So, some of these stories become more interesting when, instead of presence, we look at share of voice. So, share of voice is a metric we have in STAT that, rather than just looking at how many SERPs a feature appears on, looks at how prominently it appears.
So you might have looked at something like this yourself if you’ve ever tried to estimate traffic by looking at click-through rates and volumes and this kind of thing. So basically, if more searchers see something in position one as opposed to position 10, then a feature will be rewarded for that in share of voice, and it’s getting a lot more visibility.
So, when we look at the top five by share of voice, we get a very different ranking.
Places
Notably, we have places which didn’t even make it into the top five for presence. Places is now in position one for share of voice.
What that reflects is that although a lot of SERPs obviously don’t have a local pack, place is another word for local pack; when it does appear, it’s big, and it’s at the top.
So, this is actually down a little bit in share of voice year-on-year, even though that’s not true for presence for this feature. So, what that reflects is that Google may be more willing to put something above a local pack than it was a year ago.
Carousel
Now carousel, we’ve talked about a little bit already, and I think the increase in share of voice for carousel reflects that a lot of different kinds of a feature are sort of gradually moving up in prominence as opposed to organic.
Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph change is mainly driven by smartphone SERPs. STAT is a rank tracker, obviously, so we’re interested in the main column of search results, not the sidebar. So, if I say Knowledge Graph, you might think of the sidebar that you often get, which is sort of Wikipedia-focused. This is not about that.
This is about the things you get in the main column of rankings, for example, dictionary results, currency conversion, and weather. If you ever search for like the cast of a film or something like that and you get these big Knowledge Graph results at the top of the SERP, these have gone up significantly year-on-year, and that’s especially true, hugely true on smartphone.
Again, there are a lot of things crowding out organic basically on smartphone at this point.