How To Optimise For Google's More Visual Results Page

In the past few days, Google has announced, via a short Google+ post, that mobile search results are now featuring even more thumbnails. Make sure your key content is optimised to cater for this. Read why and how here.

What Is It?

Now, when you search on mobile, lots more organic results include a thumbnail image. This is in addition to rich cards, snippets and answer boxes. Look:

Above shows the answer card with a large image and link and just below it is the first organic result, complete with thumbnail, from Wikipedia. It gets a lot more visual as you scroll...

Just below the AMP carousel of recipes returned for the search query "pie", the next organic result includes a thumbnail image too. This is a lot more enticing than the link below it, to the user's eye. But you have to scroll past the above rich answer card, a thumbnail organic result and those AMP pages.

So there's two ways to look at this change from an SEO point of view. Either the answer card and AMP carousel should be targeted as the biggest target due to their domination of the SERP real estate. Or you can make sure your page content is well optimised for AMP, rich cards and has a suitable thumbnail so you have the best chance of appearing in a prime spot (or more than one, possibly?).

What you can't afford to do is not target your content for any of these opportunities. You'll only get left behind.