This article will cover pretty much the basic of how to get featured snippets and many others in between.
In a digital world, when the scarcity of information isn’t an issue anymore, it becomes excessive of information phenomenon instead. Which means, we have to compete really hard to stand amongst other information providers.
In Search Engine Optimization (SEO) context, this is a core concept of it actually. One of the main objectives from those efforts we made to get a higher rank is to be visible for most of the internet users.
In other words, we want to win the competition of being the entity that is highly trusted because of our information.
But, it is quite hard and will take time to win that competition. So, to have featured snippets is like the ‘shortcut’ for being clearly visible and having an outstanding online presence in search engines.
What are Featured Snippets?
Featured snippets are short texts that we’d usually see at the very top spot of the search engine results page. It usually straight up answering the search queries inserted.
Google automatically pulls the contents inside them from a certain relevant and highly authorized website.
Getting featured snippets for our blog post would be a HUGE advantage for us. Users would see our website as an highly trusted and authorized by being featured on that top spot.
Getting Featured Snippets Based on The Type
There are three common types of featured snippets; definitions, tables, and lists. All of them are answering the different type of needs from the search queries. Not only that, the measures for getting them would be slightly different also.
The one important thing you should always bear in mind is that you SHOULD NEVER try to optimize for keywords that are already having featured snippets. It’s a waste of time.
Anyway, here’s how you optimize for them based on the common types:
Definitions
As you could already guess from the name, this kind of featured snippets represented by a box consisting of some definitions for a certain term.
Usually, the “what is” search queries are the perfect trigger for Google to show that kind of box.
How do we optimize for that? It’s pretty simple:
Write a clear and concise definition of a particular term (approximately 40-60 words). If you want, you can include the “What is XYZ” heading on top of that definition. In addition to that, always remember to be objective when writing the definition.
Tables
Likewise, table featured snippets clearly contain tables with particular theme and numbers. Most of the time, they are highly relevant with numeric data.
The only thing that we should always remember is that Google never made their own table to be featured on top of the search engine results page. Which means, we should always make our own tables from scratch for Google to pull it up later into featured snippets.
In other words, make sure we have a table in our content that is answering for specific user’s needs. And with that, let’s just hope Google will make a consideration for pulling our content as featured snippets.
Lists
Keep in mind that it can be in the form of sequential list or a no-order list. Sequential list oftentimes used to show the steps on how to accomplish something, while a no-order list usually used for elaborating recommendations.
Wrap every point/step (depending on what type of list you’d want it to be featured) in H2 or H3. Google really appreciates good structured content, for it is easier for machines to read.
The only thing we have to do to optimize this is to present our list in the content the way Google can understand it well. Here’s how:
In addition to that, you can always include every point/step with numbers, pointers, or even texts like “Step 1”, “Step 2”, etc. Just make sure it’s in the right order and consistent, and Google will take your content into a serious consideration.
Conclusion
To wrap this up, keep in mind that Google is the main decision maker for featured snippets. It automatically pulled the contents from a relevant and highly authorized website. The main reason it exist is to answer the search queries as fast as possible.
From the perspective of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it would be such an amazing BOOST for us to have them pulled directly from our content. Think about the possibilities of attracting huge amount of traffics.
Aside from that, what we need to look out for is the different measures to get them for ourselves. Consider first what kind of featured snippets we want to have, then optimize our content accordingly.