A featured snippet is a selected search result that is shown at the top of Google’s organic results Google’s organic results. They are displayed in a box above the standard list of search results, so are easy to spot by the user. Featured snippets are displayed to provide an answer to a user’s search query quickly and effectively. They offer companies greater visibility to searchers and therefore increased brand exposure.
How to appear in Google featured snippets
While Google chooses who they want to appear in featured snippets, there are a few techniques we can apply to our pages to help boost our chances of being featured.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is very important when optimising your website for Google snippets. Studies have found that in fact long-tail keywords are the trigger of features snippets.
Researching keywords, to identify which words are going to help you rank for searches, is always a great way to start. When thinking about featured snippets, it is always good to consider question-type searches. Content that inclues questions are easy for search engines to identify and return results from. This will mean that your result comes up when people type in that question.
When keyword researching you should also target informational content. If a user were to type into Google a query that is related to your page, your page should come up as a featured snippet as long as you have optimised it to do so.
Questions
This section looks into questions that people type to search Google, that could relate to your page or product. For example, if someone searches the question what are the top 100 Law Firms in the UK? and you have a blog post on it, you want to make sure that your post is optimised for that question. This would result in your snippet hopefully appearing for that question. You can find these questions in a numerous ways, a few of which we have explained below:
Look at Google for extra questions
Firstly you can look at Google’s extra questions that pop up after typing in your question. This will pop up like the image shown below and is a good way to think of all the various questions people could be asking that may be answered by content on your site.
Ask people about their questions
Another way you could gather together a list of questions, is by asking your clients what they would like to know and what their questions are about your company. This will give you good insight into the questions that your clients would search for in Google. If you have optimised your page for these questions, then there is a higher chance of your Google snippet answering their query.
Monitor questions people ask on social media
Social media platforms, are a great way to research what your client base are doing and talking about. If you spend some time on these platforms, you can see what kinds of questions your clients are asking and adapt your site to fit their needs. You could even comment on their question and tag your blog post to help answer their question. This is very effective, because lots of other people who follow them may have a similar question. This will result in more people viewing your comment and more visits to your blog / page..
Identify where you already rank high!
On your website it is important to do some keyword benchmarking to see where you are currently ranking high and where you need to be improving. The places that already rank high on your website will take less time to optimise for a Google snippet. The places on your site that do not rank as high will need a bit more work on them, because they may not be as optimised for the search engines. You will need to do more work to try and get them as good as they can be so that they can get to a better place in Google!
Final Thoughts
Featured snippets are a great opportunity to get more clicks to your website and also increase brand awareness and conversions.
