Did you know you can actually rank better than #1? For certain queries, Google will show a “featured snippet” above the search results.

What’s a featured snippet?

A featured snippet is a section extracted from your web page enhanced to draw user attention on the Google results page. When Google recognizes that a query asks a question, it displays a top result as the featured snippet in the search results.

Featured snippets are not part of the traditional knowledge graph — they are a special way of displaying the information from a single site. The site that earns a featured snippet, based on Google’s assessment that it is the best answer for a question, whether explicit or implicit, gets to rank in “position 0” and have its content and URL displayed above the rest of the traditional organic search results.

What types of featured snippets are available?

There are a few different types, including:

• Paragraph
• List
• Table
• Chart or graph
• Image

The webpage’s title and URL can also be a featured snippet. The type of snippet that appears often depends on the nature of the question asked and the nature of the answer.

Google has a new site testing tool that shows page speed in a different light.

New research from Google has shown that up to 50% of users can leave a site in the time it takes the home page to load. 

To drive this point home, Google has created a new mobile testing tool to give you an estimate of the number of users your website may be losing while the page loads.

They also give a benchmark of your site tested against other sites in your industry (though "industries" are very broadly defined). 

This tool is Google's way of reiterating how important it is to improve page speed. This affects SEO of course, but the primary concern should be overall usability and conversion rates. If users are bouncing from your website, they may be bouncing from your paid marketing efforts, causing you to waste money, lose leads and, more importantly, lose sales. 

As more and more online traffic shifts to mobile, Google is going to increasingly emphasize speed. All web developers and SEOs are going to have to become experts at making sites run faster.