How to target featured snippet opportunities
Featured snippets are an excellent way to increase the visibility of your website. But what are they and how can you effectively target them as part of your SEO optimisation strategy? We explain all here.
What are featured snippets?
We’ve all asked Google a question and been presented with a box at the top of the search results featuring an answer, below which is a web link and a page title. This is a featured snippet.
Before you target featured snippets
The process of targeting featured snippets can be separated into three basic stages: identification, understanding and targeting.
The first step is to identify opportunities for your site or your client’s site to feature. Determine which keywords the site could rank on page one for, and explore how a question might be formulated around the page subject. For example, if your page is a recipe for strawberry jam, your query might be, “How do you make strawberry jam?” or “What ingredients are used in strawberry jam?”
You’ll need to consider the search volume in relation to the volume of qualified traffic that will come through to your site – if your visitors increase but they aren’t likely to convert or return to the site, going after this particular snippet could be a wasted effort.
The next step is to understand the intent of the user – what questions are they asking and why? Are they researching or looking to buy?
Targeting featured snippets
Now you’re ready to target keywords that have featured snippets. The first thing to do here is tidy up your on-page content to provide quick and clear answers to the questions. Google is looking for simple and cohesive answers to present to searchers, so make the content easy to consume.
Next, it’s important to ensure broken links are fixed and outdated content is replaced. This should be part of your everyday SEO optimisation anyway, so shouldn’t take long. You can also look to add content that provides further value or investigates a particular subject further.
Finally, summarise the key points of the content at the bottom of the page in a quick, consumable format. This is the kind of text that Google will pick up and display.
In terms of markup, you’ll need to delete any superfluous markup and mark the pages you’re hoping to feature in a similar way to how existing featured snippets are marked up. This gives you a chance to be competitive.
Extra boosts
Once your page is sufficiently optimised to target featured snippets, it’s time to get your SEO services provider to help you with some good quality backlinks to the page to help it rank. If it’s already on the first page of results for the keywords or queries, a few extra backlinks won’t do any harm.
You can also add some highly eye-catching imagery to your article and ensure they’re properly annotated to increase your chances of getting picked up for a snippet feature.
If you don’t have time to set up your pages for featured snippets, or to research which pages have the best chance of being featured, contact us for help with SEO services today.