What Are Google Featured Snippets And How To Optimize Them

Do you want to get more clicks from organic search results, by jumping on the first position on Google? Featured Snippets can be useful for the same. Let’s understand what are Google Featured Snippets.

Featured Snippets (FS) :-FS are short text or small piece of information that appear at the top of the Google’s search results. The main aim of the snippets is to provide answer to the search query of the user by extracting information from top ranking pages. Many marketers and digital marketing companies in India refer featured snippets as answer boxes as they provide answer of your query in a box. It can be in the form of a paragraph, table, video, or numbered list. Users who wish to read the complete piece of information can click on the relevant URL of the featured snippet. Therefore, it is important to optimize featured snippets to help Google to understand the content of your page and show it in the relevant search results.

Types of Featured Snippets

Paragraph Snippet

One of the most common types of featured snippet is a paragraph. It contains a short piece of information that provides a brief answer to the user query; usually it has 50-60 words. It mostly provide answers to queries like what, how, why, when, where, and who.

Table Snippet

Table snippet provides data in a table form having rows and columns. It usually contains data related to sizes, dates, prices, units, food menu, any chart or any data that can be best displayed in a table form.

Video Snippet

Google also display video snippets in the form of you tube video that plays from a specific part of a video. These videos are ready to play. Generally, Google shows video snippets for queries related to How to.

Numbered List Snippet

You must have noticed whenever you searched for best cafes or best books to read or top 10 songs or anything which needs to be displayed in bullets or numbered list, a list appears on Google. It could be ordered list which shows either steps of ranking from 1 to 10. Or it may be unordered list which do not require any particular sequence.

1. Featured snippets play an important role in driving organic traffic to your website by showing your page in results and sending user to your website.

2. It helps in boosting rankings by getting you on the top of the search results.

3. It increases CTR (Click Through Rate) also as you will get the highest number of clicks on the pages which are displayed as featured snippets on Google.

4. It promotes your brand as a website is the first thing user see when user made any search on Google.

5. It helps in searches done through voice searches and maximum answers come from Google featured snippets.

Use Long term keywords

Most of the Google featured snippets display longer keywords or direct questions as user query tend to be in a form of a question. Google gives preference to long term keywords. Focusing on long term keywords will help you in optimizing your pages. All you need to do is to include questions in your content. Ask questions, provide a brief answer to that, and elaborate the same in the article itself. By adding questions such as how to, what to do, where to in the content will help search engine to use them as answers and display them as featured snippets.

Organize the structure of your pages

Do not limit your pages to answer any one type or any specific type of questions. Avoid making different pages for answering each specific question; try to include all related questions in one page. Structure it well so that it can address a lot of related user queries. Once your page gets featured on Google, its likely to get featured for all similar questions. Accordingly, structure your content well.

Improve your rankings

Google prefers taking information from pages ranking on top 10 in the search results, that means they are somewhere on the first page of the SERP. You need to take further steps to improve your ranking in order to come in top 10. This may include making your website SEO friendly and user friendly. Optimize content, images, etc on your website.

Use attractive images

Images also play very important role when it comes to content as Google randomly pick image from the page while displaying paragraph featured snippet. Therefore, make sure that you use all high quality, branded and eye catching image, so that no matter which image Google selects to show. Keep on updating and re uploading the images whenever you make any changes in the information.

Use Trigger words

Trigger words when used in the article make the article more engaging and users feel better. Infusing emotional trigger words like amazing, great, awesome can make content shine out and compelling. Set the tone in the beginning and follow the same throughout the content.

Nikhil Agrawal

Nikhil Agrawal is the Director of Digital Marketing and Strategy of IS Global Web, a leading digital marketing agency that provides world-class search marketing services and web & application development. He has extensive experience across digital marketing verticals for over 10 years. He is helping many businesses for their search traffic, conversion optimization, product launches and their online presence. You can find Nikhil on LinkedIn & Twitter.

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