Content Optimization For Featured Snippet (Definitive Guide)

While searching on Google, you must have noticed a descriptive box answering your query at the top of all the search results. The highlighted content appearing as the top Google search result is a featured snippet which always appears above the organic search results right under the sponsored results in SERP’s. This article unfolds the mysteries of featured snippets for SEO nerds who are striving hard to generate organic traffic with their rigorous strategies to highlight content.

When does the featured snippet appear? How does it appear? What do you need to do to get your web page to appear as a featured snippet? These are the queries I will be addressing in this post.

Google reduced the organic search results from 10 to 7 in SERP and made the generation of organic traffic on websites slightly difficult. But Google also introduced featured snippets which gradually gained popularity. If you are wondering about how and when Google returns a featured snippet, then you must understand that there is no rule. It is a type of query based on which the search giant decides. Google returns more featured snippets based on the web content which is why it is important to optimize your content accordingly.

What are featured snippets?

Google says, “When we recognize that a query asks a question, we are programmed to detect pages that answer the user’s question and display a top result as a featured snippet in the search results”.

The most relevant content that answers the user’s search query is picked up by Google. Google looks for the best match to the query and reflects them in search results. It looks for the searched query term on the page and the websites ranking on the first page are always given preference.

Facts About Featured Snippets:

• It is not 1st but 0th Position in the SERP
• Descriptive content appears above the site link (page URL)
• 70 of the snippets are pulled from positions #1 through #3
• Enhances user attention on the search result page
• Online searchers click on the featured snippets to learn more
• Featured snippets are shown along with regular search results, giving them a pathway to browse further
• There’s no guaranteed method of getting the page into a featured snippet
• Google does not guarantee featured snippet listing
• High-quality search results
• Tries to deliver the best response to people’s query
• Drive manifolds traffic to a site
• Works well with mobile and voice-only searches
• The layout of the content is focused to grab user attention, helps the user easily discover the content and find the most appropriate answer.
• This is demarcated as a featured snippet because its appearance is set differently than a usual search result where description appears just below the URL.
• Google picks up sites in featured snippets, mostly the sites in top 10 results but for certain queries, this might not be the case.
• These featured snippets may appear with other types of SERP results and features.

SEO nerds also use Answerbox Terminology interchangeably but featured snippets are different from answer box though closely related. The featured snippet is not part of the Knowledge Graph. To avoid confusion, let’s stick to the “featured snippet” term whenever there’s a URL featured in the box because they present an extra exposure to the linked site (hence they’re important for content publishers)

Types of Featured Snippets

There are three major types of featured snippets:

1. Paragraph: Google returns an answer in a paragraph form, plain text, or plain text with an image, content is present in the paragraph tag.
2. List:  Answer is returned in a list form (content is present within list tags).
3. Table: Answer is returned in table format.

How to Create Content that Appears as a Featured Snippet?

• Understand what your customers are looking for
• Know that your reader and customer persona is important
• Generate user-centric content as Google focuses on user search intent
• Know the questions your customers are asking
• Think of all the possible queries and generate content to answer those questions with: How to, what is, why do or why does.
• Using these question categories, create a content bucket to answer users’ questions.  Answer the public website offers a question bank that is required to turn the wheels. Another useful tool you can use is serpstat. Above all, the Google search option offers much more through its auto-suggest feature in the search box. As a user types out a term, Google suggests the most popular related terms. By typing in a few words in the search box, one can look for the top queries suggested by Google.
• Create high-quality user-focused content which is engaging and comprehensive.

How to Optimise Your Content for Featured Snippets?

• Firstly, decide the terms that will generate featured snippets.
• Look for various question-related queries, informational intent queries, long-tail queries. You can always refer to Google for other search result sections such as “People also ask” and “See results about”.  Check Google Search Console to find which search queries generate more clicks.
• Finalize the best theme that will generate featured snippets for your website
• Finalize the keywords based on these queries, group keywords based on search intent and relevance
• See the queries for which you already rank higher. This will help you get featured and appear in the answer box.
• Use various tools to search keywords
• Optimize for featured snippets

Site Metrics for ranking in Search Results Featured Snippets

1. Off-site metrics

• Domain authority
• Page Authority
• Unique domains linking to the domain
• Unique Domains linking to a page
• Social shares: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest

2. On-page content metrics

• Create content
• Use good images – with keywords in URL and alt
• Check its Readability
• Keyword in the URL
• Word count
• Presence of paragraph HTML tags, list tags

3. Technical SEO

• Presence of schema.org code snippets
• Site Response time
• Page speed
• How long should be each content to appear as a featured snippet, optimize it accordingly. Here is a table with an ideal featured snippet length.
• There is always a scope of improvements, keep monitoring your data and make changes accordingly.

Future of Featured Snippets

Will the Featured Snippet die soon and be ruled by a new Google strategy? Google is working on improving its featured snippet results. A closely matched featured snippet will start appearing in SERP when Google does not find an answer to users’ queries. In ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Featured Snippets’ by Google, you will find the mention that Google is working on displaying ‘near match results’ where the search results are closely matched with the user queries. In this case, Google might show more than one featured search results.

