Google featured snippets boost your page above all the search results for a query, and they can drive significant traffic to your site. The good news: there are concrete steps you can take to make your content more likely to earn a featured snippet.
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Eric Enge shares his observations on content most likely to earn a featured snippet, based on his tracking of over a million search queries for the past three years.
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Resources
- Featured Snippets Resource Center
- See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Transcript
Mark: Eric, just in case anyone watching doesn’t know, let’s start with what a featured snippet is.
Eric: Good idea, Mark. A featured snippet is a search feature where Google takes an extract or snippet from a website and places it in the featured box at the top of search results as a direct answer to a user query.
Mark: If the answer is right there in the featured snippet, why do featured snippets still drive a lot of traffic to the sites from which they’re taken?
Eric: That’s a good question because it seems counterintuitive. But in many cases, the snippet shown does not completely answer the question.
For example, a site’s answer to a how-to question may have 10 steps, but the featured snippet only shows the first six. In other cases, the answer may be complete but too brief, and people click through to learn more.
And one more scenario to call out: in some cases the users have asked a direct question and Google provided a direct answer, and maybe they got all of the direct answer, but it’s pretty rare that that’s really the only question the user has related to that topic, and they often want more information.
Mark: Okay. If featured snippets can boost your page to the top of search results and they can actually drive traffic to your site, you probably want to be in as many of them as you can. So how do we earn them?
How to Earn Featured Snippets
Eric: Of course, Google doesn’t tell us the criteria for selecting which page to use in a featured snippet, but after several years of tracking over a million queries that have displayed them at one time or another, I’ve been able to discern some patterns common to pages that earn featured snippets.
Mark: I know you gave eight things site owners should do to increase their chances of earning featured snippets in the comprehensive featured snippets resource center you created on our site. Can you share with us a few of them?
Eric: Sure.
- Make a list of the most commonly asked questions about your business or your areas of expertise and then filter these down to the most popular queries. If the question isn’t searched for very often then it probably isn’t that interesting to get a featured snippet for it.
- Next is to realize that your page doesn’t have to be the number one position on Google to get a featured snippet, but it does need to be in the top 10. So for each query you decide to target for a featured snippet, either choose a page already ranking in the first page of Google results or create one worthy of such a ranking.
- Finally, make sure you thoroughly answer the question on your page, but also expand the content to answer all the related questions that users have on that topic. In other words, be as comprehensive as you possibly can.
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See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Thank you for sharing valuable information
I would like to add few points here
1. The article should be at least 2000 words
2. Schema code should be implemented on the webpage
3. Bullet points + images + videos should be present on the page.
Hope it helps
It was a great post,Thank you for sharing valuable information
Thanks for your comments. Actually, after reviewing 400,000 featured snippets in our study, we saw no evidence that Schema was helpful to obtaining a featured snippet. I do think that the length of the article can be a plus, but I do think that the 2,000 figure is a bit too specific. Also, if you go to our full study (https://www.stonetemple.com/featured-snippets-guide/), you can read about this. You’ll also see that specific coding constructs aren’t a real factor. Paragraphs actually are responsible for the most FS, but in some markets bullet points or tables matter the most.