SERP Features Worth Targeting: Maps, Images, Video, News

Two features are deliberately out of scope. The featured snippet and the AI answer panel behave differently enough from the blocks above that they need their own treatment, and we cover the split in AI Overviews vs featured snippets. If you want the visual tour of what each block looks like on the page, that lives in our guide to the search results page. This post is about the go or no-go decision.

Position is a coordinate, not a value. Two queries can both show your page at position one and deliver completely different click volumes, because the pixels above your listing are different.

This trips people up because of how Search Console counts. Your reported position is your rank among the web results. A local pack, an image row and four expanded People Also Ask questions sitting above you do not push that number up. You still read "1.4" in the Performance report while your actual listing starts a full screen down. The number is honest about rank and silent about visibility.

We are not going to attach a click-through rate figure to any of those rows. The public numbers come from click-stream panels with different panel sizes, different countries and different definitions of a click, and none of them were measured on your site. The number that matters is your own: build a position-by-position baseline from your own data first, which is the method in organic CTR benchmarks, then read every feature question against it.

One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it reorders priorities. Moving a query from position 4 to position 2 under a heavy feature stack can be worth less than holding position 4 on a clean results page. Effort spent climbing inside a capped query is effort not spent on a query with headroom. The broader pressure on organic clicks is covered in zero-click searches.

Triggers on: queries where the searcher wants to see something. Products, interiors, hairstyles, charts, error screens, plants, floor plans, before and after comparisons.

Eligibility gate: none. This is the only feature on the list with no gatekeeper. If an image is crawlable and sits on an indexable page, it is a candidate.

What the work actually is:

• Serve images with a real img element and a src or srcset. Images loaded only as CSS backgrounds are not indexed as images.
• Do not block your image directory in robots.txt. This is a common own goal on sites that block /assets/ or /uploads/ to save crawl budget.
• Check that lazy loading does not hide images from a crawler that never scrolls. Native loading="lazy" is fine. A custom script that only injects the src on a scroll event is not.
• Write alt text that describes the image, not the target keyword. Give files descriptive names.
• Put the image near text that explains it. Surrounding context is how an engine works out what the picture is of.
• Add an image sitemap if your images are loaded by script or live off the main crawl path.
• The supported format list for image results includes JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, SVG and AVIF, per the Google Images best practices documentation in Search Central.

The part guides skip: originality is the lever here, not markup. If your page uses the same three stock photos as forty competitors, there is nothing to select between, and the pack fills with whoever shot their own. A service business that photographs its own vans, sites, staff and finished jobs has a real advantage here, and it costs a phone camera rather than a tool subscription.

Measurement: in Search Console, switch the Performance report's Search type from Web to Image. That is a separate set of impressions and clicks, and most site owners have never opened it. If Image search type shows meaningful impressions and near-zero clicks, your images are being found and the pages behind them are not compelling. That is a landing page problem, not an image problem.

Verdict: worth targeting on any site with original visual assets. It is the cheapest feature on this list and the least contested by small competitors.

Triggers on: how-to, demonstration, unboxing, review and "watch" phrasing, plus queries where video results have historically performed well.

Eligibility gate: in August 2023, Google announced that video thumbnails in search results would be shown only when the video is the main content of the page, and told publishers to expect declines in the Videos report. That single change killed the old tactic of embedding a loosely related clip halfway down an article to earn a thumbnail. The video now has to be the reason the page exists.

What the work actually is:

The honest framing: for most small sites the realistic video play is not self-hosted video with structured data. It is publishing on YouTube, where the platform handles the indexing problem and the video is trivially the main content of its own watch page. The trade is that the click lands on YouTube rather than on your domain. That is a strategy decision about where you want the audience, not an SEO trick, and it should be made deliberately.

Verdict: worth targeting only if you already produce video. Producing video specifically to chase a thumbnail is the most expensive item on this list per unit of traffic returned.

This is where most SERP feature guides go soft, so here is the blunt version.

Triggers on: queries about a developing or recent event, where an engine judges that freshness outranks everything else.

