How Featured Snippets Can Help Boost Your Website Traffic
Featured snippets are what a user sees first when the SERP for their search query loads. They obtain the “position zero” on the search results, appearing before the organic ones, dominating the entire page, and instantly grabbing the users’ attention.
While this whole concept sounds quite appealing, it also gives rise to some critical questions: Do the featured snippets influence the searchers? Do they receive more clicks than the top results? What does the audience think of them?
This blog addresses all your questions surrounding featured snippets, how they impact the users’ behavior and overall experience. Let’s dive in!
The Role of Featured Snippets in Increasing Your Website Traffic
Featured snippets can be defined as the summarized excerpts from a piece of content that provides the best and the most accurate answer to the given search query performed by a user. Google positions it at the top special box above all the organic search results, which is also called “position zero,” in order to answer the searcher’s query quickly.
This means regardless of your site’s ranking for a specific piece of content, if Google picks a snippet from it, it will be displayed on the topmost position in the SERPs.
While most of the time, Google will only consider your content for featured snippets if it’s already ranking in the first SERP, the other pages that it does consider on rare occasions constitute the “People Also Ask” section in the SERPs. However, this feature only gets a teeny tiny fraction of the total clicks.
The direct, short, and crisp nature of the featured snippets encourages visitors to click on them. As per a study, they receive more than one-third of the total clicks, which spells out gaining extra traffic for your site.
By now, you must be thinking about how you can get your content to qualify for featured snippets. However, doing that is pretty tricky. Whether a paragraph, video, table, or list, any content can be worthy of ranking as a featured snippet.
However, here are a few quick tactics that you can deploy to help your content rank as featured snippets and earn more clicks to your site, thus boosting your website traffic.
- Write clear answers to a search query in a paragraph
The majority of the total featured snippets comprises paragraph snippets.
These are the ones that answer a search query in the most appropriate and accurate way possible in the form of a paragraph. These snippets also show a relevant image above or beside the text typically.
- Utilize keywords in the best way possible in your paragraph
Acquiring the topmost rank in Google’s search results for a particular keyword or search query requires a great deal of effort.
Optimizing your content for featured snippets by enhancing its quality using the right keywords will improve the probability of your content earning the “position zero” in the search results.
Try incorporating question-oriented keywords in your content wherever possible In your content (but make sure they fit in naturally). Users perceive search results containing keywords that resonate with their search query as “credible” and “informative” most often. This one of the main reasons searchers go for featured snippets over the rest of the organic search results list.
Examining your competitor’s featured snippets can be an excellent way of taking a little inspiration and understanding what they are doing that you aren’t to achieve that “position zero.” You can do so by preparing a list of all the keywords for which their content is ranking as featured snippets. Pass this list to your content team to create high-quality content targeting these keywords.
However, this can be a time-consuming task. But fortunately, there are plenty of paid as well as free tools available online that can help take a little burden off your shoulders. You can use these tools to fetch important information and keywords from their featured snippets.
- Add a knowledge panel in your content marketing strategy
The knowledge panel is a box that shows up on the right-hand side of the SERPs panel containing relevant information to a given search query.
These knowledge panels are only triggered when a user performs a search query related to an entity, such as an individual, organization, or location. The searchers can get to know about the specific entity via the information presented in this box and also find an option to reach out to it.
When it comes to the total click share, featured snippets on its own gives a close competition to the organic search results.
But pages that rank for featured snippets, as well as a knowledge panel, beat the organic search results for the click-through rate (CTR). A double featured snippet acquires a great deal of the total click share, outshining the organic search results listing’s click-through rate.
Hence, designing your featured snippets in a way that triggers a knowledge panel will give your page an added advantage, driving a prodigious amount of traffic to your website.
Another Side of the Story
While featured snippets are meant to capture the users’ attention and drive them to your site, at times, they might do the exact opposite of this.
According to the same study that showed how these snippets grab a great percentage of the total click share, also showed that some users tend to mix featured snippets with advertisements.
Thus, simply optimizing your content to rank for featured snippets does not guarantee you a high click-through rate or a surge in traffic.
Google is continually modifying its user interface to make the ad label that displays on the paid search results as hard-to-notice as possible.
Now since paid search results and featured snippets show up on the first position on the search results page, it is pretty common for visitors to get perplexed and avoid clicking on them.
So, the crucial thing to note here is that merely optimizing your content for featured snippets is not just enough. SEOs can’t just go targeting a specific feature and expect the desired results. They must realize the searcher’s intent – why they are performing the query, what they expect to see from that feature, and how they see or think of that feature.
Therefore the key is to provide as direct a response as possible to the specific search query and accompanying your paragraph snippet with a relevant image for people’s reference to help your featured snippet stand out from the typical ads they are running from. The more successful your content is in answering the query, the more are its chances of acquiring the “position zero” and receiving more clicks.
Conclusion
The search engine giant is always looking to improve its platform and offer a smooth user experience as much as possible (which is perhaps why it is the most popular search engine today). The primary reason that Google rolled out the featured snippets was to help the users get accurate and relevant answers to their queries in a faster and easier way.
With the dramatic increase in the total number of people using mobile devices to surf the web and the majority of them using the voice search tool to perform search queries, featured snippets favored this rising trend and allowed searchers to read the answers aloud.
In order for Google to select excerpts from your content and rank it as featured snippets, you must optimize it first to ensure its relevance and suitability for voice search SEO to draw more traffic to your website. So go ahead and deploy these three quick tips to optimize your content for featured snippets, improve the chances of Google picking it, and get the most out of your efforts.