{"id":18271,"date":"2018-01-15T10:49:41","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T15:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hostgator.com\/blog\/?p=18271"},"modified":"2019-04-30T11:05:46","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T16:05:46","slug":"how-get-featured-snippets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hostgator.com\/blog\/how-get-featured-snippets\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Facts About Featured Snippets, Plus 5 Strategies to Rank for Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/p>\n

How Do You Get Featured Snippets for Your Website?<\/h2>\n

If you\u2019ve had your website for a while, then you know there was a time when everyone doing SEO was concerned with aiming for those top few spots in Google. If you could be one of the top two or three links in the Google listing for a popular search, it was just about a guarantee of clicks and visitors.<\/p>\n

Now for a lot of searches, the top spot isn\u2019t really at the top of the SERP (search engine results page) anymore. We\u2019ve moved into a new era of SEO – the age of the featured snippet<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Creating<\/a><\/p>\n

What Are Featured Snippets?<\/h2>\n

Even if you weren\u2019t familiar with the term, you\u2019ve seen featured snippets. In the old days, whenever you performed a search in Google, you would typically see a list of blue links with some ads above them. Now, you’ll often see a box up top with text in it that provides an answer based on the term you\u2019ve searched.<\/p>\n

\"example<\/p>\n

Sometimes it will show up below ads, but much of the time it\u2019s the very first thing on the page, drawing your attention away from the list of links that shows up below. These results go by a number of names. SEO professionals sometimes call this 'rank 0'\u009d since it goes above the #1 ranking spot. Others call them answer boxes or instant answers or, as we\u2019re doing here, featured snippets<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Whatever you call them, they\u2019ve disrupted SEO.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Few Facts About Featured Snippets<\/h3>\n

Before you try to get a featured snippet, it\u2019s helpful to understand a bit about how they work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. Featured snippets don\u2019t show up on every search.<\/b><\/p>\n

Google doesn\u2019t always assume you want a quick answer based on your search term, so this is a feature that\u2019s most common for searches that either directly ask a question or for any terms Google interprets as looking for the same type of information as a question search.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. The information is often pulled from a website.<\/b><\/p>\n

There are some types of rich results<\/a> that Google creates by pulling information from a number of sources, like their medical information snippets or the boxes of information you see about famous people.<\/p>\n

\"google\"example<\/center>But for many of the featured snippets you see (and the ones most relevant to this article), the text is pulled from a specific website. And the website the text comes from is linked right below the answer (and therefore above the other results).<\/p>\n

That means that, at least for some searches, it\u2019s possible for your website to target that rank zero spot and show up above your other competitors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. Featured snippets aren\u2019t always from the top result on the page.<\/b><\/p>\n

This is an important one. About 70% of featured snippets<\/a> come from websites ranked lower than the #1 spot.<\/p>\n

If a company works really hard on their SEO to land that top spot in Google, but doesn\u2019t also optimize their content for the featured snippets, another company that does can hopscotch right over them into that zero spot.<\/p>\n

You could potentially show up above the #1 ranked results without achieving the #1 rank which is kind of a big deal!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4. There are three main forms of featured snippets.<\/b><\/p>\n

SEO professionals have identified three different types of featured snippets that commonly show up in searches:<\/p>\n

Paragraph snippets <\/b>This is the most common type you\u2019ll see. It includes a little bit of text that provides the answer, sometimes with an image included alongside it.<\/p>\n

\"example<\/p>\n

List snippets <\/b>These pull text from bulleted or numbered lists in the text and show at least part of the list in the snippet. They\u2019re less common than paragraph snippets, but still show up for a good number of relevant search terms.<\/p>\n

\"example<\/p>\n

Table snippets <\/b>These are the least common, but show up for the types of searches that benefit from having results display in a structured format, like movie times or menu prices.<\/p>\n

\"example<\/p>\n

5. Their influence on click-through-rates (CTR) varies.<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to properly test out whether or not getting the featured snippets improves your CTR versus showing up in the top search, but researchers have tried to get a handle on the effect it has.<\/p>\n

Recent research found that when featured snippets are included in the search results, people are less likely to click through to any result. That’s not surprising, since they often provide the full answer a person is looking for although the difference isn\u2019t huge (around 4%).<\/a><\/p>\n

That same research study found that the first Google result still got more clicks than the featured snippet result, but that the presence of a featured snippet did mean some of the clicks that would otherwise go to the top result do get split off to the website featured in the snippet.<\/em><\/p>\n

Anecdotally, some companies have seen big gains in traffic due to getting the featured snippet for a search. Search Engine Land reported one case study where a page getting the featured snippet for a high-value keyword led to a 516% increase in traffic.<\/a> And Stone Temple shared a few specific cases<\/a> where traffic increased when a website got the rich snippet and dropped quickly when it was lost.<\/p>\n

In any case, if the search is going to show a featured snippet, it sure doesn\u2019t hurt for your website to be the one featured and that\u2019s especially the case if someone else has the top spot.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How to Create Content That Gets Into Featured Snippets<\/h2>\n

Now that you know why to care about getting into featured snippets, here are a few strategies to help you get there.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind, as with all SEO, there are no guarantees that this process will earn you featured snippets for the search terms you target, but it will increase the likelihood of you claiming that zero spot above the other search results.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. Brainstorm question and informational queries to target.<\/b><\/p>\n

Featured snippets only show up in some types of searches, so you shouldn\u2019t be trying to target the snippet for every single search term you aim for in your SEO efforts.<\/p>\n

The main ones to think about here are question searches and searches that are looking for the same kind of information as question searches, without using question language. For example, someone searching for 'healthy eating tips'\u009d is essentially looking for the answer to the question 'how can I eat healthier?'\u009d So both terms would fall into this category.<\/p>\n

That gives you a general idea of the types of search terms to brainstorm<\/a> in this section, but the best way to really figure out what you\u2019re looking for is to start doing searches. Start Googling them to see which search terms have snippets in the results. This will accomplish two things:<\/p>\n