Posted On : 14 May 2019
Back in 2018, Google first emphasized the importance of How-to and FAQ markup in search engines. There have been a lot of anticipations around this update for quite a long time with no one actually having any idea as to when Google would materialize it. However, in a recent Google I/O earlier this month, Google has finally launched and brought these features to life.
As per Google, this is going to give an entirely new dimension to search results and make things a lot easier for users to comprehend the things or tasks that they are looking forward to finding on Google.
Most importantly, this is expected to save searchers ample of time as they will not actually have to read the entire post to find out how they can go about a certain task. Google will display the best How-to results to answer such queries from now on.
Understanding the way How-to Structured Data is going to work
To understand how the How-to Structured Data is going to work, let us illustrate it with an example. For instance, if one is looking to find as to how one can tie a Tie and type the phrase on Google and enter, Google will now display the entire task in 4 to 5 steps to simplify it or in other words, Google will display the details in a stepwise manner for your searches.
Of course, a searcher can always visit a certain webpage for more information just in case one wants. However, one’s query pertaining to a certain task will be answered at the SERPs itself. For website owners, it can be a ranking factor in times to come. "How to" structured data helps voice search optimization as well.
How do the webmasters go about it?
For the website owners and SEO service providers to capitalize on this excellent feature, they can refer to the documentation that Google has recently published. The documentation explains as to how you can add the markup to the web pages and Google Assistant. Also, it comprises valuable information pertaining to the tools, steps and different properties that you could add to the markup.
In addition to this, Google has added a How-to report in the search console wherein you could find the errors and warnings to fix them in no time for better enhancement.
Google displays FAQs in the search results
Google has a markup for the FAQs in search results feature as well. If you are wondering as to how it is going to work like, Google will pull structured data from the FAQ pages and show them directly in the Google search and Google Assistant results.
However, Google has clarified that the feature is pretty different from QA pages or forums.
Search results on Google are certainly going to a lot better than ever before with the launching for these two features and most of the searchers are certainly going to have excellent ease of searching things on Google from now on.
However, considering the importance of these features for the searchers, it would be a very wise thing on the part of any website owner to start adding these markups to one’s WebPages as it may turn out to be a ranking factor in times to come.
