Featured snippets are an important element of search engine optimization (SEO) that can help your business be seen by a variety of prospects and current customers. However, understanding how featured snippets can benefit your business can be confusing. Here’s everything you need to know.
What Are Featured Snippets?
Featured snippets are visual displays in Google search that contain an answer to a key question that Google determines offers great authority. The snippet includes elements such as your website’s URL and page title. These valuable pieces of content typically come from blogs or service pages on your website. Why are they important? Because Google publishes your info at the top of page 1 and above all other results.
How are they different from other results?
Here’s what a standard Google search listing may look like:
A featured snippet could answer an FAQ or feature an excerpt from a webpage or blog and look more like this:
Because your answers can appear at the top of the google search or in the FAQ section near the top of the page, featured snippets position your website as the expert and lead to a higher organic click-through rate on your listing in searches.
How to Create Featured Snippets?
Google is driven by creating the best user experience possible and they have released search engine standards in the “Google’s Helpful Content Update.” This update emphasized the importance of providing helpful, engaging, and relevant content to users searching for answers. These changes also mean:
- All AI-generated content will be considered spam
- Content written specifically for ads or clicks could be pushed to the bottom of search results
- Your site will lose organic visibility if you are not producing helpful content
Answering highly searched FAQs and optimizing your content with SEO-friendly keywords and phrases in your headings and metadata will help show Google you are complying with these standards and providing helpful content to users.
You can also include the following elements in your content to improve your chances of being featured on Google:
- Summarize the question of an answer
- Include expert quotes
- Discuss product or industry pain points
- Use bullets and numbers to highlight important information
- Include statistics to support your topic
- Answer “people also ask” questions from Google
- Ensure all images included have relevant alt tags
When your new blog or webpage is published and indexed, Google can crawl those pages and look for the above elements to pull out for featured snippets.
Although featured snippets are a great win for your business, success begins with a great SEO strategy. Optimizing your website and all your content with the right keywords and phrases gives you the best chance of appearing in the top organic search results in Google.
Featured snippets are considered the top position in Google search and are integral for successful SEO strategies.
Want to explore an SEO strategy for your business?
The KWSM team can help! Contact us for a free SEO audit and brainstorming session.
