15 Feb
In the past few years Google has been refining the way that it displays results to users. In particular, Google has been increasing the number of Featured Snippets that it displays for queries.
When the featured snippet was first introduced, it became something of a podium prize. Google, didn’t give us much in the way of how to earn a featured snippet, but SEOs crunched the data to win the race anyway.
In this guide, let’s understand featured snippets, how they work, and how you can win them for yourself.
What are featured snippets?
A featured snippet shows up as a block that contains the exact answer to your query. It is found right above the first organic search results, which is why it’s also called “position 0.”
Featured snippets aim at answering the user’s question right away (hence their other well-known name, “answer boxes”). Being featured means getting additional brand exposure in search results.
Types of featured snippets
There are three major types of featured snippets:
- Paragraph – It can be a box with text inside or a box with both text and an image inside. This snippet shows paragraph-type answers to questions like how, who, why, when, and what. The screenshot above is an example of a paragraph featured snippet. Paragraph snippets are the most popular type.
- List – Answers that are presented in numbered lists or bulleted lists fall under this snippet type. List snippets apply mostly to posts about step-by-step instructions and recipes.
- Table – Often you’ll see table snippets show up for posts that contain comparison charts. Google values well-structured content with prices, rates, years, and other numerical data.
Why do featured snippets matter?
Featured snippets put your website at the top of the SERP and make it much more clickable, whether on mobile or desktop (91% of the keywords in our dataset had featured snippets on both). Their prominence in Google can be an indicator of brand authority, which can bode well for the way users see you, too.
According to a study “Featured snippets appear more often for keywords that indicate specific intent at a certain point in the sales funnel, such as long-tail keywords”.
The benefits of featured snippets
As well as appearing at the top of SERPs, there are a few benefits of owning featured snippets:
- Audience behavior insights: They might give you the opportunity to learn more about the objectives of your visitors by showing you what they do when they land on your content;
- Higher brand authority: Both Google and viewers might consider your website to have more relevant information written by experts;
- Higher click-through rate (CTR): This varies based on the content of the featured snippets, but generally speaking, your CTR could benefit from having more eyes on your entry in a SERP.
How featured snippets influence search and SEO
Here are a few things that featured snippets changed for both users and SEOs.
- Shortcut to the top organic position
- Fewer clicks—sometimes
- Featured snippets as branding opportunities
- Featured snippets after SERP deduplication
- You can opt-out of featured snippets (don’t do that though)
Shortcut to the top organic position
If your content is ranking on the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a search query that shows a featured snippet, you can “win” that snippet and shortcut your way to the top position. Let’s break this down.
Our study found that featured snippets come from pages that already rank in the top 10. Moreover, the vast majority of featured snippets pages rank in the top 5.
In conclusion, the higher your content ranks, the more likely it is to get a featured snippet. Getting to the first SERP is a more manageable goal than ranking number one for a keyword. But if that keyword triggers a featured snippet, it makes the first position a bit more attainable.
Fewer click – sometimes
Many SEOs believe that featured snippets reduce clicks on the search results. After all, if the answer to the query is in the SERP, why would you click on a result?
While this is the case for some queries, it’s certainly not the case for them all. It depends on whether Google can provide a satisfactory answer in the snippet.
For example, take a look at the featured snippet for the query, “when does the stock market close”
Featured snippets as branding opportunities
Clicks aside, featured snippets are the first thing that users see in the search results. They’re even more prominent on mobile devices where they’re often the only thing people initially see:
This is a very compelling argument in favor of featured snippets.
Increasing your share of voice in SERPs is arguably one of the most important SEO KPIs. That’s because brand-building is proven to be the primary driver of long term growth.
The more your brand is visible in SERPs for relevant topics, the more you will be associated as a market leader.
Featured snippets after SERP dedication
In the past, the page owning the featured snippet would also be listed in the standard ‘blue link’ search results somewhere on the first SERP. That’s gone now. Once your page gets elevated to the featured snippet, you lose that ‘regular’ search result.
Although the deduplication inevitably caused traffic drops to pages in featured snippets, it’s not a traffic killer. At least that’s what Kevin Indig’s study says.
While we intend to update the study soon, the least I can do right away is to check the impact of the deduplication on Ahrefs blog the same way Kevin did.
You can opt-out of featured snippets
If you want to opt-out of featured snippets, Google offers various ways to do that. Just be aware that some of them also block your content from appearing in traditional ‘blue link’ snippets. I wouldn’t recommend using those because Google could then only use your hard-coded title tag and meta description.
The easiest way to remove your page from appearing in featured snippets is to include max-snippet robots meta tag. This tag specifies the maximum number of characters Google can show in their text snippets.
And because featured snippets are longer than descriptions in regular snippets, you can set the character limit to the usual maximum length of descriptions. That’s around 155–170 characters.
You’d just have to paste this code snippet into thesection of the page which you wish to remove from featured snippets:
Note that, according to Google, this method doesn’t guarantee removal from featured snippets. Only the more restrictive methods of using the nosnippet robots meta tag or data-nosnippet HTML attribute do.
How to earn featured snippets
The featured snippet game is all about strategy. In order to rank for featured snippets, you need to format your website content to win them. Even if you write content based on a query that already has a featured snippet in its SERP, you still have a chance to replace the current snippet with a new one: yours.
