How Important is Google’s Featured Snippet?

You must have realized that it is getting harder, day by day, to build referral traffic from Google. For good traffic, you need to keep up with the constant changes in Google’s features.

The Featured Snippet is Google’s most popular SERP feature. To rank for them, you need to know how they work. Featured snippets allow marketers to boost conversions, drive traffic, and beat competitors.

What is a Featured Snippet?

“Featured snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results in order to quickly answer a searcher’s query.” – Backlinko

Google usually displays the content for the featured snippet from the content that is ranking number one. But it also pulls content from content with lower SERPs rankings.

Why are Featured Snippets important for SEO?

Featured snippets offer the chance to get more clicks from the organic search results. It is also known as “Position #0” as it comes above the usual #1 spot.

Three Types of Featured Snippets

The three main types of featured snippets are:
the Paragraph
the Table
the Numbered List

1. The Paragraph Featured Snippet

Paragraph style featured snippets give answers in a text or paragraph format to the searcher’s query. It is usually accompanied by an image and is commonly used by Google to answer ‘what are’ questions. These snippets contain words that are 40-60 words long.

2. The Table Featured Snippet

Google loves numbers, lists, and tables which is clearly showcased in the table style snippet. Google would pull the data and display it as a table.

3. List Featured Snippet

List style featured snippet answers queries in a list format or as a series of steps. It could be the steps in a recipe or to rank things in a particular order.

Google had added a few updates to the featured snippets over the last few years.

1. BERT algorithm affects Featured Snippets

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was rolled out by Google on December 9, 2019, for rankings and Featured Snippets, which affected 70 languages. BERT helps Google to understand complex queries.

2. Bubble Refinement or ‘Carousel Snippets’ are still Applicable.

Carousel Snippets introduced in 2018 are still relevant for queries. Commonly searched modifiers help searchers to refine their search query, and these modifiers could be locations, or product attributes, competitor names. It also allows different URLs to own the Featured Snippets at the same time.

3. TargetText Functionality added to the Featured Snippet

A new development in Google Chrome is the TargetText functionality that highlights a selected portion of the text on a page with a yellow background.

Increase Your SEO Efforts for the Featured Snippets

You can rank a single page for a lot of Featured Snippets if you have page and site authority. By adding quite a few definitions, ordered lists, and other formats on your page will help you get Google to add you as a Featured Snippet. FAQs also aids you to get listed.

It is also of great importance to improve your Google Rankings to prep your content for Featured Snippets. “99% of all Featured Snippets are from pages that already rank on Page 1” – Ahrefs So ensure that you get your content to be displayed on Page 1.

You need SEO and content experts who can help you to create Featured Snippets and get you listed on Google’s Page 1. If you are struggling with traffic, call us.