Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm a cosmetic dental practice so we're local and want people to visit our website, look around and make a booking.

I've followed very closely the featured snippet debate on WBF and in the blogs here and everywhere else on the web.  I've got many 1-3 positions and have been optimising for featured snippets with great success.

I have noticed though that once I get a featured snippet the CTR of the page that the snippet is taken from drops significantly.  This can often put me from position one into two or three.  The same thing happens sometimes on the local listings.  You get in the pack and people start visiting your homepage rather than the particular services page in the SERP.

At a conference I was at, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iXlVcbpvd0 (11:14) there is a suggestion that Vodafone de-optimise because a position one or two is better for their sales than a featured snippet.

After all my interests are not the same as google.  They want to answer questions and I want to sell cosmetic dentistry.  So is answering a question without bringing a user to my site a good idea?  I've certainly seen the amount of enquiries drop once the category has a number of featured snippets.

Are they as good as everyone says they are?  I think possibly not from my data and this Vodafone talk is the first time i've heard anyone agree.

I've scoured the web for answers and it's all just "GET FEATURED SNIPPETS",  "HERES HOW TO GET THEM" etc.  But my business is not about getting more traffic it's about selling.  Could someone please point me to research on conversion rate and featured snippets. or ROI and featured snippets?

Thanks.

My understanding of cannibalisation has just clicked, thanks.  But what about CTR? Will having two results not hurt the CTR of each and prevent me getting the number one spot?

I'm testing having the 'complete guide' downloads on the product pages and also combining some of the duplicate and triplicate results in serps but the results have not been great.  Even seen some negative flux.  But it's early days yet, less than a month.

Thanks for answering, I need to go away and read more about filtering.

Hi everyone,

I have a main page for my blepharoplasty surgical product that I want to rank.  It's a pretty in-depth summary for patients to read all about the treatment and look at before and after pictures and there's calls to action in there.  It works great and is getting lots of conversions.  But I also have a 'complete guide' PDF which is for patients who are really interested in discovering all the technicalities of their eye-lift procedure including medical research, clinical stuff and risks.

Now my main page is at position 4 and the complete guide is right below it in 5. So I tried to consolidate by adding the complete guide as a download on the main page.

I've looked into rel canonical but don't think it's appropriate here as they are not technically 'duplicates' because they serve different purposes.

Then I thought of adding a meta noindex but was not sure whether this was the right thing to do either. My report doesn't get any clicks from the serps, people visit it from the main page.

I saw in Wordpress that there's options for the link, one says 'link to media file', 'custom URL' and 'attachment'.  I've got the custom URL selected at the moment.  There's also a box for 'link rel' which i figure is where I'd put the noindex.  If that's the right thing to do, what should go in that box?

Thanks.