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When was the last time you searched a question on Google? What did you notice about the results?
If you’ve been paying attention for the past couple of months you’ve certainly noticed that your search results don’t show up in the same old format. Instead, when you type in a question such as, “how much does a shoe cost?”, here’s what you get:
A definitive response up top followed by related queries that people have asked in the past. After that section you now have the conventional search engine results.
What Are Featured Snippets
What’s demonstrated in the above image is referred to as featured snippet pages. Basically, Google selects content from search results pages that’s an answer to the typed in question. Since featured snippets appear in boxes, there are some who refer to them as answer boxes.
When your site is displayed on the answer box, it gives your brand plenty of exposure. In fact, there have been studies that have proven this. You can find the study findings here and here.
Featured Snippet Types
There are three different types of featured snippet pages:
- Table – the answer is given in table format
- List – The answer is given in list format
- Paragraph – The answer is given in text format
According to a survey conducted by GetStat, the paragraph snippet is the most popular.
What Are The Chances That Your Featured Snippet Will Be Displayed
A survey conducted by Ahrefs showed that over 99% of featured snippets were taken from web pages that were already ranked at the top. So, if your page is already ranked in the top 10, your chances of getting featured are very high.
A different study conducted by GetStat differs with the one from Ahrefs. According to GetStat more than 70% of the featured snippets came from sites that weren’t ranked from the top 10. So it might be that you don’t have to be a top ranked page in order for your site to get featured.
Research conducted by GetStat shows that queries associated with the following usually get the most featured snippet results:
- Health
- Financial
- Requirements
- Mathematical
- Transitional
- Status
- DIY Processes
Ahrefs has published a very comprehensive list of words and topics that are most likely to trigger featured snippets. This include words such as recipe, best, vs, definition, get, cost, meaning, phone, iphone, chicken, windows, can, make etc
It’s important to note that not all queries trigger featured snippets including:
- Shopping
- Local
- Images and videos
Here’s a summary of the findings of the above studies
Your site is most likely to get shown as a featured snippet if it’s ranking in the top 10 pages
If you’re in the finance, health or DIY ncihes, you have the greatest probability of getting featured.
How To Discover Featured Snippet Opportunities
Numerous studies have shown that featured snippets get triggered by long-tail keywords. When performing keyword research for featured snippets, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind:
- Take question-type queries into account that is queries that begin with what, why and how.
- Long-tail queries that contain no questions trigger featured snippets as well.
A good keyword tool to use when doing featured snipped research is Serpstat.
Use other means as well to discover what other featured snippet opportunities are out there. This includes browsing through suggested questions that appear alongside the featured snippet.
In addition scour other platforms such as Twitter to find out what kind of questions people ask that are related to your keyword.
Once you’re through doing that you’ll need to identify pages on your website that are already ranked high on Google.
Edit these pages to include an answer to a frequently asked question and publish that.
How To Optimize Featured Snippets
In order to increase chances of your page getting featured as a snippet you should focus on SEO best practices to get your page to rank first for the query.
For the longest time people have suggested that you should use Schema.org basically for everything if you intend to rank a particular page. However, the study by Ahrefs shows that there’s no association between structured markup and featured snippets.
Ultimately the best way to get your answer featured is by providing a good answer.
Below is a list of actionable tips you can implement.
Endeavor To Get Straight To The Point With Each Answer
If you carefully study the answers that come up as featured snippets, you’ll notice that there’s a trend of single paragraph answers getting preference.
According to this study, most featured snippet paragraphs have a maximum of 97 words and an average of 45 words. Use this as a guideline when creating your answers.
Be Factual and Well Organized
Google also gives preference to hard facts and numbers. If your answer requires that you provide number of steps, ingredients, year, time to cook etc don’t shy away. This also applies to branded queries. So say you have a list of prices on your site for products sold on a big ecommerce store. When someone runs a search on prices, Google might give your site preference in the featured snippets space because of the amount of detail and structure you’ve provided your answer in.
You won’t need to use any special markup. Google picks up HTML table elements just fine.
One Page To Rule Them All
Ahref found that once your page gets featured for one query, it’s likely to get featured for other queries as well. So, what does this mean?
When building a page you hope to get featured, you need to ensure that you answer as many similar/related questions as possible instead of trying to build and optimize a page for each specific question.
Organization Is Key
When you combine related questions and answers in one piece of content you need to properly structure your article. In other words you should have a multi-level keyword strategy.
Basically, your generic keyword such as tree would be the category you place the article in
The main query you want to feature for would then become the title of your article
Other related/minor queries would act as subheadings. Some queries that might be very similar could go under one subheading.
Eye-Grabbing Images
When images appear alongside a snippet they grab the user’s attention which is exactly what we want. Google will pick up any image on your page and juxtapose it to the featured snippet page. To ensure you don’t miss out on any traffic, you should pick an image that’s eye-catching, then brand and annotate it.
You can use Canva.com to create eye-catching graphics.
Updating and Re-uploading Images
Every once in a while you might find that you need to update your answers with new information. When you do so, remember to update your images as well. Basically, WordPress appends dates to image URLs so even if your content has been updated it might not feature due to the old images you used before.
You should update the images as well to get them featured.
If you would like to consult on how we can build snippet pages for you get in touch with us.