Sonja
The featured snippets, which appear at the top of a search engine result page, offer businesses an incredible opportunity for exposure and clicks.
If you can get this coveted spot, featured snippets are every content producer’s dream. Featured snippets show up before the organic search results, and on mobile screens can take up more than 50% of available screen real estate, making them the first thing anyone sees when Googling. Optimizing your content for featured snippet selection, like other forms of SEO, is a process that takes some work, but the improved traffic, click-through rates, and ultimately increased revenue are worth it!
What Is A Featured Snippet?
Featured snippets are brief excerpts from a webpage that appear in Google’s search results to quickly answer a user’s question. They are attempts by Google to answer a user’s query directly on the search engine result page, or SERP. This means that for many queries, the user does not have to click through to additional content or even leave the SERP. You might think that this could be bad for traffic, but if your site “wins” the featured snippet position, it is super helpful in the long term.
Featured Snippet Types
Featured snippets can be categorized into four types: paragraphs, lists, tables, and videos.
Paragraphs
Approximately 70% of featured snippets fall into the paragraph category and have an average word count of around 42 words or 250 characters. Paragraph featured snippets are generally informative and derive from “What” keyword terms. Some snippets that look like paragraphs can be subclassified as “rich answer snippets.” These most frequently appear for questions that have a clear metric answer, like “what is the distance from X to Y.”
Lists
About 19% of featured snippets are lists. Lists can be ordered or unordered, and derive from “how” and “why” keyword terms. For example: “why does my browser show X error?”
Tables
Tables make up a little more than 6% of featured snippets. Typically made up of 5 rows and 2 columns, tables only contain about 40 to 45 words. It’s very important to remember that due to the way indexing works, these featured snippets are never graphical tables. If you want to optimize for tables, you must mark up relevant content in a table format using the table tags in HTML.
Videos
Less than 5% of featured snippets are videos. These videos average 6 minutes 35 seconds in length and are sometimes called ‘featured clips.’
A featured clip auto-starts at the exact section of the video that answers the searcher’s query, instead of starting at the beginning like a traditional video.
Tools
In addition to the ordinary featured snippets, we’re including a bonus type: tools. Tool-based featured snippets answer the user’s question by displaying an interactive tool that can output user-specific answers.
Tools only appear for very high-level questions with numeric or other types of solid answers. Examples of tools that Google shows are calculators, conversions, time zones, and other tools that can offer concrete answers. It’s important to remember that these tools are primarily Google-generated; that is, while they might pull information from other websites, it’s Google’s own conversion calculators or other tools that get pulled up for use.
Who Chooses Featured Snippets?
No matter how good your content is, you have no control over whether it becomes a featured snippet. Unlike other marketing strategies, the only thing you can do is have the most informative, most highly optimized content out there. Google’s automated systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet to highlight for a specific search query, so all you can do is optimize, optimize, optimize.
In one case study, visibility from the featured snippet improved a page’s traffic by over 500%. That same page’s clickthrough rate jumped from 2% to 8%, and revenue from organic visitors landing on the page saw growth to the tune of 677%. Even though the users were able to get their information right on the search results page, the clickthrough rate and revenue still increased dramatically.
So even though you can’t mark your content as a featured snippet and Google’s algorithm chooses featured snippets automatically, there are still things you can do and changes you can make to court that algorithm. All you have to do is think about how a search engine thinks and optimize your awesome content so that the whole Internet can see just how great it is.
Featured Snippet Optimization
Now that you understand the value of featured snippets, let’s talk about how your content can find its way to that coveted position. Most research points to the fact that the majority of featured snippets come from the top 10 ranking websites. To get that coveted spot, your website as a whole will need to be fully optimized and considered one of the best resources for your given industry.
Not all topics generate featured snippets; in fact, only about 20% of search queries have them. The top categories that have featured snippets are travel, computers and electronics, art and entertainment, science, reference, and finance. Of these, only travel, computers and electronics, art and entertainment, and science have a featured snippet rate of higher than 50% for all keyword searches. Travel and computers and electronics, the two categories with the highest featured snippet rate, only return featured snippets for 62% of their searches.
