Google Featured Snippets for World’s Largest Online Chess School

INTRODUCTION:

IchessU (Chesscoachonline.com) specializes in chess education, where both kids & adults can all take chess lessons in a group and private classroom setting. IchessU is one of the leading online chess schools, providing live lessons from famous chess coaches & mentors. All classes are online, executed through interactive voice & video lessons simulating a live environment. Their private chess coaching sessions too are quite popular, and they also have programs for people with ADHD, Alzheimer’s, etc.

While majority of their students speak English, chess trainers on IchessU are based all around the world and are able to provide lessons in multiple languages. Their coaches include an International Grandmaster, several international masters, and mentors who’ve been training national and international level champions for several years.

CHALLENGE:

IchessU wanted to significantly increase the organic search traffic by being positioned on top for all the keywords that are used by people who want to learn chess. However, the problem is that top rankings no longer guarantee success. Even after being ranked for a lot of high-popularity keywords, the growth in traffic was incremental while IchessU wanted exponential growth for their already well-established & popular site.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to acquire organic search traffic as Google continues to push its Ads throughout the search engine result pages (SERPs). Google has also become more creative in presenting its search results, with Universal Search, Knowledge Graph, and Featured Rich Snippets showing up for more and more queries. These developments though seem adverse for organic search, there are constant new issues that feature opportunities if utilized efficiently.

ABOUT FEATURED SNIPPETS:

Here’s how to simplistically describe Featured Snippets – Google programmatically determines whether a page contains a likely answer to the user’s question, and if it does, then Google displays the result as a featured snippet. When Google recognizes that a query asks a question, it programmatically detects pages that answer user’s question, and displays a top result as a featured snippet in the search results. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL. The summary is a snippet extracted programmatically from what a visitor sees on your web page. What’s different with a featured snippet is that it is enhanced to draw user attention on the results page. Here’s how it looks in most cases:

STRATEGY:

While, there are no specific rules or official instructions by Google on optimizing a site for Featured Snippets, with our years of research and development, we at SEOValley have data-driven process in place which can help boost a site’s visibility in Featured Snippets.

We used the same process for IchessU (Chesscoachonline.com) which included:

  1. Researching for and identifying terms that can trigger Featured Snippets within their niche.
  2. Since most search terms that generate Featured Snippets are “query-based”, offering a concise answer on the landing page that satisfies majority of the query-based terms mapped with that page.
  3. Providing additional information in both textual and visual form to supplement the given answer.
  4. Finally, making sure that the pages which were intended for Featured Snippets are indexed and prominently featured on the site.

In addition to the above specifics, SEO best practices which include high-quality link building, on-page Optimization, and regular technical audits were being performed as part of a comprehensive SEO campaign.

SERVICES APPLIED:

RESULTS:

Within months of implementing our targeted SEO strategies, Google started showing IchessU (Chesscoachonline.com) in Featured Snippets for some of the targeted terms. As the number of landing pages showing Featured Snippets started increasing, this snowballed into massive month-over-month gains in organic search traffic from Google.

Initially only for long-tail terms, IchessU (Chesscoachonline.com) now appears in Featured Snippets for some of the most popular and obviously most-competitive terms within the chess industry – chess rules, chess moves, etc.

As this growth continues, the organic search traffic on IchessU has increased 10X within the duration of a little more than a year. With no signs of slowing down any time soon, the total number of monthly organic search visits on the site continues to go north at an aggressive pace.