TL;DR The HubSpot Sales Blog pivoted to an organic-first strategy that helped us bounce back from several months of low traffic. Now we’re applying this strategy to all three of HubSpot's blogs.
TL;DR: Featured snippets are an organic search feature that now take significant search traffic from the search results below them. Featured snippets run on a separate algorithm than Google's traditional 200 ranking signals. To understand these signals, HubSpot’s SEO team ran a series of experiments and, together with the blog and web teams, developed a process for featured snippet optimization. The result: a clean code that allows you to capture featured snippets and a guide with best practices for optimizing your content for Google's featured snippet.
TL;DR:Traffic to theHubSpot Blogflattened out earlier this year after growing steadily since 2006. Our team dug into the trend and found that the decline was due to two main changes in Google search: the addition of featured snippets on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and the increase in conversational search.
