A 2019 Pro's Guide to Leveraging 'HowTo' Schema for Top Listings on Google
 by Kristi Hagen

High-ranking How To search results pay off handsomely in traffic and incoming links. They also boost your brand's authority and shore up site authority.
A Pro's Guide to Leveraging 'How To' Content for Top Listings on Google — by Marty Schmidt

Site owners and searchers know that Google's 'How to' scene is going ballistic. Type in something like 'How to teach your dog to fetch', hit Return and watch the search results pour in. The top-ranking search result looks like this:

how-to-teach-your-dog-to-fetch-search-result.jpg

Example 'How To' Featured Snippet

As you can see in the screenshot above, CesarsWay.com has the Featured Snippet for the dog-fetch search phrase, giving it Position 0 atop the other organic search results. Scan down the page, and the same URL turns up again, this time as organic results Position 1. There are 5.85 million other URLs in the running for this query, but Cesar's Way wins the top two positions. This isn't an accident. This site owner is doing something right and this article is designed to show you exactly what that is.

A few notes before we get started...

This article takes you through the steps for building 'How To' Content into your pages and posts.

  • The process begins by structuring your set of 'How To' steps. For guidance on that, we'll look at the design principles that high-ranking results consistently use as well as Schema.org's HowTo schema instructions.
  • A well-structured list of 'How To' steps by itself will NOT put you on top of the search results. To complete the picture, we'll also review a few other optimization steps for your pages and posts. Fun Fact - these are the steps that most SEOs are missing.
  • This is NOT a beginner's g...

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