Featured Snippet for “People Also Ask” Google Search

It’s essential to be aware of what you’re up against when it comes to your business and its reputation. Although EarthLink is a legacy brand founded in 1994 that helped build the onramp to the information superhighway, changing ownership and mixed messages online were confusing to potential customers and detrimental to the brand’s reputation and bottom line.

In my first week working with the brand, I performed multiple searches and keyword investigations. A favorite tool is a free one; Google Autocomplete is perfect for discovering specific and relevant phrases that searchers are using to answer questions since it extends your search query as you type it based on the most common searches..

In the top 10, there were 2 results asking if the company was still operating. Those results were dated (#1 result was from 2016) and unhelpful to the consumer.

Goal: Answer the question accurately and promote the brand

Tactic: Create a page of content that answers the question.

Result: That page is now the #1 result and a featured snippet.

Custom Local Search Pages

In addition to thousands of more general SEO-driven local search pages, we identified 125 cities and towns with high serviceability. Working with a team of three, we developed content that would be both SEO keyword-rich and helpful to folks local to the area or moving to a new city. Each has custom content based on the locale.

By May 2022, we were ranking for 19,000 location-specific keywords and had an estimated traffic cost savings of $97,700 — what the equivalent pay-per-click ad reach would have cost the company to re-create.

Results: Roughly doubled organic keyword rankings in 8 months related to words not about the brand but related to what we do. (e.g. EarthLink internet versus internet near me)

Strategy & Execution: Our team worked hard to improve organic traffic including growing our content library by 115 blog posts. While there are many tweaks you can make to your site to improve organic search traffic (meta descriptions, alt tags, internal linking structure, custom graphics, better UX and navigation) having more content is arguably the most important.

Creating helpful internal links, supporting content, and site structure becomes much easier and impactful when there’s abundant quality content to work with.

Oct 2021: 33,800 total non-branded keywords

May 2022: 63,600 total non-branded keywords