Eligibility gate: two separate things get confused here. Inclusion in Google News is not an application process. Google stopped requiring manual submission in December 2019 and now considers sites automatically. Google Publisher Center exists to manage how a publication appears, not to grant entry. The AMP requirement for the mobile Top Stories carousel was removed with the page experience update in June 2021, so the format barrier is gone too.

None of that makes the feature reachable. The real gate is editorial. Top Stories is populated by publishers with an established news beat, a publishing cadence measured in hours, and a track record of covering that beat before the query spikes. Content also has to satisfy the Google News content policies, which set expectations around transparency of authorship, ownership and contact details that a typical marketing blog does not meet by accident.

Verdict: not worth pursuing for a service business, an ecommerce store or a standard content site. If a news event is genuinely relevant to your business, the productive move is a durable explainer that ranks in the web results after the news cycle passes, when the wire copy has gone stale and the carousel has moved on. That page can earn traffic for years. The carousel slot would have lasted a day.

Triggers on: explicit local phrasing ("plumber in Leeds"), implied local intent ("emergency plumber"), and any query where the engine infers the searcher wants something nearby.

Eligibility gate: a verified Google Business Profile. There is no alternative route. No amount of on-page work, schema, backlinks or content puts a business in the local pack without a profile that has passed verification. The guidelines require either a physical location that staff occupy during stated hours, or a service-area business that makes in-person contact at the customer's location. Virtual offices, rented mailboxes and a friend's spare room are not eligible, and enforcement against them is active.

What Google says drives placement: the help documentation names three factors, relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is not something you can optimize, and pretending otherwise is how businesses end up suspended for fake addresses. Relevance and prominence are the workable half.

A reporting note that catches people out: local pack impressions and clicks do not appear in Search Console. Search Console reports web search. Profile views, searches and actions live in the Google Business Profile performance reports, which is a separate dataset with separate definitions. If you are trying to reconcile the two into a single number, you cannot, and the honest presentation is to report them side by side.

Verdict: the highest return feature on this list if you are eligible, and entirely closed if you are not. A remote-only agency, a dropshipper or a pure content site cannot enter this feature honestly, and every method for faking eligibility risks a suspension that takes the whole profile down with it.

Triggers on: brand and navigational queries, most reliably when someone searches your business name.

Eligibility gate: none, and no controls either. Sitelinks are generated automatically. There is no markup that requests them and no setting that configures them. The sitelinks demotion tool that once let you push a URL out of the list was retired back in 2016 and never replaced.

The sitelinks search box is a separate story worth knowing, because agencies still bill for it. Google announced its removal in November 2024 and stated that the associated WebSite and SearchAction structured data no longer has any effect on search results. If a proposal offers to implement sitelinks search box markup, that line item is dead work.

What genuinely helps: an information architecture an engine can read. Clear top-level sections, descriptive internal anchor text instead of "click here", unique page titles, and navigation that reflects how the site is really organized.

Verdict: not targetable directly. Treat sitelinks as a signal that your architecture is legible, not as a deliverable. If they are missing on your own brand query, the diagnosis is usually thin brand search volume or a flat, undifferentiated structure.

Triggers on: informational queries with obvious adjacent questions. It rarely appears on transactional or navigational searches.

Eligibility gate: none, and no markup route in. PAA answers are pulled algorithmically from indexed pages, the same way answer selection works elsewhere. FAQPage structured data does not feed People Also Ask, and it never did. That myth had a long life because both things involve questions.

What the work actually is: write the adjacent questions into the page. Use the question as a heading, in the phrasing a person would type, then answer it in the first two or three sentences underneath before you expand. That is the whole technique, and the formatting discipline that makes a passage quotable is the same one that makes it useful to a reader who scrolled straight to that heading.

The cost side: an expanded PAA block pushes web results down and answers some questions in place, so appearing in one is not free traffic. The block appears whether or not you are in it, which makes being quoted the better of the two outcomes actually available to you.

Verdict: worth doing, worth nothing as a budget line. Fold it into how you structure pages, and stop measuring it separately.

