Guide to Featured snippets and SEO

Nobody can argue with the fact that web design is essential. But, there is not much point in a beautifully designed website that nobody ever clicks on. This is where web marketing comes in: to draw in the potential customers and convert them. However, your appearance on the search engine results page also takes focused search engine optimisation strategies (SEO). Here at Pumpkin Web Design, design, marketing and SEO are all areas that we specialise in, to make sure that your company succeeds online. As a result, we have produced this guide to featured snippets and SEO.

First off, what is a featured snippet?

The first step on our guide to featured snippets and SEO is to look at what exactly a featured snippet is. In short, a featured snippet appears above the first organic result, in a position known as rank 0. The featured snippet will display summarized information or an answer relevant to the searchers question. This is drawn from relevant information Google crawl-bots find when trawling through websites.

Are featured snippets helpful for companies?

Featured snippets are the highest rank a company can achieve organically, and can result in more click-throughs. In addition, even if the click-throughs don’t increase, your company exposure will.

If a company website normally ranks in a lower position, but has provided an excellent and helpful summary in answer to the relevant question, Google will still take this information to create the featured snippet. This means that sites ranked lower than the top 3 can appear above others, if they are chosen for the featured snippet spot.

In addition, the site itself will still appear in the usual position on the SERP, providing twice as much visibility for the company.

Voice search and Featured snippets

In addition, people using voice search on a mobile device will have the featured snippet read out to them, including the company website address. This is a fantastic bonus when compared with simply landing the top spot, as this will not be read out at all.

Creating content for featured snippets

Our guide to featured snippets and SEO wouldn’t be complete without some tips for you. But, while featured snippets are incredibly desirable, landing a featured snippet spot is still pretty much a guessing game, and definitely not an exact science.

However, we do have some tips to help you identify what it is that Google is looking for. These include:

Taking a look at existing featured snippets and checking out the pages they are pulled from.

This can help you understand the formatting, layout and type of content that Google is valuing.

Look at the content that didnt manage to be selected for a featured snippet.

You can do this buy adding “&num=1”, “&num=2”, “&num=3” (etc) to the end of the URL for a Google search that brings back a featured snippet. This will provide the potential featured snippets that could have been used. By comparing these with the successful candidate, you can find tips on how to make sure your content would come out on top.

For more help or advice, or for more information about featured snippets and SEO, contact the experts today at Pumpkin Web Design.