Snippets usually mean scraps or extracts of helpful information to understand and answer a particular query. There are different styles of snippets available on the internet today. It can be videos, images or lists, and files. Technology has made information-sharing methods versatile and quick, and accessible. So it makes a lot of sense to attract your clients by providing organic content that is interesting for the internet people.
Let us look at some pointers to keep in mind while planning to publish a snippet for your business.Before taking advantage of featured snippets, check if your website has any rankings at any particular position, say 1, 10, or 100.There are two ways to do this, the first is the ‘manual way,’ by checking your Google Search Console reports, and the second way is through a tool (SEM Rush).
So how does the first step work? Although this process is manual and time-consuming since it requires digging into your search results report, it can still help you discover any featured snippet rankings.
- Login to your Google Search Console and find ‘Search Results Report’ located under the Performance section.
- Sort by ‘Position’ and study the clicks and CTR.
- Search terms that are candidates for featured snippets rank in positions 1-5 in Google and have a high CTR.
- Open a new browser window, go to Google, search for those queries, and see if it shows a featured snippet for your pages.
One of the first inferences that people involved with (Search Engine Optimization) SEO jumped to was that Featured Snippets would hugely negatively impact the number of people who click through to the pages within the results. This hasn’t been the case. It’s dramatically increased the click-through rate (CTR) of results ranking.
Another critical thing to keep in mind is to optimize the content on your page, so Google chooses to use your content in the Featured Snippet.
The Definition: One should provide Google with a short (40-60 word) snippet of text that they can directly use in the Featured Snippet. It also helps if you have “What is X” directly above your definition. As per a sample out of 5000 queries, It was found that the CTR to the HubSpot website for high volume keywords increased by over 114%.
The Organization: Make sure to organize the structure of the content page or layout with headings and catchy paragraph tags; a clear page structure seems to be necessary and the semantic relevance to the keyword in question.
For non-question-based keywords, take a definition-style approach. For shorter, less question-orientated keywords that display a Featured Snippet (e.g., “Inbound Sales”), it’s much more likely that Google will pull through a paragraph of text. Google tends to prefer ‘answers’ that begin logically as an answer would.
Some answers require a more in-depth explanation, often involving a step-by-step process. Page structure is fundamental here. Each step should be structured appropriately in a list format or represented on the page as heading tags.
So when clients are looking to increase their visibility within the Featured Snippet, the first thing to do is to run a quick audit of the keywords you’re ranking for within your current SEO campaign and how many of them are question-based queries. Once the list is generated, you will get an idea of the current ranking and how well your content is structured, and then devise a plan to present it in an exciting way for the clients so that they will reach your snippet.
In conclusion, don’t forget that Google is constantly testing different scenarios to improve its search results and user satisfaction. Part of their tests is changing the featured snippet entries, so it’s possible to gain or lose a ranking over time because of this. So don’t get contented and always keep updating content marketing strategies to be in the featured snippets list.
