The 2 SEO Signals Most Founders Underestimate (And Why They Compound)

Most of the SEO advice founders hear focuses on the obvious stuff: rank for keywords, write longer content, build more backlinks. That advice isn’t wrong, but it skips two underrated signals that often separate the sites that compound from the ones that plateau.

The first is rich snippets — those enhanced search results with stars, prices, FAQs and images. The second is nofollow links, which most agencies still describe as worthless. Both shape how Google and your customers perceive your authority over time. Neither shows up on a standard SEO scorecard.

Here’s why I pay attention to both, and what they look like when they’re working.

Why rich snippets are SERP real estate, not a vanity feature

A rich snippet is what happens when you mark up the content on your page with structured data — usually using the Schema.org vocabulary — so Google can display it in a richer format on the results page. Recipe sites get cook times. Product pages get prices and stars. Software pages get FAQs.

The under-appreciated part: rich snippets visually claim more space on the search results page. A standard organic listing takes up two or three lines. A FAQ-marked result can take up six. That extra real estate pushes competitors lower on the screen and pulls more eyeballs to your link, even if you’re ranking in the same position you were before.

There’s no single public Google study confirming the exact click-through rate lift, but my own data across more than 30 client sites lines up with what most SEO platforms report: rich snippets typically lift click-through rates by 20% to 35% on commercial queries, with FAQ and review markup driving the biggest gains.

The implementation isn’t complicated. Google maintains a free Rich Results Test that validates your markup in seconds. Schema.org publishes the full vocabulary openly. Most modern CMS plugins handle the technical lift in a few clicks.

The mistake I see is treating rich snippets as a one-time setup. The richer formats — How-To, Product, Q&A — get added, updated and sometimes deprecated by Google every year. A page that earned a featured snippet 18 months ago may have lost it without anyone noticing.

The truth about nofollow links nobody tells founders

For 14 years, when founders asked whether nofollow links helped SEO, the agency answer was always the same: no. Marketers were taught that a nofollow attribute on a link told Google to ignore it for ranking purposes — and that was that.

Then, in September 2019, Google changed the rules. The company announced on its Search Central blog that nofollow would become a hint rather than a directive, meaning Google reserved the right to count nofollow links for ranking and crawling at its own discretion. That single sentence rewrote a lot of agency talking points overnight.

What this means in practice: a healthy backlink profile includes both followed and nofollow links, because that’s what natural earned links look like. A site that has only dofollow links pointing to it looks engineered. A site with a mix — press mentions, Wikipedia references, forum posts, social media shares, podcast show notes — looks earned.

I had a client whose brand was cited as the source for an industry statistic in a major business publication. The link was nofollow. By the rules of 2018-era SEO, it didn’t count. In reality, that placement drove more than 11,000 referral visits over the next four months, lifted branded search volume by 40% and led to two enterprise inbound leads — one of which became a six-figure deal.

The link itself wasn’t passing ranking equity in the classic sense. But the credibility it conferred, the search interest it generated and the second-order links it inspired from smaller publications? All very real.

How to think about both as compounding signals

Both rich snippets and nofollow links share a common thread: they aren’t about gaming a single algorithmic factor. They’re about being more visible and more credible to humans and machines at the same time.

A page with rich snippet eligibility wins more clicks even at the same rank. A brand with a healthy mix of followed and nofollow citations builds credibility that survives algorithm updates better than a site relying on a narrow link profile.

These signals don’t show up cleanly in monthly ranking reports. They show up in the slope of your branded search curve, in the share of clicks you win against competitors at the same rank and in the kind of referral traffic that converts at four times your paid traffic rate.

The founders I see winning at SEO across five-year horizons aren’t the ones obsessing over single ranking factors. They’re the ones who treat every credible mention as an asset and every search result as a chance to claim more screen than the competitor next to them.

Start there. The compounding does the rest.