A Google snippet is the unicorn of search engine optimization: it’s that excerpt of content at the very top of the search engine results page (SERP as they’re known in the trade). They are highly sought after but rarely achieved: after all, there can only be one for a topic.
And I got one! And a #1 ranking! (Snippets do not always come from the #1 ranked page for a search; sometimes they are from the second- or third-ranked page.)
It’s a snippet from, and ranking for, my blog post about HubSpot’s skyrocketing customer acquisition costs from last September.
This is a very specific, long-tail search phrase, of course. If you search for just “customer acquisition costs” you get a different snippet and set of results.
As noteworthy that I got the snippet and ranking, though, is that that piece is only four months old. In general, Google likes older content. Much older, as this chart from SEO software firm Ahrefs shows:
The average age for the #1 ranked page on Google is almost three years. Even the #5 ranked page is, on average, over two years old. Elsewhere Ahrefs reports that only 5% of content makes page one after a year – and most of those are probably from sites with high domain authority.
So unless your content is a perfect fit for a very specific, long-tail search phrase (like “HubSpot customer acquisition cost”), or very few people in your industry are creating content (and I’ve seen that in one or two instances), chances are it won’t make Google page 1 results very quickly.
Content marketing and SEO are a marathon, not a sprint.
