Featured Snippet SEO – What You Need to Know

Day after day, the search engines are getting smarter and are able to sort the user’s query in a fraction of a second. Be it a simple question related to the weather outside or a sci-fi query, search engines, especially Google, are snappy in providing answers with the help of feature snippets.

For the unversed, a featured snippet is a quick, brief but complete answer to a user’s query. It appears on the search page in the form of a box. With these featured snippets, a user gets a quick answer to his question without having to click on a website and search for the answer. To gain this special feature on your website or blog, you need to perform featured snippet SEO.

What is Google Featured Snippet? 

Google is one of the highly used search engines leveraged by billions of people. If we talk about the web, there are millions of websites with billions of pages. When a user searches for a query, it becomes Google’s responsibility to show more relevant and update results.

To filter out the best results, Google uses more than 600 factors to rank the content to show you the top 10 relevant search results to your query. To make the search results more relevant and quick to the users, Google introduced featured snippets. Under this special feature, Google automatically pulls relevant data from an indexed web page to showcase it to the visitors. 

Google featured snippets that are useful in terms of SEO benefits. First, if your website is ranking a featured snippet for a keyword, there are 8% more chances that users will click on your website’s URL as it’s appearing top of all the other search results. And, secondly, there are high chances that your website will rank two times in the organic search results — one in the featured snippet and other in the top 10 search results. To take a competitive edge over others optimizing the website to earn more snippets is highly recommended.

Benefits of Google Featured Snippet?

Google featured snippet brings you tons of SEO benefits for your website. Optimizing your website leveraging advanced featured snippet SEO techniques, you can easily dominate the search results. 

No matter how competitive the niche is, featured snippets are the only key to unlock sheer SEO benefits to drive more traffic and revenue. Following are some of the key benefits of Google featured snippet:

• A ton of organic traffic
• More Authority in your niche
• Leverage benefits from the voice search

A ton of organic traffic:

If your site is properly SEO optimized, you can enjoy thousands of visitors per month or even every week or day. As you appear on the ‘position zero’ that means about the first ranking website, you own the first organic search page results. 

More Authority in your niche:

To dominate your competitors, featured snippets are among the most straightforward ways of doing this. People pay thousands of dollars to rank on #1 position but with a featured snippet, you can build your authority by appearing over everyone without spending anything. 

Leverage benefits from the voice search:

As of 2020, more than 40% of people use voice commands to find quick answers. Interestingly, Google picks the answer from a website that is having a featured snippet. By performing a featured snippet SEO, you are also optimizing your site for the ongoing voice search trend.

Tips for Ranking in Google Featured Snippet

With so many lucrative benefits of having a featured snippet, everybody wishes to have as many as possible for their site. First thing first — You can’t intentionally create them but you can optimize your website for achieving one. Here are some well-researched tips for ranking in Google featured snippet:

• Always optimize your blog with data and listicles
• Try to come in the first top 10 results
• Use the hidden opportunity
• Keyword Optimization and formatting
• Be multi-presentable

Always optimize your blog with data and listicles:

The first thing you need to do is focus on creating valuable content that has some data to back the content. While writing content, if you can add some numbers, percentage or ratio; the chances are high that Google will fetch a paragraph from your website for a search query.

Understand how the entire google featured snippet works. You will notice that search engines are always trying to map a visitors’ question with a relevant answer. If you have written a paragraph with a subheading for example, “what are the main parts of a watch?”, Google will fetch that paragraph to give users relevant data.

So, the first thing that is important — Always focus on solving the user’s problem to get highlighted in the search results. Using subheadings in question format always helps in gaining a featured snippet.

Try to come in the first top 10 results:

When reverse-engineering the results from the search page is performed, it was found that Google will only show the result in the snippet if the website is ranking within the top to search results for that particular keyword. 

The very first tip that will earn you a snippet is a higher ranking than your competitors. This is because the process of getting featured in the search results starts with coming in the top 10 organic search results.  To optimize your blogs for appearing in the top results, you need to perform in-depth competitive research on why they are coming in the search results.

By using a good website audit tool, you can easily find the complete blueprint on why they are ranking higher or lower than you. Check out how they are writing their blog and what kind of formatting they have done on their blog to provide better value to the visitors.

Use the hidden opportunity:

The next ultimate tip for ranking in the featured snippet is to explore the hidden ranking opportunity for your next content. If your competitor is ranking for a keyword, you can create better content to outperform other competition. 

The concept is very simple — The more updated and organized the content, more are the chances for getting featured in the search results. Content length always plays a major role in getting featured. When you analyze other ranking websites, you will find that the average word count of these blogs is around 1500-3000 words. The reason why long blogs are always preferred by the search engine is that they try to solve all user queries on the same blog.

Long-form content that is backed with updated facts, figures and data is all you need to dominate the Google featured snippet. By making content in such a way will help you solve every user query in a better way and search engines are always looking for such content. 

Keyword Optimization and formatting:

Now come to the other two of the important factors. First is the keyword optimization and second is the formatting. Keyword optimization is not just about the density or location of keyword placement, it’s more than that.

The search bots are getting smarter day by day and just by stuffing the keywords forcefully in the content will not work. You need to write content that organically blends the keyword in your content piece. Apart from using direct match keywords, try to put more focus on broad search keywords and long-tail keywords to grab the user’s attention in the content. 

For example, if you are writing a blog on ‘top 10 SEO companies in India‘, you can create more creative headings around it like ‘How to find top 10 SEO companies in India‘, or you can also break the keyword to add more content in it.

Be multi-presentable:

If you run a company or a digital agency, try to be more active on other content platforms that are YouTube. When you create a video for your new blogs, you double up your chances of getting into the featured snippet. Apart from text, the table Google also supports video snippets and the clip is usually taken from YouTube. And, another reason for making is video is less competition. cover the range for your topic in a much broader way.

These were some of the well-researched and tested Google’s featured snippet SEO tips that will definitely help you in earning a featured snippet for your blog. Always focus on creating valuable content for your audience.

Types of Featured Snippets:

Coming to the types of featured snippets, there are mainly three types of snippets that serves the same purpose but in different ways. Check out the different types of snippets:

• Paragraph Type
• List Type
• Table Type
• Video Type

Paragraph Type:

A paragraph type of snippet is the most common one. In this, google pulls a whole paragraph from a website that fulfills the visitor’s search query. For example — If you search for ‘Number of restaurants in Australia’, you will find a quick paragraph taken from a website.

List Type:

Second, comes the list type of snippet, in which Google tries to solve the visitor’s query by showing some sort of data that is either in the form or ordered number or in the form of bullets. These types of snippets are generally ranked to those websites that have articles in listicle format and provide quick data.

Table Type:

The table form is used to showcase a collection of data in a simplistic way. For example, if a user is searching for a series of data in his query, the chances are that Google will fetch data from a website that has the data organized following a proper schema markup.

Video Type:

As we are moving towards digitalization, video snippets are the hottest in the trends. If Google finds a relevant video to the search query, the whole YouTube video appears on the spot.

Conclusion — Start Featured Snippet SEO Now

Start optimizing your blogs according to the above criteria and tips to boost your chances in earning one for your blog. It’s not that very difficult. All you need to focus on creating valuable content for your visitors with updated information. Drive quality traffic to your website leveraging this amazing feature.