Google wants users to know the answer to a query as quickly as possible, and that's why featured snippets appear. They show up before the top organic search results for a keyword on the SERP. If you can earn them, these snippets can help you drive traffic and expand your reach.
So what is Featured snippet? What is a featured snippet?
You know about Rankranger, according to its report right at the time of writing this article, the Featured snippet's appearance rate is 5.51%, that's a chance.
Do you want to jump to the first position, jump to the top 0 in Google without having to focus too much on Backlinks, without focusing too much on factors that you can hardly compete with your competitors?
Let's learn about Featured snippet with SerpSeoAZ now!
What are Featured Snippets?
What are Featured Snippets?
Translated into Vietnamese we call it a featured snippet , which is a short piece of text that appears at the top of Google search results to quickly answer a searcher's query . The content that appears inside the Featured Snippets is automatically pulled from the web pages in the Google index.
Precisely it provides a quick resource to the user and shows first the first result for the user's query – commonly referred to as “ Position Zero ”.
Google analyzes the query, tries to tie its results to user intent, and chooses the best snippet it can extract from existing content to improve user experience .
In fact, when there are direct answers, the percentage of users clicking on the link below the featured snippet is quite low, it is significantly reduced compared to the normal top 1 click rate. However, not because of that, every website is fighting for this top 0 position.
Learn the importance of featured snippets with me!
What is the importance of featured snippets?
Google's idea when creating featured snippets was to help users skim to get basic answers to their questions without searching through a bunch of web pages on the SERPs. These featured snippets are on top of all search results and it stands out as soon as a user types a keyword into the search box.
So the question is, what do you get when you get featured snippets?
Improve click-through rate
According to a study by Ahrefs of over 2 million featured snippets, when there's a featured snippet at #1, it only gets ~8.6 percent of clicks (on average), while the page ranks right below it should get ~19.6% of clicks (on average).
That's a bad thing compared to the top 1 but what if you're not the top 1?
If you don't reach the top 1 then your click-through rate will be extremely low if not no clicks later. With Featured snippet you will get a significant number, although not equal to the top 1, but it is a big improvement.
Even if you're not top 1, you still have a chance to get featured snippets ! And then your click-through rate will improve.
Increase the prestige of your website – Help build a brand
In an article about the benefits of SEO , I once mentioned that SEO helps build trust and credibility in front of users, helping to increase brand awareness. Of course, the fact that you get featured snippets reinforces that.
What you can achieve up front is that users will see you continuously with their query if you have featured snippets . See more remember more, brand awareness comes from this!
Featured snippets introduce your business as an authority on a topic. They make users more likely to accept you as a thought leader in your field. That's expertise!
There's no need to click on the link below the snippet, having a featured snippet is a powerful move to boost your brand's power. Of course, clicking on the link would be much better!
Leverage voice search technology
More than 40% of internet users perform voice searches every day on computers and mobile devices. Is that a motivator?
If you pay close attention, when you do a voice search, the featured snippet will appear very high. Take advantage of this!
Optimizing for featured snippets with voice searches I'll cover near the end of the article
Show your content is on the right track
If Google pulls featured snippets from your content page, it means your content is well organized and is the best answer for users, valuable to them. And of course, you're on the right track!
You don't have a featured snippet yet when you enter the top 10 that requires you to improve your content. That is why you are in this article of mine.
User Selection
You create content and that content will bring users to something, maybe make users buy.
Once you get the featured snippet , some Google users will find their answer and they won't click on the link below the snippet anymore. The rest of them will click on the link to find out more information, these are the people you can convince them to come to the end goal that your content creates.
What types of Featured snippets are there?
If you pay attention, there will be many types of formats that will appear in the top 0 position as soon as we search for certain information. That means that depending on the query from the user, there are different types of Featured snippets .
Understanding which types of snippets work best for your topic will help you organize your content and give you the best chance of being part of a featured snippet .
Paragraph – Definition Box
You will see a paragraph appear at the top when you search for something on Google. This paragraph can deal with, providing the searcher with a short, direct definition or description.
Often the definition boxes will appear more and it usually solves for the query “ What is it? “. The definitions that Google tends to use are very concise and easy to understand. The typical length of a definition box is between 40 and 60 words .
Numbered list
This is exactly an ordered list , the numbers are sorted from smallest to largest and placed at the beginning of the line of items. Google uses numbered list featured snippets to rank things, present them in order, or show steps in a process.