However, featured snippets are relatively new, and will likely be used more soon. If your niche doesn’t have many featured snippets yet, it’s time to start optimizing your content now. That way, as featured snippet access expands, your content will be first in line to get highlighted by Google.
Keywords and Queries
The queries that get featured snippets tend to be long-tail keywords. These keywords, which are really 3-5 word key phrases, allow you to target more specific demographics and answer more specific questions. You should be using them whenever possible! Google Suggestions and Google’s Related Searches are great sources for long-tail keywords, as are the many keyword research tools you might already be using.
Additionally, certain types of questions tend to generate featured snippets across content categories and niches. DIY processes, health questions, financial questions, mathematical questions, lists of requirements, and status updates are all query types that frequently have featured snippets.
You can ignore the math questions since the featured snippet there is going to be a Google-generated tool. But if you can write content that addresses a list of requirements or a process, the featured snippet selection algorithm is more likely to pick up on that kind of writing!
Organization and Formatting
While featured snippets have four primary forms, the vast majority of them are in paragraph form and the next-most frequent are lists. Keep this in mind when you’re trying for optimization! If you’re trying to rank for featured snippets, good long-form written content is more likely to get you there than video content.
The same is true for tables; a table might be great on your page and overall help get your ranking up, Google is less likely to pull that table for a featured snippet.
Question Tags
Featured snippets exist to answer questions quickly. If you can predict the questions people might want answered, you’ll rank higher for the featured snippet position. Look for places in your content where you can add a “what is X” or “why does Y” or “how does Z” type of heading/subheading for whatever your X, Y, or Z keyword is. Adding these keyword question-and-answer heading tags to your content sends clear signals to Google that your content could be right for a featured snippet.
Define, Define, Define!
When optimizing for the featured snippet, it’s really important to include an “is” statement. This means that the very first sentence should start with the structure: “X is.” For instance, if you’re trying to be the top-ranked result for questions about knitting stitches, and your keyword target is “what is stockinette stitch,” your first sentence could be: “Stockinette stitch is a knitting stitch that consists of alternate rows of knit (plain) and purl stitch.”
This isn’t just good for readability; it seems that “is” statements are triggering phrases for Google’s algorithm that allow the automated systems to easily find relevant text for the featured snippet. Once you have your “is” statement, follow that up with two to three sentences completing the definition.
For example: “Stockinette stitch is used for sweaters, bags, hats, socks, and other accessories. Unlike plain stitch, stockinette fabric has a “right” side with a v-shaped pattern and a “wrong” side with a bar pattern.”
This tells the reader what the stitch is used for and how to tell it apart from other stitches, which helps answer the question “what is stockinette stitch.” Remember, featured snippets are meant to answer questions quickly while still giving a good answer. To optimize your content for a featured snippet, you want to try to describe it as completely as possible within two or three sentences. The follow-up sentences should describe two or three crucial facts about the topic in a clear, concise manner.
Know Your Audience
While AI selects featured snippet content, the actual audience for those featured snippets are people just like you. Some could be potential customers. People with the same interests as you that are searching for good information about their habits, hobbies, and lives. It’s these types of people you want to be writing for since they are the people asking Google for answers related to your content.
So, what does your audience want? Are they the kinds of people who want short, to-the-point answers? Are they searching for information that needs a little more explanation? Would a video be more helpful than a written answer?
Taking the time to think about who your audience is, and how they typically interact with content will do wonders for your optimization process. Once you spend time getting into the minds of your viewers, you’ll have a better understanding of what kind of content you need to be creating. In turn, this will help you rank more highly on SERPs, and increase your chances of earning the featured snippets spot.
The better you get to know your audience, the more relevant and authoritative your content will become, helping you to be ranked higher by Google’s AI, and helping to make you the #1 resource for your industry.
