Get Your Website More Visitors with Google In-depth Articles

As the name suggests, in-depth articles are articles that Google considers authoritative on a broad topic on the web. It has been a while since Google rolled out this new update that focuses on in-depth articles on a given subject. Lately, you might have seen a new box labeled ‘in-depth articles’ while googling for a broad topic. Those results are long and detailed articles chosen to provide search users with content that will stay relevant for years. To rank for those in-depth results, your site should provide high quality content and you should let Google know about it.

What are in-depth articles?

The concept of in-depth articles is a new search results feature that was introduced by Google in August 2013. As per this, Google looks for articles that are deep into the topic, detailed, long and provide helpful information to the visitors. In order to rank for these in-depth results, you need to implement schema.org article markup in your blog. This is to help Google understand the structure of the article and is the first thing you should do if you plan on making your articles appear in the in-depth results box.

Benefits of ranking for in-depth articles

‘In-depth articles’ is a quite new feature and not many blogs are competing to rank for it. This means the competition here is

very low and you should use this situation in your favor. Ranking in in-depth search results could also give a boost to your organic traffic and this is very beneficial from the SEO point of view. This update could also mean that Google is striving hard to separate between low quality blogs and the authoritative ones. If you want to be in the list of high authority blogs, this could be the new way to go.

How to optimize your blog for in-depth articles?

You need to optimize your blog before it can qualify for ranking in the in-depth articles section. The first and important one is to implement schema.org article markup which includes attributes like headline, alternative headline, crawlable images, description, datePublished and articleBody. As a next step, you should implement Google Authorship for your blog which lets Google evaluate relevant and expert authors. If your content is split into multiple parts, you should also use pagination and canonicalization to help Google understand your page structure.

A logo is very important to let everyone know about your brand and stand out in the SERP; so it also helps to let Google find your logo. You can use the organization markup to give Google a hint about your logo or create a Google+ page with your logo as display image and link it with your website.

Once you are done with all the essential optimization, it is time to write long and compelling articles which Google would be glad to rank for their in-depth results.