippet could change depending on language and search variation. The best way to explore this is to do a search in an incognito (and un-logged-in) browser window of Google Chrome. If you've performed research along these lines, let us know what you found out down in the comments!

6. Why do featured snippet opportunities fluctuate in number from day to day?

Change really is the only constant in search. In the webinar, I discussed the various tests I did that caused Moz to lose a formerly won featured snippet (and what helped it reappear once again). Changes as simple as an extra period at the end of a sentence were enough to lose us the snippet. With content across the web constantly being created and edited and deprecated and in its own state of change, it's no wonder that it's tough to win and keep a featured snippet — sometimes even from one day to the next.

The SERPs are incredibly volatile things, with Google making updates multiple times every day. But when it comes down to the facts, there are a few things that reliably cause volatility (is that an oxymoron?):

If a snippet is pulling from a lower-ranking URL (not positions 1–3); this could mean Google is testing the best answer for the query

Google regularly changing which scraped content is used in each snippet

Featured snippet carousel topics changing

The best way to change-proof yourself is to become an authority in your particular niche (E-A-T, remember?) and strive to rank higher to increase your chances of capturing and keeping a featured snippet.

7. How can I use Keyword Lists to find missed SERP feature opportunities? What's the best way to use them to identify keyword gaps?

Keyword Lists are a wonderful area to uncover feature snippet (and other SERP feature) opportunity gaps. My favorite way to do this is to filter the Keyword List by your desired SERP feature. We’ll use featured snippets as an example. Next, sort by your website’s current rank (1–10) to determine your primary featured snippet gaps and opportunities.

The filters are another great way to tease out additional gaps:

Which keywords have high search volume and low competition?

Which keywords have high organic CTR that you currently rank just off page one for?

8. What are best practices around reviewing the structure of content that's won a snippet, and how do I know whether it's worth replicating?

Content that has won a featured snippet is definitely worth reviewing (even if it doesn’t hold the featured snippet over time). Consider why Google might have provided this as a featured snippet:

Does it succinctly answer the query?

Might it sound good as a voice answer?

Is it comprehensive for someone looking for additional information?

Does the page provide additional answers or information around the topic?

Are there visual elements?

It’s best to put on your detective hat and try to uncover why a piece of content might be ranking for a particular featured snippet:

What part of the page is Google pulling that featured snippet content from?

Is it marked up in a certain way?

What other elements are on the page?

Is there a common theme?

What additional value can you glean from the ranking featured snippet?

9. Does Google identify and prioritize informational websites for featured snippets, or are they determined by a correlation between pages with useful information and frequency of snippets?

In other words, would being an e-commerce site harm your chances of winning featured snippets, all other factors being the same?

I’m not sure whether Google explicitly categorizes informational websites. They likely establish a trust metric of sorts for domains and then seek out information or content that most succinctly answers queries within their trust parameters, but this is just a hypothesis.

While informational sites tend to do overwhelmingly better than other types of websites, it’s absolutely possible for an e-commerce website to find creative ways of snagging featured snippets.

It’s fascinating how various e-commerce websites have found their way into current featured snippets in extremely savvy ways. Here's a super relevant example: after our webinar experienced issues and wasn't able to launch on time, I did a voice search for “how much do stamps cost” to determine how expensive it would be to send apology notes to all of our hopeful attendees.

This was the voice answer:

“According to stamps.com the cost of a one ounce first class mail stamp is $0.55 at the Post Office, or $.047 if you buy and print stamps online using stamps.com.”

Pretty clever, right? I believe there are plenty of savvy ways like this to get your brand and offers into featured snippets.

10. When did the "People Also Ask" feature first appear? What changes to PAAs do you anticipate in the future?

People Also Ask boxes first appeared in July 2015 as a small-scale test. Their presence in the SERPs grew over 1700% between July 2015 and March 2017, so they certainly exploded in popularity just a few years ago. Funny enough, I was one of the first SEOs to come across Google’s PAA testing — you can read about that stat and more in my original article on the subject: Infinite "People Also Ask" Boxes: Research and SEO Opportunities

We recently published some great PAA research by Samuel Mangialavori on the Moz Blog, as well: 5 Things You Should Know About "People Also Ask" & How to Take Advantage

And there are a couple of great articles cataloging the evolution of PAAs over the years here:

What’s the deal with "People also ask" boxes? (2016)

How the "People also ask" box is evolving (2017)

When it comes to predicting the future of PAAs, well, we don't have a crystal ball yet, but featured snippets continue to look more and more like PAA boxes with their new-ish accordion format. Is it possible Google will merge them into a single feature someday? It's hard to say, but as SEOs, our best bet is to maintain flexibility and prepare to roll with the punches the search engines send our way.

11. Can you explain what you meant by "15% of image URLs are not in organic"?

Sure thing! The majority of images that show up in featured snippet boxes (or to be more accurate, the webpage those images live on) do not rank organically within the first ten pages of organic search results for the featured snippet query.

12. How should content creators consider featured snippets when crafting written content? Are there any tools that can help?

First and foremost, you'll want to consider the searcher.

What is their intent?

What desired information or content are they after?

Are you providing the desired information in the medium in which they desire it most (video, images, copy, etc)?

Look to the current SERPs to determine how you should be providing content to your users. Read all of the results on page one:

What common themes do they have?

What topics do they cover?

How can you cover those better?

Dr. Pete has a fantastic Whiteboard Friday that covers how to write content to win featured snippets. Check it out: How to Write Content for Answers Using the Inverted Pyramid

You might also get some good advice from this classic Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin: How to Appear in Google's Answer Boxes

13. "Write quality content for people, not search engines" seems like great advice. But should I also be using any APIs or tools to audit my content?

The only really helpful tool that comes to mind is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, but even that can be a bit disruptive to the creative process. The very best tool you might have for reviewing your content might be a real person. I would ensure that your content can be easily understood when read out loud to your targeted audience. It may help to consider whether your content, as a featured snippet, would make for an effective, helpful voice search result.

14. What's the best way to stay on top of trends when it comes to Google's featured snippets?

Find publications and tools that resonate, and keep an eye on them. Some of my favorites include:

MozCast to keep a pulse on the Google algorithm

Monitoring tools like STAT (email alerts when you win/lose a snippet? Awesome.)

Cultivating a healthy list of digital marketing heroes to follow on Twitter

Industry news publications like Search Engine Journal and, of course, the Moz Blog ;-)

Subscribing to SEO newsletters like the Moz Top 10

One of the very best things you can do, though, is performing your own investigative featured snippet research within your space. Publishing the trends you observe helps our entire community grow and learn.

Thank you so much to every attendee who submitted their questions. Digging into these follow-up thoughts and ideas is one of the best parts of putting on a presentation. If you've got any lingering questions after the webinar, I would love to hear them — leave me a note in the comments and I'll be on point to answer you. And if you missed the webinar sign-up, you can still access it on-demand whenever you want.

We also promised you some bonus content, yeah? Here it is — I compiled all of my best tips and tricks for winning featured snippets into a downloadable cheat sheet that I hope is a helpful reference for you:

Free download: The Featured Snippets Cheat Sheet

There's no reason you shouldn't be able to win your own snippets when you're armed with data, drive, and a good, solid plan! Hopefully this is a great resource for you to have on hand, either to share around with colleagues or to print out and keep at your desk:

Grab the cheat sheet

Again, thank you so much for submitting your questions, and we'll see you in the comments for more.

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whitelabelseoreseller · 5 years ago