A Featured Snippet is a search result that appears wrapped in a type of card and aims to provide a direct answer to a question or even a step-by-step guide for the searcher to perform an action. So what can you do to make your website appear in this format?
It is worth highlighting the importance of this result model that has been gaining ground in Google search results every day. Some websites claim that their click-through rate increased by up to 3 times after their URLs started appearing as Featured Snippets.
What you need to do, first of all, is understand that it is Google that determines which content should appear like this and that you need to understand very well the keywords that can lead to the loading of the answer boxes. At the moment, it is practically impossible for a tool to predict which searches will load in this format.
On the other hand, one thing is certain: if you get a result like this, know that it is possible to optimize your content to make the most of the situation, making people click on the content instead of consuming the information without leaving the Google search results.
1. Understand how Google uses the Featured Snippet
The Featured Snippet was specially designed to show a summary of an answer, extracted from a web page, whose main objective is to solve the problem of users who want something faster (while it is advantageous for the search engine that users stay longer on Google, allowing them to print more AdWords ads).
Basically, questions about definitions, meanings and step-by-step tutorials are the content that most benefit from this format in the search engine. However, it is Google that programmatically determines which page contains the likely answer to the user’s question.
If you want to have a better chance of appearing in a Featured Snippet, our recommendation at the moment is to focus on questions about the definition or behavior of something, always summarizing very well in the first paragraph what it is about and using important expressions such as “what is it”, “how does it work”, “what does it mean” and “definition of”.
If you already have some pages on your website that are well-ranked on the first page of Google, the chances of your content eventually becoming a featured snippet increase dramatically. However, it is also worth knowing a few rules so that you don’t give everything away, which brings us to the next point!
2. Don’t hand everything over on a silver platter
People won’t click on your content if you answer their question in just a few words, and as bad as that may sound, it’s a reality. So, very short step-by-step tutorials or summaries with few words and no depth can actually have the opposite effect: your site will start to lose traffic because visitors are satisfied with what Google shows them.
So, consider some tricks like increasing the number of steps (adding some extras) so that Google shows the “More items” button and the user needs to go to your website to see all the results. Otherwise, you’re the one who’s losing out!
3. Structure your website data
One of the great secrets of good practices to have your content predisposed to appear as a Featured Snippet to answer a question is to have the content of your HTML properly structured. Here are some important elements:
- Ordered lists
- Unordered lists
- Text paragraphs
- Content in tables
- Headers
For example, one way to make Google interpret a list of items is to put an H2 (heading 2) before a bulleted list. This is because Google loves tabulated and organized content. The same goes for game results or rankings, something Wikipedia uses wisely when organizing data in tables.
Of course, Google can also create lists without headings, listing content based on text. Therefore, knowing how to write so that the search engine gives you credit is just as important as tabulating and structuring the content.
And this is much easier than you might think! Just think like a consumer, like a user.
What question would you ask about that topic? How would you write to find out the answer? If your website contains the same expression answering the question, you are adopting good practices and the chance of your content gaining notoriety increases, even though today Google takes into account more than 200 variables to organize the SERP (search engine results).
A good tip in this regard is to find frequently asked questions that have an average volume (tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, but not millions) and that do not yet have very complete or precise content, taking into account the wording of the question. Based on this, you can create pages that answer the question exactly and monitor the evolution of your ranking.
4. Use Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a tool from Google itself that allows you to check your website’s indexing position and other features in the search engine. Although it is heavily criticized for being inaccurate and having many bugs, there is an interesting feature that you can use: re-crawl pages!
This feature is extremely important for you to force Google to prioritize a certain page. All you need to do is the following:
- Go to Google Search Console and choose your website
- Expand the Tracking tab and click “Fetch as Google”
- Enter the end of the address of the page on your domain that you edited and click “Search”
- Then, in the result that appears, click on Request Indexing if the button appears.
- That’s it! Google will automatically update the information it has about that specific page in a few minutes.
Featured snippets are the main focus of many pages that seek to improve their ranking with SEO. The advantage is that many search results do not have well-prepared answers and that, according to Google itself, 15% of daily searches are for new keywords.
Therefore, organize yourself, plan and test using the same logic as Google. After all, they themselves create the logic to reward the best for the user. Therefore, if you follow them, you will be rewarded for a job well done.
