Optimising Your Content For Featured Snippets
Driving more traffic to your website, that is the goal for most at the end of the day. You want as many clicks as possible on your content that you work hard on and one way to help with this goal is to show up as featured snippets in search. How is it that you get your content or your product to show up in this coveted spot in the search results?
A snapshot of what I will cover:
- What is a featured snippet?
- Types of featured snippets
- How to create featured snippets
You will know by the end of this blog how to optimise your content to give it the best chance of showing up in that much sought after prominent position in the SERP’s.
What is a Featured Snippet?
I spoke briefly in my last blog about what rich snippets and if you are anything like me you could easily overlook the ‘Featured Snippet’ title and group them together. Just to be sure:
- Rich snippets enhance pre-existing search results
- Featured snippets are their result that appears above normal SERP results.
So, featured snippets are the rich search results that appear in the SERP’s, extra information about your product, service or content. This extra information attempts to provide answers to the query of a user. Featured snippets usually appear at the top of the SERPs below paid ads, but above other organic search results.
Top question always asked about featured snippets; ‘Is it worth it? Will it really help?’ Well, in answer to this, research has found that having a featured snippet in search can drastically improve click through rates (CTR). I don’t know about you, but I like the sounds of that.
Types of Featured Snippets
There are variations of featured snippets and the way in which this extra information appears. I explore them in a bit more detail below.
Paragraph Featured Snippet
This type of featured snippet is most likely to appear when a users search was a question. The paragraph includes a blurb of copied information from the main text. They include information that attempts to answer the question.
List Featured Snippet
Much like the paragraph featured snippet, this type of featured snippet also attempts to answer a question. Instead of providing a paragraph, the information is presented in, you probably guessed it, a list.
Table Featured Snippet
The more structured stance is taken by this type of featured snippet. It makes the data easy to be read directly from the SERPs.
How to Optimize Content for Featured Snippets in Search
Of course, there is no exact process for how to create featured snippets. Google is once again the master of this process, they choose which results make it to featured snippet status. There is no explicit ‘How To’ as such, but there are best practices that you can follow to increase your chances of showing up in the featured box.
Long tail keywords that are questions should be your target. The most popular of the featured snippets include information that answers a question. Create your content with the long tail keyword phrases that begin with:
- What is
- Why is
- How does/do
- How to
You should clearly answer these questions in your content. Make sure that the answer is clear on your page of content. The question should be clear, so put it as a subheading (<h2> markup), and then answer it in the text immediately below (<p> markup). Use the rest of the blog or pages content to provide supporting information to the answer, but make sure that the answer is clear and defined.
When you are writing your content, find related keywords and filter them throughout your content, Google loves this, wholeheartedly. It reinforces the question that your content is answering.
If you have a bulk of information, points that you want to get across and you know which ‘featured snippet type’ you want to be then put the information into that format.
Increase your chances of showing up as a list featured snippet by formatting that information in a list. To increase the chances, use subheading tags (<h2>) for the list items. This will help search engines to read and understand the information and give your content a better chance of gaining featured status.
Using a table structure. To increase chances here, as before, just put your information into table format, using the appropriate tags (<table>).
SEO >> Organic Search >> Featured Snippet
A strong web design with excellent on page SEO is your best friend. The content that appears as a featured snippet is more often than not pulled from pages with a great organic ranking in search.
Optimising your keywords, making sure you are following all of the best practices and boost the natural ranking of your page.
NOTE: HIGH QUALITY IMAGES
Show that your page is authoritative, you can do this by securing yourself high quality backlinks that send signals of authority to Google. High quality images also help the cause. In the content box, the featured snippet often has an image included and you want the first look at your content to be a high resolution image, not a blurry one.
There is no way for you to let Google know which image you would like to be included, so all images should be of the same quality.
Aim for Featured Snippets and Support a Strong SEO Strategy
The click through rate, when you appear as a featured snippet increases dramatically in most cases and more traffic is driven to your website. Optimise your content for featured snippets. If your content doesn’t make it to featured status, you will still have created content that is sharable, that can produce long term SEO.
A strong SEO strategy is the beginning, for your content to be optimised for its hopeful ascent to featured snippet status, you need to conduct keyword research, have strong on page SEO , great link building or you need to get in touch with us as we are experts in this and we can do all the hard work for you, while you enjoy the results.
About the author:
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