You can be forgiven if you do not know what featured snippets are in digital marketing. Even most search engine optimization consultants don’t know what it is. At this juncture, we can go ahead and ask what is featured snippets is? If you have used Google to search the internet, at any point in the last few years, the chances are that you have seen featured snippets, you just do know that is what it’s called.
Featured snippets are that extra little bulleted points, Google adds to a listing in its search result page. Listing with featured snippets tends to be at the very top of results on page 1. The image below shows an example of a featured snippet. But I will encourage you to go to Google right now, type these words “10 of the best free greetings cards and ecards apps on Android platform” and you will see a featured snippet that takes you to a page at a website called Temi’s Blog.
Why should I bother with featured snippets?
Now that you know what featured snippets are, your next question could easily be “why should I bother about featured snippets? That is a very good question, and any SEO and digital marketer will tell you that driving traffic to their own or a client’s site, is the holy grail of their profession. Which I believe is yours too, if you are reading this article with a view to driving more traffic to your site.
The best way to answer the question as to why you should bother about winning a featured snippet to your site is best answered in a list, and here is a list of some of the reasons you should bother:
- More traffic to your site! As you can see, the listing with a featured snippet stands well out of the crowded Google search engine result pages. That means more traffic to your website.
- Vote of confidence in you by Google. A featured snippet for one of your posts is the ultimate thumbs up for your content. It means of all the pages on the internet with similar contents, Google deems yours to be the best.
- Double bite of the cherry. The featured snippets on average double the amount of traffic to that specific page on your site.
How can you win a featured snippet in Google?
- The very first thing you need to do is to pay attention to your article when you are writing it. The quality of the article, and whether it answers a question Google users ask, is one of the factors that will determine whether you get a featured snippet to a post or not. If it is an existing article you wish to get featured snippets for, you will have to reevaluate the article and maybe rewrite it. That was the advice given to the author of document authentication and verification services who wanted to earn featured snippets in his article.
- Target long tail keywords. Research has shown that the majority of snippets are triggered by long tail keywords. Start with good old keyword research. read more on a step-by-step guide on the Keyword research strategy for a blogger.
- Also, identify possible opportunities to get featured for an F.S, study your competitors and understand the particular aspects or sections that get google snippets. It’s quite complex, right? we will give you a hint.
- According to research by Ashref, more than 99% of featured snippets pages already ranked in the top 10 on Google’s ranking list. Therefore, if your article is ranked on the top 10 of google’s ranking the chances of your article getting a snippet is very high.
Find the keywords you already ranked on page one for that have a features snippets. These are your featured snippets opportunities. - Be a detective: It is a well-established fact that “content is king in SEO” apart from writing good content, spy on your competitors and detect what is relevant but absent in their content and include such relevant content to yours. Providing very vital information different from others gives you a chance to rank better by google.
- Identify the commonly asked questions
- know your searcher’s intent: try to find out what you searcher are thinking, what sought of answers do hope to get when they type on a google search engine. put yourself in their shoes. think like them.
- Prioritize your featured snippets opportunities by the highest potential ROI(Return on investment Keywords)
- Ensure to clean up a rogue on-page HTML to make crawling your content easier.
- Use the inverted pyramid style writing style
- leverage on 3rd party ranking sites when necessary
- The H2 tags should always be in the form of a question.
Conclusion
Earning featured snippets requires a bit of additional formatting to your regular posts. The extra formatting means a little bit more time spent posting an article. That additional time is worth investing because it will pay you back in traffic, in multiple folds. So if you are looking for more ways to drive organic Google traffic to your site, you should invest the extra time required to earn featured snippets.