What is a Featured Snippet?

A Featured Snippet appears in some Search Engine Result’s Page (SERPs), as a broad answer when a question or research intent topic is being searched. This Snippet, also known as Google’s Answer Box, shows content from inside one of the pages positioning on page one that specifically answers the inquiry looked for without the client visiting the genuine page.

Types of Featured Snippets

There are three major types of featured snippets:

1. Paragraph form.This can be a container with content inside or a case with both content and a picture inside. The paragraph snippet is the most popular featured snippet.
2. List (an answer is given in a form of a list)
3. Table (an answer is given in a table)

FORMATTING FOR FEATURED SNIPPETS

Get these few formatting techniques down to increase the chases of your content showing up on featured snippets.

• Tables
• Images
• Bullet Points
• Numbered Lists
• Steps
• Word Count
• Charts

SHOULD YOU USE FEATURED SNIPPETS?

When it originated, snippets were widely frowned upon. Most SEOs thought that this would be a section that users would scroll right past. This actually hasn’t been the case. After snippets have been introduced to search it has dramatically increased the click-through rate (CTR) of results ranking within it.

HOW DO YOU RANK IN THE FEATURED SNIPPET SECTION?

Since Featured Snippets have been introduced, they have been a bit of a mystery. The reason being is because they haven’t been that easy to determine what SEO factors influence getting your content to appear within them.

A lot of the information out there says that the key to ranking in featured snippets is directly impacted by structured data. Although, this is not the case. Gary Illyes, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has said outright that structured data has nothing to do with ranking in the Featured Snippet.

Although there has been limited information yet to pinpoint the right way to get your site to rank, there are still a lot of best practices that will help you increase the chances of your site showing.

1. On-Page SEO – First and foremost you should make sure your site is optimized
2. Backlinks still matter – Not only will backlinks help increase your chances of getting into featured snippets, but it will also help increase the chance of your site appearing on the 1st page of search results.
3. There should be an area on the page where the search query appears in a header (h2, h3, h4, etc.).
4. Place the content you want to appear in the Featured Snippet in a <p> tag directly below the header mentioned. For this to have the best chances of showing, your answer should be between 54–58 words long.
5. Add “Step 1,” “Step 2,” “Step 3,” etc. at the beginning start of each subheading within a page (h2). Doing this will sometimes just pull through the subheadings listing them chronologically,
6. When you are aiming to have a shorter keyword to be displayed in a Featured Snippet, you’ll have a better chance of Google pulling it through as a paragraph of text as opposed to a step-by-step.

Conclusion

The work it takes to get your content and site to appear in featured snippets is a painstaking process and you cannot be sure when you’ll see the results. If you work towards the above best practices and formatting techniques we have outlined for you, your chances of appearing in the snippets will be significantly increased.

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