Featured snippets are brief answers shown at the top of Google search results. They offer quick, direct information pulled from web pages about any query and are the point 0 of every Google SERP (search engine results page.)
In this article, I will explain featured snippets, their importance, and tips for optimizing your content to achieve them.
So, let’s begin!
What are Google Featured Snippets?
Google featured snippets are content pieces that directly answer a user’s query in the search results.
For users, featured snippets are short text pieces designed to answer users’ queries quickly and answer questions directly within Google search results.
This format is designed to provide quick and concise answers to user queries. It directly answers your search query, is pulled automatically from web pages, and is displayed at the top of Google’s search results.
For example, when you searched “What are featured snippets?” You must have come across the top result from Google Documentation explaining their feature.
Since its launch in 2014, these snippets have become a key component of the search experience by supplying useful information, enhancing conversions, and steering targeted traffic.
They’ve also significantly impacted voice search since over 40% of voice search answers come from Google-featured snippets.
Why Featured Snippets Are Important
For users right now, speed and convenience have become important.
Featured snippets are a game-changer for businesses that can use them. They materialize at the top of search results, securing the much-desired ‘position zero,’ the highest possible ranking spot without advertising. This prime real estate gives the organic click-through rate a serious boost.
Featured snippets are the most recurring feature, at 6.5%, for internet products on Semrush Sensor‘s reports, and this number only increases for e-commerce and service-based industries.
But that’s not all.
Featured snippets also have the following benefits, making featured snippets important:
- Triggering featured snippets reduces ‘no-click’ searches by providing direct answers
- They increase visibility and brand exposure through featured snippet optimization
- They establish authority and credibility
- They drive more organic traffic to your website
Optimizing for featured snippets means reaching beyond the list of Google’s search results. To optimize for featured snippets, it’s essential to provide concise and relevant information that directly answers users’ queries based on their keyword intent.
For service-based businesses, most rich snippets are based on informational intent.
For e-commerce businesses, it’s more about winning product snippets with a transactional intent.
Commercial intent queries also feature rich snippets based on reviews and rank listings.
The only search intent where featured snippets don’t appear often is Navigational. This is mainly because local SEO replaces the need for a snippet when you search for a business.
4 Types of Featured Snippets
Aiming for a Google featured snippet takes strategy.
Understanding the various formats that might appear on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is essential for making an effective strategy for featured snippets based on your industry.
There are four types of featured snippets:
- Paragraph snippets
- List snippets
- Table snippets
- Video snippets
Each type serves a unique purpose and presents information in a way that best addresses the user’s search query, ensuring the most relevant results for their specific needs.
Paragraph Snippets
Paragraph snippets are the most common type of good-featured snippet, making up roughly 70% of the snippets users see.
They provide brief, encyclopedia-like answers to questions like ‘How,’ ‘Who,’ ‘Why,’ ‘When,’ and ‘What’.
These 40–60 words’ explanation paragraphs display featured snippets by highlighting important content in blue to show the key point. To make the most of this feature, it’s essential to go for featured snippets that are relevant and informative to your niche.
List Snippets
These ordered or unordered lists appear in Google search results and are commonly used for step-by-step content. The search intent for these snippets is also usually informational and educational.
They present data in a format that doesn’t need to be shown in a certain order, like an unordered list. Or, when a specific sequence is needed, like a recipe or DIY task, they present an ordered list. You can tell the difference because Google uses numbering for ordered lists and bullet points for unordered lists.
Table Snippets
Following that, we have the table featured snippet, also known as a table snippet.
These are less common and present data in a tabular format for specific topics. The purpose of table snippets is to present information visually and facilitate comparisons.
While they are less popular, these snippets are concentrated around statistical or comparative search queries to give a quick overview of the SERP.
Video Snippets
Finally, we come to video snippets. They’re displayed for ‘How-to’ search queries or tutorial-based content, typically from YouTube.
They usually have a ready-to-play timestamp or a complete outline of the videos and start at a specific part of the video. Clicking on a video snippet can take the user directly to the video section in the snippet.
7 Tips on How to Get Featured Snippets
Having covered the fundamentals, it’s time to explore the real question: how to get featured snippets?
Here are 7 tips to help you reach point 0 of Google’s search results, along with the perfect strategies and tools!
1. Use Google To Identify Featured Snippet Opportunities
Begin with Google to pinpoint featured snippet opportunities.
How?
By searching for questions your audience might ask and creating clear, concise content that answers those questions. Consider leveraging the ‘people also ask’ section to find common user questions. Also, inspect existing answers for detail and accuracy to identify content gaps you can fill.
For example, the keyword “featured snippets” itself has several questions people ask on Google.
Let’s not forget the future of Google search feature snippets and generative AI in search, leading to fewer clicks and greater importance for featured snippets and first positions.
You can use SEOBoost to make this process quicker.
Let’s explore this further in the next section.
2. Do Keyword Research Using Topic Reports
The next most important part of winning a featured snippet is to plan the right keywords.
You can move on to keyword research with topic reports to discover terms that activate featured snippets. Not doing thorough keyword research can lead to missing out on terms that trigger featured snippets.
You should aim to find low-difficulty and untapped long phrase keywords from which you could win featured snippets.
With SEOBoost, you can also conduct keyword research in minutes using AI and have a list of all the phrases, keywords, and variations listed out for you to use around your article strategically and win the featured snippet.
