How Do You Optimize For Featured Snippets?

Image by William Iven from Pixabay

Every business that provides service to the people through internet aims to rank 1st in the search results on Google. However, it has become hard to build up the referral traffic from Google due to competition and various Google algorithmic factors. For this, you need to develop some strong tactics to drive in more traffic to your website and gain more users to click on your contents.  The featured snippets can help with this!

What is Featured Snippet?

Featured Snippets aka the rich search results appears as a special block of information on the search engine results pares. They usually attempt to offer relevant answers to the user’s query and are usually situated at the top of the SERPs above the organic results and just below the paid ads.

Types of Featured Snippet

• Paragraph – This includes a note of the content that is extracted from the original content that attempts to answer the question that the user has searched for.
• List – This featured snippet attempts to answer the question in the form of a summarized list instead of a paragraph.
• Table – The table featured snippet provides the information in a structured way so that the data could be read straight from the SERPs.

How to Gain a Place in the Featured Snippet for a Particular Keyword?

• Make use of Snippet Bait – Snippet bait is a 40 to 60 words block of short summary designed to be placed at the beginning of an article. This makes it easier for Google to pull up the summary from the article and show it to the users based on the search query.
• Optimize your website for the mobile search – After the advent of mobile phones, people look to get their required information at just the click of their mobile phones. According to Statista – about 49% of website traffic comes from Mobile Phones. So, if your website is not mobile friendly, it will be hard for you to gain a place in the featured snippet.
• Make use of H2 and H3 tags – Most people usually ignore this, but the h2 and h3 tags help the Google bots to recognize the information fast.
• Summarize the Data into Table of facts – As this gives out a quick picture of the content, there are many chances that your content might get a place on the featured snippets.
• Sum up the Content with Bullet Points – Readers will find this very helpful, when you list the contents in bullet points as it will be easy to read.
• Get connected with High Domain Authority sites and try to get links in return from them. Guest blogging is one way to get good backlinks.
• Increase your website’s speed – This is one important factor that is considered for the Google SERPS, so this should help.
• Secure your website’s URL and adopt HTTPS.
• Understand your competitor’s Snippets – Analyzing your competitor is actually worth your time. You must find out if Google brings up featured snippets for keywords for the keywords that you are already ranking. After you identify this information, you can start amending your content to perfect the optimization process.

Ultimately, you need to have a watch over your competitors, and try to deliver answers for multiple questions in your content. Above all, you must try to use “how-to” phrases in the FAQ section of your website. Earning the zero position in SEO isn’t that easy.  To make this possible, you must work really hard!