Yes, you can do even better than the first ranked website if Google features your snippet. People give a lot of importance to snippets so if your content appears in featured snippets, you can gain serious SEO advantages.
Featured snippets appear above search results and below ads on the search page. Featured snippets are very popular as they offer quick and succinct answers to user queries. Since they provide answers to common questions, they are also referred to as answer boxes.
Snippets Gaining Popularity
According to this study, featured snippets are growing substantially. In December 2014, there were just fewer than 250,000 snippets, while in January 2016 there were around 370,000 featured snippets.
With the help of a featured snippet, you can improve your website’s organic traffic and boost conversions. Since featured snippets take up a lot of space in Google search results pages, they may be even more effective than placement at the first position.
Now that you know about the importance of featured snippets, you will be interested to know how you can optimize your content so that it appears in the featured snippets.
Where Featured Snippets Come From
Most of the featured snippets come from websites, which already have high ranking in search results.
However, an interesting study by GetStat showed that almost 70 percent of snippets come from pages that do not have top position. Another important result was that it is easier to get featured snippets in certain industries if your rank is lower. This includes categories like DIY, health and finance.
Formats
Snippets are displayed in 3 different formats: paragraph, list and table. In some cases, there is also an image within the snippet. Snippets in the paragraph format have the greatest popularity.
One of the best ways of getting a featured snippet is generating great content and formatting it in a way that Google prefers.
How to Get Your Own Featured Snippets
If you want your own featured snippets, then you should research your competitors to understand how they are performing well.
SEMrush
For this, you can use SEMrush to search your competitors’ featured snippets. Although SEMrush is a good analytics tool, it can also be used for finding the featured snippets of your competitors.
Once you use this tool to identify the snippets of your competitors, you should find out what topics they are discussing. Your snippet should be based on the same topics.
You can also use Google to find out more about featured snippets.
In order to optimize your content for snippets, you must have an idea about what your audience is looking for. You should be aware of the questions that people want answers for.
You will have to think like your audience does. For instance, think about someone who is not familiar with marketing. People who are new to this field will be confused by marketing acronyms.
They will perform a search for these terms. For instance, they might type: what is CTA?
In the results page, look for the section marked ‘People also ask’. This will show you the questions that people commonly ask with respect to CTAs. You can explore this section to understand what people are asking.
You can now create content for your featured snippets accordingly.
SEO services like RDB Design can offer useful SEO strategies like the Helpful SEO blueprint.