We are using a wordpress plugin - Popup Builder to create roughly 90% of the sites content. The homepage consists of one inline tagline, along with images that are used for the popup boxes. (see below)
The text within the popups was not being indexed by google previously, so we have now inserted the popup link around the shortcode to get around this issue. However, this still isn’t ideal and was just wondering if anybody had a solution on how to insert the content inline without any changes to the front end design of the site.
From what i’ve read google doesn’t particularly like hidden text. Hence the reason you weren’t getting good results on SERPs. The best method to get around this would be to actually have it visible somewhere. Perhaps if you hit step 1 instead of it opening a popup modal window you could move the user down the page to a named anchor. I know this isn’t as slick as having a popup but it you aren’t ranking well and losing ground to competitors you might have to bite the bullet and change it.
Alternatively (i haven’t tested any of this) but you could experiment with layering things in a different way. I don’t know how clever google is in knowing if something is behind something with 0 opacity vs display:none;