![]() ![]() It will also help you stay under the displayable text limit. Writing this way helps with readability, which will result in better usability metrics when Google evaluates the performance of your snippet. Don’t beat around the bush we’re not trying to pad out a five-page essay. The best way to write content for a featured snippet is to answer the query simply and directly. You can continue this process to see more snippets, until you run out of competitors or you reach the 32 word limit for queries like I did: ![]() Is there anyone else? Here’s what we get when we add “” to the query: We see that NASA currently has the snippet, but who might have it if NASA didn’t have this content? Let’s add “” to the query to see who else is competing:Īn explanation from a physicist at U.C. To test this trick, let’s look at who has the featured snippet for “why is the sky blue?” This is a handy trick to get a better idea of how many pages you’re competing against for the featured snippet. If you’re curious to see which other candidates you’re competing against, you can use a search operator trick to see what is “next in line.” Use the keyword exclusion operator, which is just a hyphen “-” to remove the featured snippet source domain from a query. If you want your content to be in the featured snippet position, you must have the best answer to the query. The metrics Google could be looking at are how long users are reading the snippet, how often they click on the source page of the snippet, how often users have a successful search session after seeing your snippet, or any combination of other user satisfaction signals. Google is frequently split testing featured snippets to see which answer users prefer. User Satisfaction and Split Testingįeatured snippets are volatile. Those studies found that the first result occupied the featured snippet for the query only 27-31% of the time. However, your page doesn’t need to be the first result to be featured. SEMrush and Ahrefs have done research in the past to see where the source pages of featured snippets rank, and over 99% of the time pages in the first 10 blue links are the source. ![]() Your content must rank on the first page of Google’s search results to be eligible for a featured snippet. This can present a problem for some websites, because HTML tables can be tricky to fit into responsively designed pages they just don’t work out of the box for mobile devices. I’ve only ever seen Google extract content from tags. Table snippets are taken from tabular data on a page. You’ll see list snippets for “How to” and “Types of” intents. List snippets are normally taken from bullet points or numbered lists in content, but I’ve seen rare instances of Google using the section headings on a page for a list snippet. Google likes to use these for answering “What is?” intent or giving a brief description of an entity. Usually one to three consecutive sentences of text, but sometimes Google will stitch two excerpts from the page together. The paragraph snippet is an excerpt of text from your page. There are three main formats for a featured snippet: paragraph, list, and table. They are also used as search results for voice queries.įeatured snippets are sometimes known as “answer boxes,” but many SEOs reserve that label for Knowledge Graph features that also occupy the space before the classic 10 blue links, or “position zero.” The key difference is that Google itself generates the content for answer boxes and featured snippets are content scraped from other websites. ![]() They come in a few formats, including paragraph, list, and table. Google displays featured snippets at the top of its Organic results or in the People Also Ask feature. What is a Featured Snippet?įeatured snippets are short pieces of text Google extracts from pages to concisely answer queries directly in its search results. Later in this post, I’ll show you a trick to see which other snippets you’re competing against. There is even an analog to the second page of results for featured snippets. Our snippet text needs to be high quality and beneficial to users to have any hope of sticking. The “content is king” rule also applies here. And just like page titles and meta descriptions, there are character (or pixel width) limits we need to be aware of. Instead of trying to get into the first 10 results, we want to occupy a single position. In classic SEO, we’re focusing on a single page here we’re focusing on a single paragraph. The way I like to frame the topic is beginning with the text. Everything we’re doing to optimize for a featured snippet is the same as a whole page, just smaller. I would say featured snippets are a microcosm of classic “10 blue links” SEO. Optimizing for featured snippets might seem mysterious, but capturing them is not much different than the on-page SEO we’ve been doing for years. ![]()
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