Heard of featured snippets but not sure what they are or how they can help you climb the search results? Selesti‘s quick guide will tell you exactly what featured snippets are and how you can use them to dominate the search results!

What are featured snippets?

The idea behind featured snippets is to provide a short, simple answer to a user’s search. The text is pulled from pages within Google’s index, and they often appear as paragraphs, tables or a bulleted list.

More importantly, featured snippets typically appear at the top of Google search results, even if the site from which the text was taken ranks on page 2 of the SERPs.

This means you can use them to rank at the top of listings even for some of the most competitive terms.

How To Win At Featured Snippets

There are certain things you can do to improve your chances of ranking for a featured snippet. 

Keyword research

Use your own knowledge about your industry as well as common keyword research tools, such as SEMRush and Google’s Keyword Planner to get an idea of the interest in your chosen topics.

It’s worth noting that you have a higher chance of getting a featured snippet for more niche topics: over 85% of snippets appear for queries with a volume of 100 or less a month.

Understand Your Audience

It’s important to understand the intent of your audience whilst searching if you’re going to get a featured snippet. One way of understanding what questions users are commonly asking is the “people also ask” section, which sometimes appears alongside the search results in Google.

You can also ask your staff what questions they hear from customers. This can be an effective way of identifying previously unthought-of queries, as well as helping your existing customers!

Structure your post better than your competitors 

Ensuring your content is well structured can make the difference between appearing for a featured snippet or not. Most content that ranks well for featured snippets tends to be driven from question-based content. Indeed, 41% of all questions searched on Google have featured snippets and this is only likely to increase.

You can also use something called “snippet bait” to increase your chances that your content will be chosen for a snippet.

Snippet bait is typically a section at the start of a post that is specially designed to appear in a featured snippet. For paragraph snippets this may be a short (40-60 word) paragraph that quickly summarises the response to a query in a straightforward, simple fashion, You can then go into further detail later into the post. 

Making the most of featured snippets

As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities to dominate the top of the search engines, even if you’re not ranking on the first page. 

If you’d like some help to supercharge your position in the search results, get in touch with one of our experts today.