Tips

How To Optimize For The Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the first thing people will see on many search engine results pages, and they are almost twice as likely to be clicked over the first position on the search engine results page.

A featured snippet position primarily is used to answer search questions or topics in a short and concise manner.

Getting your site into this highly valuable space as part of your SEO efforts can really help to improve your visibility.

You can achieve Position 0 if you make effort in content creation on your site, especially when it comes to answering questions and paying close attention to the questions users are asking via search.

How to Rank for Featured Snippets

1. You Can’t Create Featured Snippets

Google creates featured snippets at their own discretion. Google systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a user’s search request, and if so, elevates it.

No matter what you do from an SEO perspective, you can’t force the creation of the featured snippet.

2. You Can Capture Featured Snippets from Others

The best way to acquire featured snippets is to first utilize a tool such as SEMrush, Moz Pro, or Ahrefs Site Explorer. Using these tools, you can see where your website ranks for search queries and based off those current rankings you can see which queries currently show featured snippets and in what format.

3. Page 1 Rankings Required

Unless your page ranks on page 1 for a search query that triggers a featured snippet, getting one will be nearly impossible. 99.58 percent of all featured snippets are from sites that rank in the top 10 of that search term.

4. Analyze & Identify Opportunities

Now that you have found a featured snippet for a keyword you rank on page 1 for, it’s time to try and capture it.

• What is the current site doing well to answer the user’s question?
• What could be improved and provide a better experience for users searching for that topic?

Build out your content in a way that will provide a better answer.

5. Grammar Matters

At Mozcon, Britney Muller from Moz shed light on some tests they have been running.

She found that if you have grammatical mistakes in your heading or description, it could trigger removal from position 0.

6. Think Inverse Pyramid!

You want to try and put the answer to the featured snippet towards the top of your page.

Start with the answer and then supplement the rest of the content on that page with information so the user could get everything answered in this one place.

7. Formatting Matters

If the current featured snippet is in a table format, make sure your answer is in a table format.

If the current featured snippet appears as a bulleted list, make sure yours is as well.

And so on.

8. Featured Snippets Are Expanding, Becoming More Diverse

While featured snippets have been around for a while, their types and displays have expanded recently.

Take for example, the job search (screenshot below), that shows local jobs once the query is typed into Google. As these continue to expand and diversify, there will be even more opportunities for businesses to rank in this position.

Example:

9. Look at the ‘People Also Search’ Box

Looking at the results in this box can not only help you to answer relevant questions, but also spark ideas for other content you can write to help your SEO efforts.

These searches are almost always related and can really help to get insight into other related keywords.