Getting a Local Business To Rank For Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets

51%

Increase in traffic

31%

Increase in top 3 keywords

Overview

Short Film Hacks is a film blog that I created to discuss anything related to short films, based on my experience with filmmaking as a hobby and in my video production class back in high school. I discussed topics like storytelling, editing, and film fundamentals

SEO Tools Used

WEBSITE URL

https://shortfilmhacks.com/

TIME SPAN CONSIDERED

September 2022 to September 2023

FILM BLOG

SERVICES RENDERED

SEO Strategy

Technical SEO

*Note: The client name is not given, nor the specific keywords or location for reasons of confidentiality. The only thing I can say that this is an arborist client in the East Coast, where many of these sorts of companies are in demand due to the nature of the land in many of these areas.

Local businesses are generally who I work with at my agency, so much of the work I do on a day to day basis is very similar to the work done for this client

Challenges

This site had done SEO in the past but they had tons of service pages that were not ranking because they did not have a proper keyword research strategy in place

There were also a lot of holes in their technical SEO, especially with broken links making their way into the fold. These kinds of cobwebs can send the wrong signals to Google, which can potentially get you penalized

There were a lot of service location pages as well, which the client had in place to attempt to rank for other cities as well, meaning we had to select a few common keywords across all pages and try to create an effective system to rank for all of these keywords.

Strategies

Initial Keyword Research

To begin, I did the keyword research using Keyword Tool since it is more effective for local search volumes and keyword suggestions in local areas than say Ahrefs or SEMrush. Once I get that done and organized to send to the client, they approved it and I got off to work. Once that’s done, it’s a matter of digging into the backend and applying the optimizations as usual.

Collaborating With Other Teams

Once the client approves the keywords, I delegate the work to get the media room set up so that we can start leveraging digital PR to get backlinks, boosting our off-page SEO. In addition, the GBP profile gets optimized as well, using the top 5 keywords that the client approved to make the posts.

Content is especially important for featured snippets since if those opportunities come (which aren’t really common for local searches), we had a small section of text that Google can deem relevant for the query and land that featured snippet as intended.

Technical SEO Optimizations

We were starting to rack up broken links on the site, so I had to go into the backend and investigate what was causing that. Once I could detect the source, I ended up replacing the broken link with the right link so that the links within the site flow and have no cracks in the SEO