Google used to be a search engine. And today? Today, Google gives us direct answers to many questions without us having to leave the search engine universe.
Google Fraggles means the continuous development of the answer formats directly on the search results page, which conveniently allows us not even to click on a third-party website. But what happens to organic search, URLs and search engine optimization when Google increasingly acts as a personal answer provider with the Google Fraggles? We want to take a (Google) magnifying glass below.
WHAT IS GOOGLE FRAGGLES?
Cindy Crum, a US SEO expert, coined the word creation “Fraggle”. Google Fraggles are fragments of information placed in the search results pages that are displayed after a search query and are prepared in such a way that they already provide the best possible answer without the user having to go to an external page.
This not only increases user comfort but also increases the number of zero-click search results. The Google Fraggles come as widgets, snippets or boxes. The new trend seems to be continuing because Google is continuously expanding the information display in the SERPs.
WHAT FRAGGLES SHOW UP ON GOOGLE?
The fact that we already find a lot of information in the search result list is not a recent invention, but its widespread use is a new trend. Among other things, knowledge panels, featured snippets and direct answers now act as Google Fraggles and always throw away a bit of an answer for the searcher. Below we briefly go into the fragment formats and show how these Google Fraggles are distributed according to the Searchmetrics SERP Features Monitor.
Knowledge Panel
About 37% of desktop and 29% of mobile queries trigger a knowledge panel in the SERPs. In addition to basic information about people, companies or institutions, this Google Fraggle also contains more and more information in the field of knowledge or health.
Featured snippet
In the featured snippet, the search engine lists excerpts such as texts, lists, tables or videos that Google classifies as relevant according to the search. Content from external websites is used to create the featured snippets so that it is possible to place a page in these Google Fraggles with SEO measures and thus improve the rankings. 7% of desktop and 5% of mobile search results use the featured snippet.
Direct Answer
Here, Google presents an answer to facts in the SERPs. These Google Fraggles are used from their own data sources and show up in around 6% of all desktop searches.
Answer Card
With the Answer Card format, the Google Fraggles are presented in a carousel and positioned according to their popularity.
Jump
links Jump links are not new per se, but Google has only recently referred to the relevant section on the external site.
With the development of natural language processing and the semantic analysis of content, Google has laid the foundation for today’s Fraggles development in recent years.
The updates from Hummingbird to Bert have gradually ensured that the search engine has developed an ever better understanding of the relationships between the search queries.
At the same time, better-structured websites and the use of schema.org ensure that Google bots can classify content much more efficiently and precisely.
WHAT DO GOOGLE FRAGGLES MEAN FOR ONLINE MARKETING?
Google Fraggles provide the searcher with the best answer directly in the search results. The consequence of this: third-party websites remain unnoticed. In addition, Google Fraggles directly serve changed search behaviour such as voice search or language assistants such as Alexa or Siri. These will be of great importance in the years to come.
Zero-click searches, i.e. search queries that end without a click on an external website, already account for around half of all search queries.
Thus, Google Fraggles undoubtedly also affect online marketing and SEO. Google is gaining more and more traffic and the organic search results are not taken into account. This also applies to the URL, which no longer serves as a place for information.
Tip 1: Structured data
schema.org markups built into the website ensure that search engine crawlers can read and understand the content better. Structured data is also represented by the search engine as rich snippets (e.g. ratings or FAQs).
Tip 2: User intention
From now on, the question must always be asked: what kind of added value does the user really want and what is the best way to give him this in the form of content?
Tip 3: mobile first
Although detailed content is important for Google Fraggles, at the same time a view must be taken of summary content for structured data in the mobile environment.