Unordered list
Google uses a list of no order to excerpt highlights to list the factors that can satisfy the user. Everything is so natural that they are not in any order or process, simply listing what the user needs.
Tabular Featured Snippets
The tabular featured snippet is probably the easiest and most frequent type for queries looking for a list of numbers.
Google can take your entire dashboard to make a tabular featured snippet, or it can pull multiple metrics from different websites to recreate a table of its own. I like the former, if you optimize your content well for the Tabular Featured Snippet , there will be many advantages for you.
Featured snippet tables can also have more than one column, so don't feel limited by the amount of information you display. Also make sure your table has more than four rows to increase the chances of people clicking through to your website.
Featured snippet in video format
Usually will be Youtube Videos that appear on the featured snippet .
If a video provides the best answer to a user's query, it will include that video in a featured snippet. Video Featured Snippets can be useful for “ tutorial ” queries .
With the exception of queries that need tabular results, of course, any top video queries can appear.
How to make featured snippets appear
Google has algorithms that consistently evaluate snippets (and search rankings) to see which snippets provide the best responses to certain user queries. There's no way to guarantee that Google will use your content as a featured snippet .
What you can do is optimize your content to create opportunities!
Look for Featured Snippet Opportunities
Before you produce content, keyword research is a very important step and I have a pretty detailed article on the subject of “ keyword research ”. In this article we are talking about optimizing content for featured snippets , of course keyword research for Featured snippets is what I am about to talk about right now.
Once you have a set of keywords, you will want to know if the keyword has an internal snippet appearing for it and manually type it in the Google search box to check. But sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn't and do you feel like you're wasting your time with this?
On the Ahref tool, you can completely discover which keywords have a chance to appear with Featured snippets .
Specifically in the dashboard of the Ahref tool, go to “ Keywords Explorer ”, enter the keywords you want to analyze in the Ahres search box and press “ Enter ”. Then select “ Matching terms ” a list of keywords will appear.
In the Matching terms area , scroll to “ SERP features ” and select “ Featured snippet ”. A list of keywords with a high chance of featured snippets will appear. Download it and do what you normally do after doing your keyword research .
Optimized for specific featured snippet formats
Depending on the user query that Google may display the right type of featured snippet format , your job is to tailor the content to that type of format.
Here's how to optimize your content for the 4 featured snippets I mentioned above (except for videos because most video snippets are for youtube, it's not for our website).
Optimizing content for featured text snippets
You need to give Google a short piece of text (40-60 words) that they can directly use in the Featured Snippet . Of course it is in the form of a definition paragraph, explaining a specific problem, explaining the query " what is "
Remember this, the more your content resembles a Featured Snippet , the more likely it is that Google will use it. It is not your opinion, it must be objective, a universally known definition. Google doesn't like it when you put emotions in the featured snippets they generate.
Optimizing content for Featured snippets in the form of a numbered list
You need to turn your content into concrete steps and of course make it understandable to Google. Do not just write down the steps as step 1, step 2, .... or create an ordered list of 1, 2, 3, … and Google gives you a list-style featured snippet .
You need to do more!
You need to wrap your items or steps in a subheading, which can be an H1 or an H3. And important before each item you need to put “Step 1, Step 2, ….
Or 1., 2., 3. ….
Note that everything has to be consistent, which means you are setting “ Step 1 ” followed by “ Step 2 ” and not 2. or Step #2 .
Optimizing content for Featured snippets as an unordered list
I think SEOs are quite interested in this type of featured snippet because it is quite easy. All entries are considered equal and are not in any particular order.
You can wrap it in H2 or H3 sub-tags, even using the list format to represent list items. It doesn't have a rule at the beginning of the line and you can express the items however you want.
Another way that seems to help is to create a table of contents for your content page, which can help Google understand it faster and give you a better chance of getting featured snippets . This could be an addition to wrapping list items in a subheader.
I tried the keyword “ kitchen price list from Bosch ” and see, Google takes my results as featured snippet
Optimizing content for Tabular Featured Snippets
Google may pull other information from different websites to build its own tabular excerpt . But this happens when the top pages are not optimized for a particular tabular form.
If you optimize your content for a specific table that responds to a user query, Google will likely use that table as a featured snippet . Of course it's just a snippet of the code in the table you create, there's a source link below the featured snippet . It leads to your website if the snippet is yours.
