How to Secure Featured Snippets & Drive More Organic Traffic
Are you looking for more organic traffic?
Optimising content for Google’s featured snippets drives extra traffic, without needing to acquire new backlinks.
Featured snippets are the answer box appearing above all other organic results. According to Ahrefs, they appear for more than one in 10 searches (12.29 per cent) and gain 8.6 per cent of all clicks.
Google systems “determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a user's search request” – so here are my tips for optimisation, giving you the best chance at securing the spot.
Identify snippets to go after
Put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. If they’re interested in your industry or products, what might they be asking?
Investigate by googling these questions yourself and creating content to answer them. Also have a browse of the ‘people also ask’ questions displaying – take these questions, too, and you’ve already formed the layout of the piece of content.
Beating the competition
Consider the layout of your answer – what content type is the current snippet? This could be a paragraph, numbered list, bullets, table, or a YouTube video.
Although following the same format is a good idea (Google has identified this as the preferred way to display this answer), it’s no use providing a similar response – you’ll need a better one to steal the top spot. Be unique, do more research and go the extra mile to provide something more for the searcher.
Google is trying to provide a quick and clear answer for the reader. Keep yours concise and easily digestible.
You can mould existing content – summaries at the top of pages do well in featured snippets. Add extra value by including a table or bullet point sections into a step-by-step list.
Even simple changes to clean up the page title are a great start. For example, ‘Improve your organic CTR with these 5 steps’ to ‘How to improve your organic CTR’.
For new content, featured snippet answers work well as FAQ sections, Knowledge Centres or as ‘Ultimate Guide To…’ blog posts.
Structured mark up
I’d recommend using structured mark up when you’re aiming for a featured snippet.
Google heavily relies on understanding your content through HTML mark up. Well-structured content with h-tags, ordered/unordered lists etc. and in all the right places, makes it easier for Google to interpret this as featured snippet worthy.
If you need any assistance to increase your organic search traffic, get in touch with the Evoluted team.
