What is a Featured Snippet?

What is a Featured Snippet?

As in SEO, you know how hard it can be to achieve the first result for a search query on Google. With the introduction of Adwords, video results, local 3 packs, and mobile devices reducing the amount of search results you see, being number 1 can make or break your site.

If you have searched for something on Google in the past couple of years, you may have noticed a small box at the top of the results that displays your answer along with a link to the article it was pulled from. This is called a featured snippet, also known as a rich answer.

Types Of Feature Snippets

There are many different types of featured snippets and depending on what you are searching for, you may see a different type with various searches. Let’s take a look at the most common featured snippets.

• Featured Snippet Paragraph - This type of featured snippet is going to be an excerpt of the content of the site Google is pulling the answer from. Most of the time, the answer will be highlighted for easier navigation.
• Featured Snippet Lists - Snippet lists are commonly used for list style answers. For example, searching for 2015 Mustang color codes, you will see that a list of each color is listed in the featured snippet.
• Featured Snippet Tables - Snippet tables are used to display answers that are best viewed in a table.
  
  

How To Format Your Site For Featured Snippets

• Structure Your Site With Q&A - To help get your site producing rich answers, you will want to structure your content to reflect actual questions that people are searching for. Providing the question and the answer will allow Google to navigate your content quicker.
• Put Subtitles With Your Search Terms - When adding H1, H2, and H3 tags to your page, remember to include search terms you are wanting to rank for in the subtitles. This will place more importance on the search terms in Google’s eyes.
• Stay Organized For Google & Users Sake - When you find the opportunity to use a table of coded list in your content, do so. Google likes the organization of tables and lists and it will help make your content stand out when displaying featured snippets.
  
  

What To Remember About Featured Snippets

Featured snippets do not always come from the first result in Google. In fact, we have seen rich results come from the pages below the fold, near the bottom of the first page. This can be an easy win if you are struggling with bringing your content to the top of Google. Featured snippets can drive more traffic as it takes up more real estate on the page and gives the user exactly what they want to see.

Featured snippets, while they may seem complicated, can be easily achieved if you structure your content correctly. In doing so, you can easily increase the amount of traffic your site receives without having to battle for the first result.