Talking Technology and Featured Snippets

Eric Enge, CEO at Stone Temple Consulting, spent 15 to 20 years providing SEO, content marketing, and social media for large enterprise clients, including several Fortune 50 clients. The company distinguishes itself with a strong commitment to solving actual problems, rather than pitching generic formulas and "hoping they stick." Stone Temple Consulting became part of Perficient Digital, a $500 million public consulting firm, in July 2018, after a 3-month courtship. Today, Eric serves as General Manager of Perficient Digital.

Lead co-author of The Art of SEO, the 900+ page "bible of SEO," contributing author (Forbes, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, Search Engine Watch, Copyblogger and Social Media Today), host of 2 live video broadcasts a week (The Digital Marketing Excellence Show and The Digital Marketing Answers Show) and a Coursera Instructor, Eric spent the first 10 years of his career at Phoenix Technologies, manufacturer of BIOS, a software piece that "boots" most of the world's computers, and then 5 years running his own business development consulting firm.

He took a right turn when a friend asked him to build business development strategies for a DVD e-tail site. Eric researched ways to use search engines to drive traffic the company's page. A year later, organic searches had generated $3 million in annual sales. Eric became the SEO digital marketing expert. Approaching problems from unconventional angles is characteristic of his work.

A global Fortune 200 e-commerce site that requested that Stone Temple audit their site, check the SEO, and add some content marketing to overall increase organic search traffic and sales from that traffic. Stone Temple discovered 95 percent of the company's business came from the US site, but Google spent 70% of its crawling time going to the international versions of the site. In a bold move, Stone Temple blocked Google's access to the international versions of the site. The result? Total aggregate site traffic increased 30% in 60 days.

In this interview, Eric provides a wealth of information on:

1) the goal and impact of Google's 2018 updates (how to make query responses relevant to users—by looking at not only the content that answers user's question, but also the content that would answer the related questions that would tend to follow),

2) the role of "featured snippets" and "speakable markup." (A featured snippet includes an answer that has been extracted from a webpage, a link to the page, the page title and the URL. Because the featured snippet block appears above the organic search results and below the AdWords block, it sits, not in position 1 of the Google search results, but in what is referred to as "position 0."), and

3) the future of conversational interfaces. He asks what a good conversational interface looks like and what it will take to build it. "People will shift to voice experience," he says, "once it becomes a better option for them than their keyboard experience."

Finally, Eric talks about "who to hire" and why and how he sold his company as he approaches his retirement

Eric can be reached on Twitter at @stonetemple or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericenge/.