What Is A Google Featured Snippet?

Our clients have recently asked us what we can do to get their web pages to show up in these featured “boxes” at the top of Google organic search.

Google Featured Snippet

 

These types of highlighted search results in Google are called “Featured Snippets”. When a user types a question into Google search, Google has the option to display a search result as a special featured snippet at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). The purpose of the featured snippet is that it provides an answer to a user’s question.

Benefit To The Searcher

The benefit of a featured snippet to the user typing a question into Google search is that the user gets an immediate response to their question. A featured snippet increases the usability of the search engine. This eliminates the user having to click on multiple websites to find the answer they are looking for. The more user friendly the search engine is, the more the user will use that search engine to answer the questions they may have. The more search engine queries, the more advertiser impressions and clicks. The more advertiser clicks, the more money the search engines make. You get the point (Kaching!). 

Benefit To The Website

The benefit of a website having one of their webpages displayed as a featured snippet is relevant web traffic. The more a webpage stands out in the search results as a featured snippet, the more impressions and clicks the website will get.  Consider Google playing a matchmaker for your content. Google is matching a question from the searcher to an answer on a webpage. The more answers a website can provide, the greater probability of having that website’s content being used as a featured snippet.

Can I Mark My Webpage To Be Featured?

I hate to break the news to you, but there is no silver bullet on this one. As per Google, there is no code you can add to your webpage to have it listed as a featured snippet. Google’s response is noted below:

How can I mark my page as a featured snippet?

You can’t. Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user’s question, and displays the result as a featured snippet.

What Can You Do To Increase Your Changes

  1. You should always use unique organic content as the base of your article / blog post. Stay away from copied/duplicate content.
  2. Create content that answers a specific question.
  3. Make sure you provide a detailed and in-depth answer to the question you are writing about.
  4. Understand how users are searching. Users typically use “What is”, “How To”, etc. to start their search query. Use this as the framework for your answer.
  5. Ensure that the content is easy to understand and answers the question you are targeting. Usability is key.
  6. Make sure you stay on target with your answer/content and don’t veer off course into a different unrelated topic. Relevancy is crucial.
  7. Conduct research in Google search to see what some of the common search queries are for a given topic. Google always gives the user suggestions on similar search queries. Use this as the foundation when researching topics to write about. An example is listed below.

Google Featured Snippet

Google also gives recommendations at the end of the search results for related searches. 

What Is A Featured Snippet

 

8. Always use descriptive title tags, meta descriptions and ALT tags to help describe your content’s topic.

There is no guarantee that Google will use your blog post/article as a featured snippet. There is no guarantee that Google will even keep the featured snippet displayed in its search results. But for the time being, if you follow these simple steps, you will be well on your way to creating content that could be picked dup by Google as a featured snippet.

Any questions on this article, please feel free to reach out to us at 877-877-0542.

Michael Delpierre