Google might show more than one featured snippet in the search results to improve the search results and user experience, pushing the organic results down. Displaying the strongly aligned content as well as the one that provides contradictory information for better user experience is the motive.

One result displays reciprocal link building as, both, good and bad. So, a user can find a contradictory response, both, in favor and not in favor.

Google says “On a typical day, 15 percent of the queries we process have never been asked before. That’s just one of the many challenges along with sifting through trillions of pages of information across the web to try and help people make sense of the world.”

Google welcomes users to share their feedback directly from the search result page about the featured snippets in search results for your query. Click on the “Give Feedback” link at the bottom of the box.

Featured Snippets Help with Mobile and Voice Searches

Today, mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches, and voice search is gaining popularity at a steep rate. Very soon we might see Google showing 5-3 organic search results.

Conclusion

The future lies in voice search and spoken featured snippets. Google is working on ways to show the source page in spoken search results.

If you like this post, do share it with your friends and family. Need help promoting your brand? Let us help tell your brand’s unique story today! If you have any query leave them below in comment section.

Best Practice in Online Reputation Management

In the modern digital world, building brand reputation depends highly on SEO. Your company’s reputation either escalates or goes down based on social media reviews, Google listings, and reviews on other social platforms. Apart from the basic hacks of creating quality content and authentic inbound links to improve brand reputation, there are more powerful SEO-based strategies for boosting your brand reputation. Here are a few useful tactics you could use:

Associating your name with the best content
If your brand name is excluded in your published content, it will be the content that attracts more traffic instead of your brand name. On the other hand, if your brand name is associated with poor content, your name acquires a poor reputation, not the content. Hence, it is necessary to associate your name with positive content. SEO places your brand name on relevant pages for positive results.

Formation of a personalized brand
Business develops more when there are people involved, rather than companies. Even B2B companies pitch their branding around keywords that complement their company. Select keywords that are common to your brand as well as customers’ search lists. Then, combine those terms for personal branding with relevant SEO.

Responding to reviews works wonders
Surveys show that 85% of customers rely on online reviews the way they believe a trusted friend. When your site receives positive reviews, customers frequently visit your site and Search Engines, in turn, review your site with higher rankings. Likewise, negative feedbacks can bring down your site’s ranking. Acknowledge positive feedbacks and rectify errors to make your site SEO-friendly.

Make customer gratification a priority
After Google figured out ways to measure customer satisfaction online, things changed. The longer a customer spends on your website, the better your site’s ranking is. With the help of quality content, you can keep your customers glued to your site. When the results meet the customers’ search queries, customers spend more time on your site. The content and SEO strategy should be based on customer searches; what customers are looking for and how to add more traffic.

Organize PR online
Conducting online PR proves to be an efficient way to boost your brand reputation. Create engaging content and hold press releases to keep your customers hooked to your website. This will reward your website with authentic backlinks. Optimize the press releases in line with SEO.

Address those copyright concerns
You should be particular about piracy. Google easily recognizes piracy and removes your search results. This happens due to notices from Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Avoid getting into copyright troubles by responding to DMCA notices, if there are any. A tip from Organic Search Engine Optimization Experts - for every user-generated content you create, build an approachable footer link.

Smart brand-advertising
Your target should not be limited to definite platforms of the online platform. Your brand should feature on a maximum number of websites. Choose paid advertising to generate better brand awareness and feature everywhere on the web.

Keep a check on brand activities
One of the potential ways to enhance your reputation is a quick response to your brand mentions. Respond smartly to positive or negative mentions of your website. But, at times, you may be unaware of the feedbacks on your website. In such cases, use tools such as mention.com, Google Alerts, and Brand24 help. You can, thus, get assistance in boosting your brand reputation.

Defend negative SEO attacks like a pro
Sometimes, sudden drops in your search gradings occur due to a competitor’s adverse attack. SEMrush comes in handy when your site experiences an influx of poor backlinks. In case you receive a penalty notice, the Google Webmaster Tools should disavow the low-quality back-links.

There are some trusted websites that provide you with excellent services for better brand reputation management. Alternately, you may consult an SEO Agency for more personalised services. What can be better, after all, than having a digital marketing agency help you win the SEO game?

Link Building in 2019 – What You Should Know

Link building is the process of earning links on other websites. Natural earned links directly improve the relevancy and authority of a website and largely impacts where it ranks in search engines. On the other hand, self-created links are risky as they can get penalized by the Google webspam team.

Link building is a risky strategy unless you have fixed the inevitable quality issues on your website. For instance, if your website is not attracting social shares or organic links, then you have a huge problem and creating unnatural links will not help in the long run. Read how to optimise your website for voice search.

In 2018, Google will discount and discard a lot of links to your site if it finds them low quality. Links matter in a lot of situations but Google will demote sites that have no expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (EAT). One of the ways to gain better ranks is by getting links and mentions on authoritative sites.

