Everything you need to know about featured snippets.

What is a featured snippet?

You've probably all seen a featured snippet while searching the internet without even realizing it. Featured snippets are a way for search engines like Google to present information about your website directly on the search results page. This makes it faster and more convenient for people to get answers and information from your website because they don't even have to click on your website to read what they are looking for. What better way to make you understand what a featured snippet is than to show you?

As you can see from the picture above, the information is directly in my search result. These are featured snippets. From this information, you can obviously access the websites that contain them.

What are the advantages of featured snippet?

If Google chooses to highlight your featured snippet you will be at the top of the first page of results. This is a huge advantage that will help you increase your audience and traffic to your website. This is the perfect opportunity to boost your website. Google's goal is to improve the user's experience, so it chooses from the websites it has at hand the snippet that matches the user's search. So, any website can make snippet and be chosen by Google to show to the internet users. All this allows you to improve your SEO and to gain authority on search engines.

One of the strong points of featured snippet is that users love them. They prefer to have the answer to their question without having to visit a website and go from page to page. If they want to know more than the information available in the featured snippet, they will visit your website because they have already had a glimpse that they like. This gives you a lot of new leads to convert into customers. In addition, the fact that only people who want to learn more visit your website gives you much better performance and statistics by eliminating all the people you had no chance to convert in the first place.

Some figures on featured snippets:

• Featured snippets cover 50% of smartphone screens. It is sure that if your website is there, you get all the visibility you can.
• 70% of the articles that are in featured snippets were published less than 3 years ago.
• Pages that appear in featured snippets have an average of 8 images. The illustrations are therefore important in the quality of your content.

What are the types of featured snippet?

There are 4 types of featured snippets:

• Paragraphs
• Tables
• Videos
• Lists

Paragraphs:

Paragraphs are useful for giving definitions or short answers. This type of featured snippet can be presented in different ways. There can be pictures or a voice to hear the pronunciation of the word...

Tables:

Then, featured snippets in the form of tables make it easier to read the numbers.

Videos:

Featured snippets in the form of videos often suggest tutorials or answers to the search in video form.

Listings:

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Featured snippets in the form of lists make it easy to show rankings, recipes or even instructions... Again there may be photos added to the featured snippet.

Now, you may be thinking that you remember seeing featured snippets that I didn't show you. What you have seen looks very much like featured snippets but they are not featured snippets because they do not give the possibility to visit the website that gives the information or because they don't impact your ranking. In fact we talk about rich snippets, rich answers and knowledge graph.

Rich answers

This information is seen by Google as public knowledge. It does not want to associate this information to a single website.

Knowledge graph

This presentation allows you to refine your search by clicking on one of the proposals belonging to the graph and to show a large number of photos.

Rich snippet

Rich snippets are an advantage for your website because they are simply additional information that can be seen before clicking on the link of your website. This information is usually notes, product availability, prices, or photos. However, it does not affect the ranking of your website on the results pages. You can see it on the image below in light grey letters.

How to get my website in featured snippet?

Even if Google chooses which featured snippet it puts forward, you can increase your chances of being selected. Appearing in featured snippet is only temporary. To give yourself the best chance to appear in featured snippet, focus on your keywords and answer specific questions in a few words. The better your answer to the question of the Internet users, the more likely you are to be placed in featured snippet and to stay there. It is possible that several websites are featured snippet at the same time, rarely more than two. It is therefore the quality that counts! Think of a question from an Internet users that you can answer, look if a featured snippet is already set up on Google for this question. If yes, make a better one! If not, make one!

Featured snippets can only be about facts. So if you have any to share, make them easy to understand and short. As explained above, you are giving people a glimpse of your website, and if they want to know more and get details, you can be sure they will visit your website first. Your goal is to attract people to your website.

You need to create structured content because search engines identify them more easily and are likely to make them featured snippets. As shown above, use lists, tables and short paragraphs in your content whenever possible. When writing content, make sure your title is the question of the user and your subtitle is the list of answers for example.

For more information, you can contact Oshara Inc, the Montreal web agency specialized in SEO, advertising campaigns and website creation.