Featured snippets are often shown in the Google SERPs, they are a useful inclusion and often provide good user experience. They are usually a small snippet of text maybe a couple of sentences to a paragraph in length and are usually taken from a page that is in the top 10 results of Google.
The Google algorithm is intelligent, it can figure out what part of an article is most useful to the query and it shows only this part of the article, it does not rewrite or do anything like that but it takes only that part which is relevant to the users query.
You may be wondering how you get your website featured in a Google snippet. Well we have compiled this guide to try and give you some answers and guide you in the right direction. These tips have all been taken from reliable sources and you can be sure that by following our guide you will increase your website chances of being featured in Google Snippets.
Google tends to use featured snippets mainly for queries that are question based. The algorithm will then detect pages that are question based and then display the featured snippet as the top result.
There is no guarantee that your website will have some of its content displayed as a featured snippet but it is worth putting the effort in to try and get a featured snippet listing place. You will notice an increase in clicks to your website and it will also be displayed twice in the SERPs, once as a featured snippet and then again as a regular SERP result so you get twice the real estate than you would usually.
There isn’t any schema mark-up that you can use to mark your content as a featured snippet, it might also be seen as “gaming the system” since Google don’t want you to be able to control the search results that are displayed for given keywords.
You can only really have a featured snippet for question type of queries, anything that is not a question is unlikely to have a featured snippet. You can try it out with a query such as “how to calculate area of a cube”.
The phrases that are most likely to return a featured snippet are:
How to
How do
How does
You can see that these are all queries with question-based intent. This is the type of content that you need to focus on if you want a featured snippet.
There are many tools available with some free and some paid, but we would recommend the Google Keyword Planner, not only is it free but it returns results from Google database of keywords.
You do need to rank quite highly for your website to be used as a featured snippet. This is because Google takes snippets from the top-ranking pages. To rank your website in Google Organic results you need to understand and implement SEO. Whilst SEO itself is not complicated to understand the implementation can be difficult and ranking high in the SERPs even more difficult.
To get your website ranked as a featured snippet you need to make sure that your content is well laid out and answers the query that the user has inputted into the search engine. Here are some steps you can take to increase your chances of being listed as a featured snippet.
- Break down the content – Make sure that you break the content down into small chunks
- Use media – Include images and video where necessary
You need to make sure that your content is unique and of a high quality. Don’t waffle on and where possible use bullet points in the main part of the query.
If there is already a featured snippet don’t lose hope since that doesn’t mean that you can’t also rank for the keyword. You should focus on improving the answer that is given for the query. Can you add references? Can you go into more detail? If you can do this, then it is possible that you can outrank the featured snippet.
There can also be a downside to having a featured snippet. The problem with having a featured snippet is that most of the time it answers the users query and there is no need for them to click through to the page. This means that you can lose potential traffic and conversions for your website.
So how do you go about resolving this? You try to make your answer detailed but general and never going into the nitty gritty of what the user is asking. This can be difficult for math-based questions and is easier when the question is based around a general keyword. Therefore, keyword research is important.
Getting your website in the featured snippet is possible although it can be difficult and there is a lot to think about. You want to answer the users query without giving too much away and the aim is for them to click through to your website. It has been proven that the visitors that click through usually convert at a much higher rate.
There isn’t a guaranteed way to get a featured snippet. Don’t lose hope as although you can’t guarantee that your website will be a featured snippet improving your content is good for SEO and may help to increase the ranking for your website. Focus on creating valuable user content that answers question-based search queries if you want to be listed as a featured snippet.
