Featured Snippet: Magic or Reality?

Contents:

• What is a featured snippet
• How it affects organic traffic
• How to optimize your website for the featured snippet

What is a featured snippet?

It is rumored that there is a mysterious trick to make the traffic on your website go sky-high. Have you heard about it? Surely. This phenomenon is called “featured snippet” or “position zero,” that is defined as a block above the organic search results in Google with a short answer to user’s query. At the same time, featured snippet shouldn’t be confused with the “quick answer,” which doesn’t show the root website in the end. Moreover, “quick answers” are oriented typically on the incontestable information or short facts. Consequently, Google with its own algorithms promotes your website to lots of new visitors by demonstrating the link of your page on the highest rank.

The most pleasant benefit of such attention of the most powerful search engine is that even the owners of smaller websites that don’t occupy top positions in organic SERP may optimize their page content for certain long-tail queries and get chosen for featured snippets, which will ultimately drive more traffic to their site and may help them improve organic positions. That could be compared with the situation when you go through the games’ levels and suddenly get involved in the meeting with “boss”, which provides you with new opportunities.

At first sight, the reasons of the growing interest in this kind of snippets are crystal clear. But let’s dive into details.

How it affects organic traffic?

What are the special aspects of the snippets that make them helpful when it comes to boosting your organic traffic?

1. High visibility. People psychologically pay more attention to the top positions in the search results. The page that is featured in ‘position zero’ unconsciously catches the eye. Mainly, that works with the images that Google pulled from your page.
2. Speed. The structured text, that is located in the frame, seems to be the quickest way to understand the matter for the majority of users.
3. Friendliness. It looks like the big brother “Google” helps you directly. And that is true to a certain extent, just because the search engine tries to diversify SERP and selects the website with the most appropriate content and the high rate of scrupulosity.
4. Relevancy. The primary purpose of the search engine ranking process is to produce the most corresponding reply and final satisfaction of the user’s demand. A featured snippet is a result that’s meant to provide the user with the most accurate response to his long-tail keyword. And if Google thinks that your website’s page is relevant enough that it’s worth to move it up to the ‘position zero’, it will most likely influence your website’s authority and hopefully boost its ranking in the long run.

How to optimize your website for Google’s featured snippet?

The synergy of all previous factors generates an effective solution. A Human as one of the laziest creatures adores quick solutions!

Such characteristics make featured snippet an ideal tool for improving the traffic of a growing website. So how to earn the position zero?

• Concentrate only on a handful of keywords, that perfectly complement each other and provide truly “organic” content.
• Build well-structured pages, divided into short sections (paragraphs), which will represent ready-to-use decisions to the query. Furthermore, it will have direct influence considering that featured snippet is formulated from the page content in comparison with simple snippets, that have two alternative way (from the content or the description of the page).
• It’s important to note that the featured snippet could be displayed in search engine result as a numbered or bulleted list as well. So you could construct the part of your page, for instance, its conclusion as a list of step-by-step actions, which will lead the person to the expected result.
• In this case, it will be a nice practice to check previously common and popular questioned queries with keyword planning tools. Do not hesitate to include the best ones in the titles in order to show the level of priority on the page to the search engine. As a rule, Google awards websites with the featured snippet in reliance on the idem identity of the query and the title of the page. Long-tail keywords in a question form like “how to get more followers on Instagram” or “what’s the best job in the world” are something you should target.

Take into account, that a great number of questions could be composed into the FAQ format with the variety of links to the certain pages containing the concise answers.

Keep in mind the importance of the user experience and generate the brief, but really descriptive messages that will be helpful not only for an average user but also for an inquisitive one.

The information you share should bring value. The search engine was right to detect the most useful page from the mass of them. Filling your website with repetitive words will irritate both readers and Google. You don’t need to put yourself in the place of the user, as it’s commonly suggested since you already are a user with the human way of thinking. So just be yourself, be a reader, not only a writer of your texts.

It’s the interesting detail that Google trusts the facts, so make an effort to concretize your content, showing the numeric data to the users. For example, in the shape of statistics or infographics.

In case you are optimizing for mobile devices (which is a must), you just can’t help but compete for the sweet snippets. They have the most attractive look on mobile devices because they occupy the entire screen. That’s also the main reason why you should pay attention to featured snippets of the competitors in your niche and aim for your own.

There aren’t any special recipes for features snippet optimization on mobile. Just make sure that all of the recommendations mentioned above are followed. Moreover, you shouldn’t be nervous about AMP version of the pages anymore, Google fixed this bug, and your AMP page may appear as the featured snippet as well.

Want to boost your website’s position and win the featured snippets race? Contact WiserBrand’s Cyber Gurus at seo@wiserbrand.com and we’ll make your on-site SEO pitch perfect!

Eugene Koplyk

Head of Marketing department

As a Digital Strategist, I help companies grow their business online. Here share my expertise, ideas, and best practices on Ecommerce marketing initiatives, branding, SEO, conversion and many more. If you want to stay connected, follow me on LinkedIn.