Links are of great importance since Google has already confirmed that links are the number 1 ranking factor, other than great content. Ranking without quality links is difficult. If Google cares about links, and so should you.

1. Content is King
Content is the most legitimate link building strategy of 2018. As a business, you can also employ this strategy to build links on your site. One of the ways it can be achieved is by focusing on content marketing strategies to drive 100% of the link building activity to your website.
● Centre it around original research
● Curate the best possible information by citing the source
● Publish the article on your website and newsletter
● Link your blog post to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for boosting social activity.

In short, you write what you are passionate about. If your content resonates with larger audience, then it will help you in generating natural backlinks.
Content strategy along with outreach activity (act of promoting your content to those who might link on it) can be termed as a powerful link building strategy.

2. Up-to-date link building program
What makes for a good link? If the page that links to you is a PageRank powerhouse then that link will have a great impact on your ranking. In other words, the authority of the page that links to you matters the most because links from these pages pass more authority back to your site.

The quality of a link is also determined by a domain’s sitewide authority. For instance, a link from the Huffington Post will have a greater impact than a link from a no-name blogger. Using Ahref, you can enter a site’s URL and check its domain ratings.

Furthermore, getting links from authority sites also matters, especially if they are closely related to your site.

3. Remain Aware of Google and Other Search Engine Strategies
Are you sure about the placement of links in your content? Or is it placed in the footer? Links that are put away in footers and sidebars do not hold much worth. Thus, make sure your links appear in the main body of a webpage.

There are certain types of links that work best for link building:
● Images
● Infographics
● Charts
● Diagrams
Visuals work better as they are easy to link to. For instance, if you create and publish a chart on your site, you get a link anytime shares that chart. The same cannot be said about text-based content.

Ways of Building Links in 2019:
If you have just started building your website, then there are certain strategies you can use to get high quality
backlinks.

Guest Posts: It is important to build your personal brand to help your blog. Guest blogging on relevant and authority sites within your niche sector is one such way to build your brand image. Google is cracking down on spammy guest posts, but you can still add a link to your own useful content or post on relevant blogs. The same strategy can help you rank for long-tail keywords.

Social Media Marketing: More social shares do not necessarily guarantee a high page rank. Social media, on the other hand, is a great channel to get more exposure for content and at the same time to increase your perceived value. So, with social media strategy, you can help increase your brand visibility to boost your domain authority and earn a high page rank. More social shares also contribute to more mentions, which again have an impact on
your page rank.

Internal Linking: Regular and deep linking to your authoritative content from contextually relevant blog posts helps with your SEO strategies.

Broken Link Building: This is one of the most popular link building strategies as it adds value to the internet by repairing a broken follow link. Since you add value to a webmaster by repairing broken links, they are likely to return the favour with a follow link to your site.

Track Your Backlinks
All links coming from blog comments, press releases, etc. have to be tracked. You are supposed to track every link that points to your site that is indexed.
What should you track?

Anchor text distribution: This is one of the most important things to track. Your business should keep an ongoing record of anchor text distribution that points to your site and how the same measures to the niche-specific target anchor text.

Rankings: You should keep a track of wherever you place links to ascertain what were the rankings before the link was placed. This allows you to understand what anchors and links were likely to have a positive or negative impact. You can accomplish the same with a rank tracker, but you also do so by using a weekly ranking notes.

Keyword list and Target Pages: You should track every keyword your site is targeting and all the required pages. Every time you send a keyword’s exact anchor, note it in a spreadsheet.

Regular Link Audit: Poor quality links cleansing If you want to avoid Google penalty then you should learn how to remove bad links with a regular backlink audit. You can find low-quality backlinks that are hurting your rankings and remove them with the backlink audit. One of the ways to do it is through Google’s webmaster tools to export all backlinks on your website. Another way to do it is through the use of ‘Open site explorer from Moz’. Furthermore, you can get more
information about backlinks from ahrefs and Majestic SEO.

Conclusion
If you want to rank better for organic search keywords, then the focus should be on building links. More backlinks means more power in the rankings, then your content marketing efforts should also focus on links to gain traction. Backlinks and mentions can drive relevant traffic back to your site. Thus, focusing your efforts and time is important on link building is important.

So, how do you stand out when everyone business is trying to do the same?
Links are important for rankings but most people acquire them in the wrong manner. For instance, they would ask for links without providing anything in return.
By following link-building campaigns you can sway things in your favour. You can start by creating a guest blogging strategy. This is one of the easiest ways to get links quickly. Furthermore, you can also mention top influencers as it can give you a good chance to get a link.

This is because if you mention someone, they are most likely to share your post or mention you back. You can also try prospecting for broken links and pitching your content. You can also create high-quality infographics that will definitely bring links.

If you like this post, do share it with your friends and family. Need help promoting your brand? Let us help tell your
brand’s unique story today! If you have any query leave them below in comment section.