Google Featured Snippets And How You Can Optimize For Them?

 

Google featured snippets are a hot talk in the SEO world these days. Everyone is aiming to get that sweet spot at the top on Google. After all, featured snippets offer more visibility to a business page which leads to more brand recognition and traffic. But it’s not that easy. You need to optimize your page content in a specific way to get that spot. There are optimization tactics that you must follow if you wish to see your webpage on the top spot(featured snippet) for a search query related to your business domain.  

Read this blog till the end if you want your business pages to get the comfortable position as featured snippets for search queries.  

The Mystery Of Featured Snippets 

Whenever you search for anything on a search engine like Google, you can see several results with a lot of pages. However, no one goes through all the results. In fact, more than 90% of individuals don’t get past page 1 of Google, as per Chitika Insights. They’ll more likely change their search terms. You can now see the importance of ranking on page 1 of Google. In this context, you can understand what relevance and authority can a featured snippet bring to your website described in the picture below:

Ranking at the top is something everyone wishes. This spot is known as the featured snippet which is provided by Google as a way to answer search queries clearly and concisely. Being at the top certainly can bring a lot of clicks which therefore translates to more traffic for a query. The featured snippet appears inside the box on the top of a Google result page. 

Under this special feature, Google automatically pulls relevant data from an indexed web page to showcase it to the visitors. 

Google Featured Snippets That You Can See On Page 1 Of Google  

The job of this featured snippet is to answer a specific query in a more clear, and concise way. There are a host of featured snippets that Google can display for a search query. Coming to the types of featured snippets, there are mainly four types of snippets that serve the same purpose but in different ways. Check out the different types of snippets:

1. Paragraph Type
2. List Type
3. Table Type
4. Video Type

Paragraph Type 

A paragraph type of snippet is the most common one. Approximately 70% of featured snippets are in the form of a paragraph. 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.

Usually, paragraph type snippets are on an average of 42 words and 250 characters. 

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 of an ordered list or an unordered list shown in bullets. These types of snippets are generally ranked to those websites that have articles in listicle format and provide quick data, as usual, in the case of a featured snippet. 

Table Type

The table form is used to showcase a collection of data simplistically. 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 it  organized following a proper schema markup. The table on average consists of 45 words spanning five rows and two columns. 

Video Type

As we are moving towards digitization, 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. On average, however, roughly, the videos are 7 minutes in length. Still, video type amounts for the lowest in the Google featured snippets with less than 5 percent of searches showing video snippets. But with videos in high demand, it seems like this number will change quickly.

The Benefits Of The Featured Snippets

Google featured snippets bring you a ton of SEO benefits for your website. Optimizing your website leveraging advanced featured snippet SEO techniques, you can easily dominate the search results if you do it right. 

No matter how competitive the niche is, featured snippets are effective in unlocking sheer SEO benefits to drive more traffic and revenue. Yes, since you are on rank one you get a bigger share of the pie.  Following are some of the key benefits of Google featured snippets:

• 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 SEO optimized, you can enjoy thousands of visitors per month or even more every week or day. As you appear on the first position that means about the first ranking website, you own the first organic search page results.

This type of SEO optimization would require optimizing for the featured snippets. Certainly, ranking at that spot brings in a lot of organic traffic as featured snippets are not paid. It’s based on how well you answer a search query. Hence, it’s all effort-based and the traffic that comes with it is highly authentic. 

More Authority In Your Niche:

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

You become an authority based on effort and by writing user-relevant content. Building content around user intent is the key to appearing at this position. This Google search position automatically grants you higher authority as Google organically pushes your content to the top, since you solved a user query through content. 

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 optimized for Google featured snippets. By performing a featured snippet SEO, you are also optimizing your site for the ongoing voice search trend.

It’s easier for Google to show a brief answer to the user when they are using voice search. With the increase in the voice search trend, you are already optimizing for it when you optimize for featured snippets. Therefore, they are highly beneficial and optimize your page for the modern way of searching. 

Follow These Tactics To Optimize Your Web Pages For Featured Snippets 

With so many lucrative benefits of having a featured snippet, everybody wishes to optimize their site for it. You should optimize your website for achieving one. Here are some well-researched tactics for ranking in Google featured snippet:

• Focus On Search Intent
• Learn From Your Competitors Featured Snippet Strategy
• Try To Come In The First Top 10 Results
• Optimize For Vital SEO Tactics 
• Have A Strong Web Presence 

1. Focus On Search Intent 

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, percentages, or ratios; 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 important thing is always to 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.

Hence, writing crisp answers in paragraphs, tables, lists, or making a video answering a user query can help you get your content on the featured snippet.  

2. Learn From Your Competitors Featured Snippet Strategy  

Use a site audit tool and figure out the keywords for which your competitors are ranking for the Google featured snippet spot. Look what they’ve done right. Learn from their content style and adapt that to your own. 

By using a good website audit tool, you can easily find the complete blueprint on why your competitors are ranking higher 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. What is it that’s getting them a spot on the featured snippet? You’d find a lot more than you think. 

3. 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 10 search results for that particular keyword. 

Ranking higher than your competitors means a better shot at getting a featured snippet. To optimize your blogs for appearing in the top results, you need to perform in-depth competitive research and many other SEO tactics better than your competitors. 

So, writing more facts, sharing new information often, or writing high-quality content can help you get Google featured snippets. This way you can outrank your competitors and beat the competition in the most organic way.  

Note: 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. So writing a lengthy blog that explains everything can get you featured in the top 10 spots. 

4. Optimize For Vital SEO Tactics 

Some strong SEO tactics work for Google Featured Snippet as well. The first is keyword optimization. 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 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 as question based queries tend to be long-tail keywords. 

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.

Apart from this focus on having a brief URL, internal and external links for your website. Have a good title and heading tags and write a descriptive meta description to help Google understand your page better. 

5. Have A Strong Web Presence 

If you run a company or a digital marketing company, try to be more active on other content platforms. When you create a video for your new blogs, you double up your chances of getting into the featured snippet. Apart from text, 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. Even creating content on content creation platforms can also get picked for a featured snippet spot. It’s all about providing value and answers to people’s queries. 

These are 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 business for a search query. Always focus on creating valuable content for your audience.

Conclusion – Start Featured SEO Snippet Now 

Start optimizing your website according to the above-mentioned criteria and tips to boost your chances of earning Google featured snippets for search queries. Concisely answer a search query in the best possible way you can. So, focus on creating valuable content for your visitors with updated information. Drive quality traffic to your website leveraging this amazing feature and get all the benefits.