Based on our study, here’s a rundown of the main on-page SEO elements you need to consider in order to be in the running for (and win) a featured snippet:
Choose Your Keywords
Let’s say you’re a farm and you want to teach consumers how to select the best fruit. You’re not going to have much luck going after the keyword “apple” alone, so it is crucial to be strategic and choose your keywords wisely.
This is where featured snippets can help you. The more words in the query, the higher the chance of the SERP returning a featured snippet.
The best way to increase the length of your keywords is to consider the questions your audience is asking about your products and/or services. Longer queries can often reveal intent, too, as they tend to be much more specific than shorter ones.
You can earn a featured snippet for shorter keywords like “ripe apple” (and someone has), but you will likely have better luck and see more visitors in a certain part of the sales funnel when you get a featured snippet for a more specific keyword.
You might, for instance, provide an authoritative answer to the question “how do I choose a ripe apple?” and get a featured snippet as a result, which could lead to more valuable visitors because of the suggested intention behind the query — they could be closer to the point of purchase.
Leverage the Power of Questions
Gone are the days when Google users threw every potential keyword into the search box and hoped for the best. Google and other search engines have become portals for every question under the sun, and featured snippets pop up fairly often depending on the kind of question that’s asked.
In our dataset, 29% of keywords that triggered a featured snippet started with a question-based word, such as “why,” “do,” and “can.” Here are the top queries that result in featured snippets:
- 77.6% of questions that start with “why”
- 72.4% of queries that start with “can”
Questions beginning with “where” trigger featured snippets least often at only 18.6%. This is probably due to the fact that Google defaults to another search feature, such as Local Pack or Map, when the word “where” is used.
SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool did a lot of the heavy lifting here, as it finds all possible relevant questions and long-tail keywords.
Once you have your questions based on your related keywords, it’s time to start creating a content plan. You can answer multiple questions in one article, or have a series of articles based on the questions surrounding a specific keyword. However, just make sure you keep the user intent in mind and avoid putting all your eggs into one basket.
Use topic research to streamline your content creation process and SEO Writing Assistant to help you create optimized, search-engine-friendly content that, where necessary, is geared towards earning featured snippets.
Format for a Featured Snippet
The type of featured snippet you could earn will likely be easy to figure out. If you recall from earlier, your 4 featured snippet formats are: paragraph, list, table, and video.
As you write and use these formats naturally within your content, consider the data listed above for each type.
Writing with a featured snippet in mind helps users, too, especially if they are speed-readers. For the readers who love more depth, your subsequent paragraphs can add examples, humor, or whatever else you’d like to include after the definition written for the featured snippet.
Images in Featured Snippets
When you insert images, be aware that those included in featured snippets aren’t always taken from your content. Google uses the Images algorithm to load the image separately, so sometimes it’s a crapshoot, but there are some things you can do to prevent this. For instance, The average graphic in a featured snippet is 159 pixels tall and 197 pixels wide, so basically 160 x 200px. Try to keep that ratio with your own images.
If Google uses them in featured snippets, it will create thumbnails, so you can scale up to 960 x 1200px for better quality if you like.
Date your content
Many websites refrain from putting dates on their posts in order to appear relevant for as long as possible, but this isn’t always user-friendly, for example, if the reader needs to know for research purposes.
Dated content actually shows up regularly in featured snippets. Among the different types of featured snippets, here are the percentages of those that included a date:
- Paragraph: 44%
- List: 47%
- Table: 19%
- Video: 20%
We checked our subset to see whether or not the date made a difference, and it turned out that, whilst more recent content was favored, older articles won the featured snippet if they provided the best answer. About 1% of featured snippet content was less than a week old, and sometimes a featured snippet’s content was only several hours old.
The vast majority of featured snippets, though, were from content posted within the past 2-3 years; 70% of featured snippets in our subset were from 2018, 2019, and 2020.
The argument for and against putting dates on content isn’t going away any time soon, but the arguments for are pretty strong:
- Dating your content is best for the reader because it reduces confusion and frustration;
- Dated content builds trust, especially when it shows that it’s been updated with current information;
- Algorithms may show preference based on fresh content; and
- There might be a recency bias in the click-through rate.
Refresh and re-optimize your content, and make sure your statistics are always current. Let readers know the original publication date and when it was updated. You may earn a featured snippet and boost your metrics without having to invest in an entirely new piece of content.
Use Subfolders Wisely
Subfolders are listed after forward slashes in the URL, as follows:
- domain.com is the root domain. It has zero subfolders;
- domain.com/subfolder has one subfolder; and
- domain.com/subfolder1/subfolder2 has two subfolders.
According to our research, a very long URL is less likely to get a featured snippet, so 1-3 subfolders is the sweet spot. It’s difficult to keep your content organized. You will have to create folders for different keywords to keep everything organized. A clear, intuitive subfolder architecture organizes your site’s content and sets you up for possible featured snippets, for example:
- domain.com/main-topic/subtopic-a/
- domain.com/main-topic/subtopic-b/
- domain.com/main-topic/subtopic-c/
Wrap up
Featured snippets are pieces of information that typically appear at the top of Google’s search results. They provide answers to the search query by pulling relevant content from top-ranking pages.
Being featured in Google search results is your incentive to work harder on your content. Snippet features can be both exciting and rewarding to research and uncover new ways to leverage them to improve the SERPs for everyone.