Featured snippets have become an essential SEO factor in increasing traffic to your website without having to pay for ads. This helps businesses stand out as an authority and leader in their industry. If you’ve never heard of a featured snippet, don’t worry. We’ll dive into this more for you below.
3 Things Marketers Should Know About Featured Snippets
1. What Are Featured Snippets?
Featured snippets are short excerpts of text that are shown at the top of Google’s organic search results in what is referred to as “position 0”. These featured results are automatically pulled from indexed pages in the search results to help quickly satisfy users with an answer to their query.
Let’s use an example to help you understand what a featured snippet looks like. Let’s say you’re looking to start your own blog and you searched “how to start a blog”. Below you can see a featured snippet pops up after you search this phrase.
2. Are Featured Snippets Important For SEO?
Not only are featured snippets important for SEO, they’re one of the best ways to take up more real estate for a particular search result on Google. In fact, the more room your featured snippet takes up, the higher the probability that you’ll get a user to click into your webpage to read more of your content. All in all, you’re likely to see both a higher click-through-rate and an increase in traffic. This is especially important when you don’t already rank within the top three results.
3. How Do You Get Featured Snippets?
One of the most important things for digital marketers to know is how to get your content to show in a featured snippet. Well, the answer to this question isn’t as simple because there’s no guarantee that your content will appear as a featured snippet and there’s no simple switch you to tell Google you want them to include your content here. However, the strategies listed below can help improve your chances:
- Optimize Your Content and Help People Find Answers
Google created featured snippets to save people time and provide them with quick answers to common questions. Take advantage of this by writing content that answers these questions. You can use keyword research tools and find out more popular question searches by using a tool like AnswerThePublic to help you come up with ideas.
- Use Long-Tail Keywords In Blog Posts
According to Yoast, Long-tail keywords are keywords or keyphrases that are more specific – and usually longer – than more commonly used keywords. Although they get less search traffic overall, they are specific and defined resulting in more motivated searches. Since they have less search traffic, that means less competition and a higher chance to get into a featured snippet.
- Start With Your Higher Ranking Keywords
According to data from Ahrefs, they’ve found that 99.58% of featured snippets come from the top 10 search results. By using keyword tracking tools, you’ll be able to see what keywords or phrases you’re already ranking in the top 10 for. If you start optimizing your content here, you’ll have a better chance of coming up in a featured snippet.
Optimize Your Content for Featured Snippets with Efferent Media
Our digital marketing team can do more than just earn more featured snippets on Google. When you partner with the digital marketing experts at Efferent Media, we use a holistic approach to make sure your website is found by the people searching for the products or services you offer. We have the professionals to help your business succeed in 2022. Schedule a time to chat with us!
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