Featured Snippet Optimization

What Are Featured Snippets?

Featured Snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google's search results in order to quickly answer a searcher's query.

What Are the Types of Featured Snippets?

The four main types of featured snippets that Google displays on its search engine results pages (SERP) include: 

• Paragraph snippets 

• Bulleted list snippets 

• Numbered list snippets 

• Table snippets 

Why Are Featured Snippets Important?

Topical authority is important to Google, it won’t give authority to a page based on keywords alone. A top performing website should be able to cover one topic holistically, as an expert, providing quality answers that users are looking for.

Featured snippets do just this, while generating opportunities for pages with less authority to appear at the top of the SERP.

Securing Position Zero (P0)

Feature snippets are considered Position Zero (P0) in the SERP. P0 is SEO gold, as 49% of all Google searches are no-click, and 70-80% of users ignore paid ads and only focus on organic results. Securing position zero will bring traffic to your site, and increase sales, if a proper inbound funnel is in place.

• If you rank #1 and land a featured snippet you could be getting over 28% of the clicks (i.e. almost a third of the potential organic traffic for a given search term)
  

• If you don’t rank #1, but still manage to land a featured snippet you can exponentially increase organic traffic (i.e. pages ranking outside the top 3 positions would be getting single digit CTRs, so you could effectively 2-3x the traffic potential)

• In other words, it looks like the featured snippet is stealing clicks from the #1 ranking result.

Optimizing Webpage Content for Position Zero

My team had a task to rank for quite competitive keywords, “blockchain in banking” “blockchain in insurance” “blockchain use cases” “blockchain in energy” etc. Our competitors were currently ranking in the Top 3 positions.

We created webpages for each industry-related keyword, and optimized each paragraph to answer questions in the 4 feature snippet formats to be featured in P0.