Here's a pretty realistic example:
Add Schema Markup to the content page
Schema Markup does not guarantee you will definitely get featured snippets , with Schema Markup Google will faster understand the content on your website and generate beautiful results on Serp. It helps search engines know what your page is about and what you want your users to know.
Once you've optimized your content and are ready for a featured snippet , Schema Markup will act as a bridge that helps Google expose what you do faster. If you add structured data to your content, it will improve the appearance of your SERP and possibly even improve your chances of securing a featured snippet.
Of course when adding Schema you get Rich snippets , which is faster. Adding Schema directly affects Rich snippets, but it also supports the appearance of Featured snippets, but it will take a long time.
Use the inverted pyramid pattern
Often when writing content, you will deeply emphasize important ideas somewhere that readers can hardly find. Meet people who read, they will see them, and people who are lazy to read a lot, your content will be considered devalued.
The inverted pyramid model with outstanding advantages will help users capture the information and main content of the article in the fastest way. The core content will be put right at the top of the article, that's why!
Borrowed from journalism, inverted pyramid writing can help you create purposeful, engaging, rich content that helps you rank for multiple queries and win multiple snippets at once.
I won't elaborate in this section, it's quite abstract and needs you to explore.
Specifically:
- If you want to know what type of inverted pyramid model is, my article " writing in reverse pyramid model " will be a useful document.
- And if you want to dig deeper into the correlation between the inverted pyramid and featured snippets , Moz's Whiteboard Friday has researched it, read it! It is very good and will help you a lot.
I'll quote Dr. Peter 's answer verbatim from Moz :
In a nutshell, the relationship between the inverted pyramid scheme and featured snippets is that of query-by-question queries. you need to reply directly from the beginning of the content. After that, we go into details and ideas in the answer and of course most users are more interested in the answer at the beginning of the content .
Featured Snippets and Voice Search
Voice search optimization is optimizing your content for machine interaction, i.e. you tailor your content to make it understandable to artificial intelligence. The better your content is optimized for voice search, the better overall organic visibility
Start with the conversation keyword
Once you've settled on your basic SEO, you'll want to take a closer look at your keywords to make sure that voice search can pick them up. It's Google's trend you have to do it!
In your niche ask your customers how they use words with Google voice search. A survey is needed to understand this issue!
After you know the common words that users use in voice search, include them in the article as a keyword. The chances of your featured snippet appearing are very high because in your content there are words that match the query from the user.
Create optimized content for featured snippets
I mentioned it quite well above and I won't repeat it. You need to carefully remember the 4 types of featured snippets (except for youtube videos) and optimize the right content for each type.
If your content isn't set up to easily fit into a featured snippet , even a highly ranked page can be passed on to the next result.
I have interacted with quite a few websites of businesses in Vietnam and they have one thing in common that is poor content or content containing too long sentences or paragraphs with too many sentences , more than 3 sentences.
The voice guidelines that have been published by search engines like Google seem to indicate less than 30 words is best for any piece of content you think might be an excerpt. This shows that you can hardly get afeatured snippetif you insist on doing it.
And beyond simply shortening your content, there's really another element you can focus on to try and drive other search engine results.
Using the FAQ , that's right! These are the questions that users often use when searching and it appears quite a lot when they search by voice.
A direct answer to it is the same as the inverted pyramid pattern, wrapping it in H2 or H3 and of course about 30 to 40 words is Ok.
Rich snippets and featured snippets
Rich snippets also known as rich snippets , the search results do not have to pay for some additional information is displayed. There are different types of rich snippets, like: products, reviews, events, recipes, articles, etc.
Rich snippets are enhanced search results that provide more information, while featured snippets are selected snippets of code that appear above organic search results and are intended to answer users' questions. use immediately.
To get rich snippets you need to add Schema Markup to your content page. You can refer to the article “ What is Schema Markup? How to use it for SEO “, understand what it means and can implement it easily to get Rich snippets
Final Thoughts on Featured Snippets
Featured snippets , like most other Google features, will continue to evolve. Researching and finding new ways to leverage them to improve SERPs for everyone can be both exciting and rewarding.
In my post you already know
- What are Featured Snippets?
- What is the importance of featured snippets?
- What types of Featured snippets are there?
- How to make featured snippets appear
It's important to run a quick check of the keywords you're ranking for in your current SEO campaign and how many of them are question-based queries. Once you have this list, you can drill down into the current position you're ranking for.
Apply the strategies I mentioned above to increase your chances of featured snippets appearing.
Let me know what you achieved with the comments below!
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