A large share of the SERP feature advice online targets things that were switched off. Before you implement anything from an older guide, check this list.

The pattern is consistent. Google has been reducing the amount of free result real estate that markup alone can buy. Features that reward a genuine asset, an actual location, an actual video, an actual photograph, have survived. Features that rewarded pasting JSON-LD have not.

Search Console will not tell you which feature blocks appear on a query. It does give you enough to infer where they hurt. This audit takes about an hour and produces a list of queries to stop working on.

Step 1. Export the baseline. Performance, then Search results. Set the date range to the last 3 months. Set Search type to Web so image and video impressions do not contaminate the numbers. Open the Queries tab, add the Average position column, and export to a spreadsheet.

Step 2. Build your own CTR-by-position curve. Group the exported rows into position bands (1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 5, 5 to 10) and take the median CTR in each band. This is your site's curve, not an industry chart. Branded queries will skew the top bands, so exclude rows containing your brand name before you calculate. The long version of this method is in how to measure organic CTR in Search Console.

Step 3. Find the residuals. Add a column comparing each query's CTR against the median for its band. Sort ascending. The rows at the top are queries where you rank well and get clicked far less than your own site normally manages at that rank. Ignore anything under 100 impressions in the window, because small samples produce noise that looks like a finding.

Step 4. Look at the actual results page. Take the worst 15 rows and search each one by hand, in a private window, on the device and country that dominate that query's impressions. Record what sits above your listing. This step cannot be automated away with a rank tracker's feature flags, because what you need is the vertical space consumed, not a checkbox saying a feature was present.

Step 5. Sort into three buckets.

Reading the output, with example figures. Say your median CTR in the 1 to 2 position band is 22 percent across 60 queries. One query sits at position 1.3 with 4,100 impressions and a 6 percent CTR. That residual is wide enough to investigate, and the manual check finds a local pack plus an image row above your listing. If you have no business profile, that query moves to Capped and you stop working it. Those numbers are illustrative, not SparkCliks data and not a study result. Your own bands will look different, which is the entire reason to compute them from your own export.

Run these in order. Stop at the first no.

1. Do you have a verified Google Business Profile, or are you eligible for one? If yes, that work comes before everything else on this list.
2. Do you own original photography or original diagrams? If yes, audit image crawlability and alt text this month.
3. Are any image directories blocked in robots.txt? Read the actual file, not your memory of it.
4. Have you opened the Image search type in Search Console in the past year?
5. Do you already produce video as part of normal operations? If no, drop video from the quarter entirely.
6. Are you publishing news on a beat, several times a day, with a masthead? If no, delete Top Stories from the plan.
7. Does your site carry FAQPage or HowTo markup that was added specifically to earn a rich result? Log it as spend that stopped returning, and reallocate.
8. Have you built a CTR-by-position curve from your own export? Without it, every feature judgment you make is guesswork against somebody else's benchmark.
9. Of your top 20 queries by impressions, how many are capped by a feature you cannot enter? That fraction is the ceiling on what further ranking work can return.

SparkCliks sells search click and website traffic services, so we should be exact about where they touch this topic and where they do not.

Every feature above is gated by eligibility, not by engagement. A verified business profile is a verification decision. Top Stories is an editorial and policy decision. A video thumbnail is a page composition decision. None of them read a traffic log. Sending clicks or visits to a page does not create a Google Business Profile, does not admit a site to Google News, and does not make a video the main content of a page. If a provider suggests otherwise, that is a claim worth asking them to demonstrate.

What click work applies to is the ordinary web result, once a page already ranks and already collects impressions you can see in the Performance report. SERP Clicks is a pool of paid human clickers who search a keyword, scroll the results and click your listing. It operates on the blue link, inside results your site already appears in. Whether behavior signals influence rankings is genuinely contested, and search engines deny some of the stronger versions of the claim, so the defensible statement is always about what the service does rather than what an algorithm will conclude from it.

The practical takeaway points one way. Work out which of your queries are capped by feature blocks before you spend anything on improving positions inside them. A capped query does not get better with more effort. It gets better when you go and win a query that is not capped.