Best Ways to Optimize Featured Snippets to Build More Traffic

Jan 15, 2020 Gourav Bajaj DIGITAL MARKETING

Are you constantly noticing that it has become harder and harder to get referral-based traffic via Google?

This is not just because there is a significant rise in the competition but also because Google has now moved from the blue links and the organic search result from the search engine is no longer generating the traffic like the past.

Worried about it? Question is how to adapt now. Well, don’t worry, we are here to tell you about the recent change of Google and that is the featured snippets.

To let the users search what they are looking for in an easier manner, Google has started focusing on the featured snippets and it has become important for you to understand how to get your work to appear on these Google Snippets to Build More Traffic.

If you are new to this term featured snippets or rich snippets, don’t worry this post will help you. In this post we covered all things which you need to know.

What are Featured Snippets?
What are the core advantage of Featured Snippets?
Why Should You Optimize for Featured Snippets?
Types of featured Snippets?
Steps by Step Guide to Optimize Feature Snippets?

Let’s Get Started

What are featured snippets?

Before we go further explaining the ways to optimize Google Snippets to Build More Traffic, let’s take a look at what snippets are.

Well, featured snippets are the search results that are displayed on the top of the organic results of Google within a box. The snippet will pull out the content from the page linked that is the most relevant answer to the user’s search so that the user need not move away from the result page of Google. The word featured means additional exposure provided in the results.

Let’s see two recent studies done on snippets

Eric Engeconfirmed that there was a rise of 20-30% traffic on confluentforms.com when a featured snippet was held for the user’s query.
Ben Goodsellhighlighted that there was a significant rise in click-through rate from directly 2 to 8% when the featured page was placed in a box.

Mostly Featured Snippets includes

Page Title
Source Page URL
An Image

What are the core advantages of Featured Snippets?

Increases the Organic Conversion.
Increase Organic Website Traffic.
Increase Website Authority
Increases Brand Awareness
Increase in Keyword Ranking
Optimized for Voice Search

Why Should You Optimize for Featured Snippets?

The simple answer to this question is that you want more of the website traffic. All of us want it isn’t it?

To be more specific, having the content at the 0^th position will provide you the best spot in the search engine search result. And moreover, your content is gonna appear twice on the search page. That sounds awesome!

Initially, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) did not consider snippet to be a good thing. When for the first time these featured snippets occurred, most of the SEOs were worried that be responsible for cannibalizing the clicks from the organic listings. The major reason was that Google was showing the answer on the search page straightaway to the users. Then, if people are getting answer itself on the search page why would they bother to click on the link.

But at the same time, other SEO Company in Delhi, assumed that this has been done by Google to enhance the search for the mobile users and they are highly impatient. And although this was true 100% but along with it, there was no decline in the traffic for the websites.

There was a test run by HubSpot which clearly stated that the page without snippet although came at number 1 position but saw a significant reduction in the traffic by almost 38%. Therefore, it has become important to have the featured snippet for boosting the traffic.

Types of featured snippets

Now it’s the time to understand what all type of featured snippets is available in order to boost the traffic. Mainly, there are four types of featured snippets.

Paragraph Featured Snippets
List Featured Snippets
Table Featured Snippets
Video Featured Snippets

Let’s have a look at the each of these featured snippets and how they works and how they are different from each other.

Paragraph featured snippets

Paragraph featured snippet is one of the most important snippets and is loved by people all over the internet. In an attempt to reply to the question being asked by the viewer, Google has to extract out the text that is relevant from the page.

Paragraph snippet helps in the same aspect by immediately answering the question. Also, additional information can be included after the required information in order to spark the interest of the searchers and encourage them to browse through the page. This increases the click-through rate of the page. In order to answer many short type questions, FAQ pages are a good choice and in case of more complicated questioning, it is good to have dedicated blog pages.

Many times, paragraph snippets are being used for the questions including how to do, why to, who is, which is, why is, where is and what is, etc.

List featured snippets

The list featured snippets are used to explain the steps in a more precise and clear manner. This definitely increases the readability of the content and people love reading where understanding is more and complexities are less. This featured snippet lists out the steps that are involved in explaining how to perform an action, for example, preparing some recipe.

One thing great about this snippet is that things will be cleared in short steps and also the viewer will click in order to see the images or to read extra details. The lists can be both bullet list featured snippet or the numbered list featured snippet

Table featured Snippets

Next in the list are the table featured snippets. These are highly popular snippets that are around 29% of the total available snippets. With these, Google loves showing its extravagant capabilities. The table snippet not only extracts the content and gets it formatted but also pull the necessary details that the searcher looks for and create a separate table for the same.

Video featured snippets

When you are thinking about the featured snippets, don’t just be limited to your website. Google can also extract videos from other sites like YouTube. It will show the relevant clipping out of the entire video. So make sure that videos are properly optimized to be extracted by Google.

Steps by Step Guide to Optimize Feature Snippets

Let’s take a look at the ways by which you can optimize the Google snippets to boost traffic:

Improve Overall SEO

Improve the overall On-Page SEO of your website. Follow all the principles of SEO optimization in order to get a good ranking for the page. Featuring can be done only when you hold good ranking.

Determine & Analysis Targeted Keywords

Determine the target keywords. Do proper research on keywords with exact focus on the questions and make sure you target the words that are frequently occurring in the featured snippets.

Update/ Revised Website Content

You can revise the older high ranking content in such a way that it can be featured. Make sure you target the keywords in the first paragraph.

Optimized New Content Strategy

Browse through Google and identify the new content strategy. Try to create contents that can answer the questions like how, what, where and why, etc.

Content Factual

Make your content factual because Google loves well-structured, number-driven factual contents.

Add Question/ Answer in Blog

You should have a page that answers the primary question and all the related terms as well. Authority and credibility increases with it.

Add Images

Use annotated and eye-catchy images throughout the pages.

Keep Monitoring

Keep monitoring the queries regularly that you have been featured along with the CTRs and the new upcoming opportunities.

A featured snippet is not responsible just to boost traffic but to increase the relevant traffic. So use these snippets in a proper manner and be ahead in the competition.