While there’s no accurate way of knowing exactly what keyword will trigger a featured snippet, use SEOBoost’s keyword scoring to identify how strongly you have optimized your content for the keyword.
Good on-page optimization also means more chances of winning a featured snippet!
3. Find Content Ideas Using SEOBoost
You have the topic, the keywords, and all the metrics to tell you what’s doing well for your audience.
Now, it’s time to use SEOBoost to generate content ideas. The Content Briefs feature can help you create high-value content that answers multiple questions with the perfect outline and heading suggestions.
You can optimize and target new questions by analyzing existing content ranking for similar keywords.
The topic reports feature will also help you analyze your competitors’ content to uncover their strategies for featured snippets, allowing you to replicate and improve upon them.
Both of these tools and research combined, you can create a content piece better than your competitors and steal their featured snippet place!
4. Answer Multiple Relevant Questions
Avoid confining yourself to answering merely one question.
Address multiple related questions within the same content to make it more comprehensive and useful for readers.
By focusing on answering the following questions, you can increase the likelihood of your content appearing in featured snippets:
- How?
- What?
- When?
- Where?
- Why?
- Who?
It mainly depends on your niche and industry, but targeting a diverse range of topics and keywords can help you gain visibility in untapped audiences and eventually boost your trust with the search engine as well to win more competitive featured snippets later on.
5. Stay Within the Optimal Word Count
Ensure your answers are concise. Especially when aiming for a paragraph or definition snippet with informational keywords.
Ideally, each header’s answer should be around 50 words, and paragraphs in featured snippets are typically 40-60 words long. Take the Google featured snippet for query “What are featured snippets” as an example:
Give a clear definition and use the ‘inverted pyramid’ method, starting with the most important information first, to ensure clarity and conciseness. You can later follow it with a sentence to catch readers’ attention to read further.
6. Use Headers
Arrange your content with distinct subheadings and numeric names, especially when aiming for a list snippet.
Properly structured content makes it easier for Google to crawl and understand, improving your chances of appearing in featured snippets.
Headers should be clear and descriptive, directly addressing the primary query or topic of the section to enhance snippet potential.
For instance, in my guide on keyword research mistakes, I only focused on listing all the mistakes and their solutions and formatted them with <h2> so the search engine could easily register the list when crawling the page.
7. Add High-Quality Multimedia
If you haven’t already noticed, all featured snippets are accompanied by images.
Never forget to incorporate high-quality multimedia, such as images and videos, into your content. Since the feature snippet appears with the content, Google expects the feature snippet content to showcase images related to its content.
For example, the snippet for “What are EEAT guidelines?” is a paragraph that defines EEAT and contains an image with a similar definition.
Adding clear timestamps in video descriptions highlights key sections for the video snippet, making it easier for Google to create video snippets.
Including descriptive transcripts in your videos helps Google recognize the text, improving the likelihood of the video being chosen for a featured snippet. You can easily create a video SEO sitemap with AIOSEO to help with indexing.
Winning and Monitoring Featured Snippets
Once your content is optimized for featured snippets, it becomes crucial to ensure that your technical information is in place so that Google can pick you up for a featured snippet and monitor your progress.
This can help you understand whether your SEO efforts will work and pay off, allowing you to identify when to make necessary adjustments.
Using Schema Markup
Tools like the AIOSEO rich snippets schema can help you add relevant information that Google requires for featured snippets. The AI-powered tool collects data about featured snippets by crawling Google’s SERPs and is made to target the exact schema to improve your chances of winning that place.
Analyzing Performance Metrics
The most important part of winning and maintaining a feature snippet is monitoring performance metrics like impressions, keyword rankings, and click-through rate (CTR). Another aspect of this is preventing your content from losing its place by decaying and getting older.
Use the AIOSEO search statistics tool to help you find decaying content and measure all relevant metrics related to your content pages to keep them in good form and on that point 0 mark!
Common Mistakes to Avoid
It is equally important to avoid common pitfalls while optimizing content for featured snippets. I’ll keep it short so you can have a handy list of criteria.
These include:
- Keyword stuffing
- Neglecting to structure content with clear subheadings
- Failing to answer multiple related questions within the same content
- Providing overly long answers
- Ignoring user intent
- Failing to update and improve content regularly.
If you follow all the tips and strategies explained in this article, you will definitely avoid all of these pitfalls and find that featured snippet.
Key Takeaway
By understanding the types of snippets and optimizing your content accordingly, you can leapfrog to the top of Google’s search results.
Remember, it’s not just about getting to the top; it’s about staying there. So, keep tracking your progress, make necessary adjustments, and avoid common mistakes.
Start with content optimization with SEOBoost, which will help you tweak your content in all the right places to improve your chances of winning the featured snippet by 10x!
FAQs
What are featured snippets?
A featured snippet is a concise summary that appears at the top of Google search results and directly addresses a user’s query, making it easier to find information quickly.
What are SEO snippets?
SEO snippets are structured data that provide more information about a webpage’s content. They help search engines understand the page’s content and improve its visibility on SERPs.
How can I optimize my content for featured snippets?
To optimize your content for featured snippets, follow the seven tips discussed in the blog post. Utilize Google to identify featured snippet opportunities, conduct keyword research, find content ideas, answer multiple questions, stay within the optimal word count, use headers, and add high-quality multimedia.
How do I enable featured snippets in Chrome?
Featured snippets are automatically generated by Google based on the relevance of your webpage’s content to the search query. There is no specific setting to enable them in Chrome.
