Featured snippets, exploiting the latest evolutions to gain more visibility

According to the latest research, 65% of organic searches on Google now includes at least a rich snippet and users are getting more and more accustomed to this feature, also adjusting the look to accommodate the Google pinball effect. In this sense, the featured snippets have always been seen with a divided mind, between those who highlight the advantages in terms of visibility and those who, instead, fear them because they could erode clicks to the site. Let’s see the latest developments to understand how to take advantage of this possibility and conquer a place in the sun inside the SERPs.

Google’s latest news on featured snippets

In recent times, the snippets in evidence have been at the center of various changes and reconsiderations by the search engine; the most relevant news is for sure the disappearance of the double link in SERP for the site from which the snippet is extrapolated, announced at the beginning of this 2020 and progressively defined.

After seeing examples of links moved to the second page or elsewhere, at the moment it seems that Google has (definitively?) chosen to delete the second link to the site. Therefore, for the queries in which they are activated, the featured snippet becomes substantially a “result one”, in a more blatant position, with more preview text (that often completes the interest of the user and answers to its question, usual problem) and link to the site still visible.

But beware of the position, because the other change that has been noticed in the past months concerns the location of the box: in addition to finding it classically at the top, in fact, in some cases the snippets were in the middle of the page or below other organic results, with visual effect much less impacting on the user (see the example reported by Brodie Clark).

https://brodieclark.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/featured-snippet-not-in-first-position-1536×922.png

Another useful feature introduced recently definitively concerns the highlighting and anchoring of the onpage text that Google used to create the snippet: the user who in SERP click on the blue link in the box, in fact, it lands directly on the part of the site page where that reference is present, and potentially it may not see all the content of the page itself, focusing only on the paragraph he was interested in.

How to take advantage of the featured snippets

As we said, the SEO community is rather divided on the evaluation of these features, which some consider harmful to the CTR (impression confirmed by some studies) and that others consider a valuable element to increase the visibility and authoritativeness of the site.

Among the latter is Mark Webster, co-founder of Authority Hacker, who on SearchEngineWatch explains how to analyze and create featured snippets, showing the structured and repeatable process that allows you to get those positions and exploit what defines an “almost unfair advantage on search engines”.

What are featured snippets today

Before analyzing this miraculous process, the author goes on a small digression on what have become currently featured snippets, that is, a set of results additional to the classic blue links and traditional web results that Google still shows in SERP, such as images, boxes with synthetic and recap content, answers, widgets or other data.

From Google’s point of view, these snippets improve the user experience, as users get the information they need without ever having to actually visit a website.

And it does not appear by chance that in recent months Google has increased the use of snippets in the foreground, a trend “that does not seem destined to change soon”, according to Webster, who is convinced that the search engine will continue to use this approach and maintain a balance between “scraping your content (without paying for it) and rewarding you with enough traffic to keep you publishing”.

The value of featured snippets to the sites

There is a point to understand: the way visitors interact with the site has changed radically. This should not scare, as it also represents an opportunity: still today, the first position on Google SERPs gives a CTR of over 30 percent for a given search data query, and that is why dominating that particular slot in organic Serps is the goal for all SEO (and not only).

The appearance of a snippet however can upset the scenario and hijack the clicks to the site chosen by Google – which, potentially, in the classic SERP would not have reached a prominent position: Indeed, according to a search about 60% of all featured snippets come from sites that did not occupy the first position for that keyword.

The rules of featured snippets

And so, Webster and his team performed a work of reverse engineering to determine which are the “rules” behind the appearance of a snippet in evidence, analyzing over a million search results to detect common elements in the “how” and “why” of these rich snippets.

Among the criteria used, were included all types of snippets featured, including Youtube, People Also Ask, Fact Sheets and more, and were considered only queries that had at least 1,000 searches per month.

The first fact that has emerged is that, in general, about 65 percent of all search results include a snippet of some kind, and therefore, says the author, “If you’re not working to optimize your pages towards these rich / featured snippets, I can pretty much guarantee that your competitors are doing it”.

Identifying the gaps with the featured snippets of our competitors

The first operation to do is to find out which keywords of the site could potentially become featured snippet on Google: according to Webster, just start from an analysis of the keyword for which the site is already placed on the front page of the search engine and check if they generate a snippet in SERP that belongs to a competitor.

It is on these opportunities that we must focus our work to conquer this space in evidence that could become profitable for our goals.

How to gain a featured snippet

At this point, you have to decode the SERPs to understand what orients those organic premium placements, and according to the author there are some common points that can be exploited and applied for our site.

In particular, “all the speeches on the use of AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to determine well the results of the research are basically smoke and mirrors”, or at least still fundamentally fuffa, because the process that seems to use is of nature “much more mechanical”.

The optimization work for featured snippets

The study data indicate that Google deepens the way the content is structured and the semantic analysis to understand what should look like featured snippets, and you notice some basic rules that the algorithm follows when it chooses from which page to take these snippets.

In particular (and of course limited to the US version) there seems to be a preference for pages that structure their data in a very specific way:

• The queries “How to”, “What is” or “Best x vs. y” are the best targets.

• The original search query should be inserted, literally, in an H2 or H3 tag.
• You should also include an image in the “answer”.
• Typically, the answer must have a length of 50 words (no more than 300 characters).

A technique that works (for now)

The process suggested by Webster somewhat recalls the old work of over-optimizing of both the content and keywords (especially for the exact match in the heading), but in his opinion it is a technique that still works today and that allows you to structure information in a way that causes Google to pay attention to the page.

Like any trick, it is possible that there are corrective updates from Mountain View that change the selection criteria, but for the moment it works and, says the author, it allows you to earn a lot of free organic traffic and to overcome competitors.