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selesti

How to dominate Google with featured snippets

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.

WHITE PAPER: Optimising your eCommerce site

By Kate Norton, Selesti

With so many businesses now needing their digital sales to prop up any bricks and mortar revenue more than ever, the landscape for eCommerce sites and the amount of competition is evolving every day. It’s vital therefore to ensure that your brand’s voice cuts through the noise. Simply having the best quality products, the widest range of options, or the lowest prices alone just isn’t enough. 

Growing your online income requires more than simply listing your products/services on your website and hoping your customers will find you. Whether you’re transitioning from the high street or looking to grow an already established website, or just starting out, ensuring you optimise your brand experience is key to increasing your footprint and reaching your eCommerce business goals. 

The first step for any successful online store is crafting a well rounded strategy that ties your marketing KPIs and objectives to your overall business objectives. Without a clear idea of how you see your business growing in the years ahead, it is impossible to effectively measure success. In our white paper we look at how to build your brand strategy using SMART goals, understanding the best channels to focus on, planning your marketing mix and building your brand with USPs and a value proposition.

Having the best strategy in place will only work, however, if you know your customers inside and out. What are they doing when they aren’t shopping with you? What real world issues are they concerned with, and how does your brand resonate with them? We cover how to ensure you have the right data for your customers, and where to find it, as well as how to grow your customer personas into usable resources for targeting your marketing and growing your revenue. Not only is it important to look at who your customers are, but also how they interact with your brand. We take a look at how to track your customers’ journey across multiple touchpoints and how to use this information to refine your tactics and address customer pain points. 

Finally, the look and feel of your site will have a massive impact on how customers view your brand. Issues with the user experience or overall site design can cause valuable consumers to disengage from your brand and move to the competition. We’ve included some best practice examples for optimising your website design to get you started. However, real success comes from testing your design. Our whitepaper aims to help you to understand the ways in which you can utilise user testing, heat mapping and screen recording, and A/B testing to increase your conversion rate.

In our whitepaper, we take a multi-disciplinary approach to your eCommerce website optimisation journey. Helping you to combine strategy, data and analysis, and iterative design testing techniques to continually drive the right people to your store and build revenue. 

Click here to download the White Paper.