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Featured snippets: Optimization tips & how to ID candidate snippets

Contributor Brian Ussery breaks down featured snippets, explaining his observations and offering tips for pursuing the coveted 'position zero.'

Brian Ussery on June 30, 2017 at 3:29 pm

Featured snippets are quickly becoming the only search results for many queries.

If a user goes to Google.com and types [what is the tallest tree], Google returns a featured snippet, followed by thousands of organic search results. However, when a user conducts the same query via Google voice search, Google responds with an audible version of the text in the featured snippet but (in many cases) no “blue links.”

Before diving too deeply into featured snippets, let’s back up a minute…

What is a featured snippet?

A featured snippet is a summarized answer to a user’s query displayed in Google organic search results. It is extracted from a results page and includes the page title, URL and link. Featured snippets can be paragraphs, lists or tables. These results display an “About this result” link near the bottom right corner of the answer box.

Google includes answers in featured snippets at the top of search because it is faster than sending users to the source page — no matter how fast the source page loads. As a result, marketers could experience declines in clicks and page views for featured snippet queries but should interpret increased impressions for these queries as a positive KPI.

In fact, from a marketing perspective, featured snippets are highly desirable. Top positioning in Google mobile or desktop search results can help URLs garner greater visibility than traditional results. (And although Google may soon change this, it is currently possible for sites to appear in both the featured snippet and the organic results, giving those sites lots of visibility on the SERPs.)

Because featured snippets typically appear above the first organic result, you may hear marketers refer to them as “position zero.”

What makes a good featured snippet?

If you’re wondering what Google looks for in a featured snippet, it can be helpful to identify existing snippets and review the pages from which they’re pulling info. By reviewing winning content, we can start to get an idea of what Google wants.

However, it can be just as illuminating to look at the content that failed to achieve a featured snippet. Following is a little-known tip to help you identify what I call “featured snippet candidates.” I think of these as pages that could have produced a featured snippet but didn’t quite make the cut.

Featured snippet candidates provide a prime opportunity for understanding more about how featured snippets work in Google organic search results. By comparing these pages to the “winning” pages, we can get clues about ideal formatting, page layout and content quality that can help inform our own optimization strategies.

To see featured snippet candidates, just add the parameter “&num=1”, “&num=2”, “&num=3” (and so on) to the end of Google’s URLs for queries with featured snippets. Currently, Google displays “candidates” for many featured snippet queries.

One thing you may notice is that featured snippets and “candidates” can change on a fairly regular basis. Depending on a variety of factors (where, when and how you search), your results may vary from the examples shown below. Even if your examples are different from mine, the process is what is useful.

Here is an example of a featured snippet for the query [hummingbird food] from the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=hummingbird+food

Here is an example of a featured snippet “candidate” for the same query [hummingbird food] from the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=hummingbird+food&num=1 — as you can see, we appended the URL above with &num=1.

Google Featured Snippet Candidate If you have a page that you believe has the potential to produce a featured snippet, consider the search query (or queries) that might be appropriate and check them for featured snippets. If your desired search query does produce a featured snippet, take a look at the “winning” snippet, as well as the “candidates,” to get an idea of what you could be doing better.

How do you measure featured snippets for text and voice queries?

Unfortunately, featured snippets are difficult to detect, let alone track — especially for large sites. So far, I have not found a tool to detect more than about 20 percent of the featured snippets found by manual review. Additionally, there is currently no way to track voice queries for the 400,000 to 500,000 estimated Google Home devices.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Brian Ussery

Brian Ussery is the Director of SEO at Razorfish and a leading authority on Google related SEO issues. He is a "Top Contributor" in the Google Webmaster Help Forum and a trusted Google partner, who connects regularly to stay in-the-know about new and improved product features.