You’ve all seen a featured snippet on Google before, but how can you get Google to provide you with one (or many) of your pages? I found this process to be a bit tricky, with no guaranteed way to do so. If anyone has input on how they’ve received a featured snippet before, I’d love to get your insight below.
For those who don’t remember seeing a featured snippet, here’s a quick example:
Apparently, 5.6% of all searches on Google have a featured snippet. Something that surprised me recently was that you don’t need to be ranking #1 for a given keyword to receive a snippet - but you do need to be on the first page.
One of the methods that was taught to me was that when I’m writing content, create a featured snippet bait that best aligns the long-tail keyword you’re trying to rank for, between 40-60 characters. Again, this doesn’t guarantee you’ll receive the snippet, but you’re optimizing for it.
With that being said, this isn’t something I’m a master at. If you have any methods or techniques that you’ve used that have helped you, post them below.
Hi Wes. Yes, agreed with Morgan. You can’t force Google to choose you for featured snippets, but you can “push” by using schema, all you can, in your code or by inserting scripts in GTM. Different schema like articles, local business, FAQ, products, etc etc. Now, if you align this with CWV and EAT content, you probably get some insights about in GSC.
Here are two things which I think improve your odds of getting a feature snippet:
Clear wording - A simple example is to avoid pronouns (which could be ambiguous). If the target question is “What is real estate SEO?”, don’t start the answer with “IT is…”. Start the answer with “Real estate SEO is”. I think this just makes the subject clearer to the algorithm.
Target gaps - Just like with any SEO work, it pays to look for underserved questions or topics, as you’re unlikely to unseat the people who got to the mark first with a good answer to a question (they have time-based authority on their side for one). What I like to do is perform searches and find places where the featured snipped or PAA answers aren’t actually that good. You can also look through your search console data using keywords like “how” or “what” to see what questions you’re already getting impressions for, then Google the longer search terms and see what’s showing up and whether you can beat it.
To give you one example, I was working on a site for a client in Santa Barbara. I noticed in search console they were getting impressions for the question “what is santa barbara architecture”. I did a search in Google for that question and found the top results were just Pinterest pages. So, I wrote a blog post primarily answering the question “What is santa barbara architecture” and promptly got a featured snippet for it (test it out and see )
Edit:
Lists? - Another thing…I think Google likes lists for featured snippets
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