Simple Tips to Optimize Featured Snippets and Ace Your Google Authority
Reading Time: 6 minutes The logic behind Google inquiries and SEO mechanisms is constantly evolving. It’s impossible to stick to one strategy all the time and expect to maintain a stable search ranking day after day. Instead, you have to follow the latest trends and adapt. Featured snippets represent one of those trends.
As a matter of fact, they are probably the most important SEO format these days. A featured snippet allows your website to stand out from the rest of the competitors and attract users with the sheer power of its on-page position. In this article, we will explain how to optimize website content in order to earn a featured snippet in Google search.
Table of Contents
What Is a Featured Snippet?
A featured snippet displays all of the relevant information about a website – in a nutshell. It’s a brief introduction to the digital presentation of your company that is supposed to inspire users to click on the link and dedicates more time to your webpage.
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They usually consist of three or more lines, which is just enough to get someone acquainted with the basic features and content of your website. Google snippets also have this “promise effect” as they essentially suggest users that the targeted website can provide them with much more information than shown in the preview.
But the thing that makes featured snippets so attractive is their position. Namely, users see this SEO element on top of the search results: before Google’s top 10 results and even before sponsored links. That’s why marketers call featured snippets a position zero.
Featured Snippets Formats
There are several types of featured snippets. They vary in structure depending on the content of your website and the demands of a given Google search. Here are the basic featured snippets formats:
- Paragraph: This is the most common type of featured snippets because it answers Google inquiries in a few short lines. It’s a summary of the webpage that correlates the best with user’s text search. It allows you the possibility to highlight one or more keywords.
- Lists: You’ve probably seen a lot of posts online which explain 10 ways to do something or 7 best mobile apps, etc. All these posts are list-based because they help users to find the necessary information faster. This is also the reason why a solid portion of featured snippets comes in the list format. For instance, check out the list snippet we earned for the post published on com writing service.
- Table: Table snippets are perfect for presenting game scores, schedules, events, etc. They enable you to display information in a well-designed style, which always deserves a special attention from Google searchers. If you want to receive a position zero in the table format, you have to add a <table> tag on your webpage. However, keep in mind that the nature of table snippets is very specific and they don’t show up in search results too often. Namely, more than 80% of snippets are paragraphs, around 10% come in the list form, while somewhat over 7% of them are table snippets.
How to Receive a Featured Snippet
Just like all other SEO features, Google snippets will also take you some time to figure out the most efficient techniques. But there are still some basic steps that you must take in all cases, so we will focus on these procedures.
- Do the research
If you want to earn a featured snippet, you have to do the research and find out the most popular topics in your niche. Doing so, you get to learn the questions that an average user regularly asks while searching for product-related information.
You can organize a brainstorming session with your colleagues to figure out the basic set of inquiries. After that, you should check out your website and social network pages to see user comments. Additionally, there are a lot of great Q&A websites where you can find valuable information for the featured snippets preparation.
- Keyword research
As you probably already know, keywords play the crucial role in SEO and you have to create content using relevant keywords and phrases. If you want to make sure that you didn’t forget anything, Google Keyword Planner is a free online tool which can help you to conduct a comprehensive research. At the same time, a lot of Google inquiries resemble real-life questions, so try to design answers using more than five words to make an answer complete.
- Mind the formatting
The way you format a web page makes a huge impact on the overall chances of receiving a featured snippet. That’s why you need to tag headers properly with <h1> and <h2> marks. Divide text into smaller paragraphs and keep the sentences short whenever possible.
- Be straightforward and beat the competition
Websites that offer clear and direct answers to user queries have the highest chance of receiving a position zero. Keep it in mind and be as straightforward as possible in your posts. However, your competitors will try to do the same thing and you should make some extra effort to anticipate the coming trends. If you give answers to the questions that will become trendy soon, you’ll get your foot in the door and beat the competitors.
- Answer the question
We can never overestimate the importance of this advice – answer the question as quickly and simply as possible. All answers to user inquiries should be separated from the rest of the website content, preferably in your FAQ section. Not only that it helps users to find all answers on the website easily but it also enables Google to detect your feedback and reward it with a position zero status.
Conclusion
A number one position in Google search enables you to attract more customers to your webpage and generate more conversions, consequently. But earning a featured snippet, you go beyond that and receive extra visibility. This is exactly why most of the companies are trying to receive the so-called position zero.
Although there is a whole science behind featured snippets, we tried to show you the most important mechanisms in this article. We hope that these suggestions will do well for your business but don’t hesitate to let us know in comments if you have more questions about this topic.
Author Bio: Antonio is a marketing specialist and a blogger. He loves writing about SMM, marketing, education, and productivity. He’s also crazy about riding his bike and bumping into new people (when he’s on foot). He will be happy to meet you on Facebook and Twitter.
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