37. FEATURED SNIPPETS ARE FICKLE
• Featured snippets turn on and off based on
clickstream / CTR data.
• When pages are crawled and indexed,
content seems to be pre-processed for
featured snippet formatting.
• Case study : Glenn Gabe
44. DISCOVER FEATURED SNIPPETS
1. Find all ranked keywords on page 1
that have ‘how to’ and similar
informational queries
2. Check SERPs for presence of
featured snippets (automatically)
3. Analyze structure and content
62. OPTIMIZING FOR FEATURED SNIPPETS
• Structured Content
– H1s / H2s or CSS formatted headers
– <UL> and <OL> formatted lists
– Schema - not required but ItemList and
ItemListElement may nudge in right direction.
– Consistent html elements throughout page
– Open Graph Image tag
– Basic on-page SEO (title tag, URL).
63. OPTIMIZING FOR FEATURED SNIPPETS
• Optimized Language
– Simple, factual statements and instructions.
Descriptive enough to include keyword modifiers
(keyword research!), but not run-on or wavering.
– Command language seems to work well.
– Preface each list with a bolded section title that you
want to show in SERP.
– “The steps are:”, “Instructions:”, and similar prefaces
64. OPTIMIZING FOR FEATURED SNIPPETS
• Reinforce the Featured Snippet Algorithm
– Basic on-page elements seem to be extremely
strong signals
– If you have a relatively strong site (critical mass of
inbound links / DA), how-to or answer-based
content.
– Keyword research and competitive analysis based
on ‘how to’ and other informational queries in your
field. Find FS, try to influenceand takeover results.
Kahena is an inbound marketing agency based in Israel. Offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. We’ve got a great team and some really wonderful clients.
97% OF SERPS have some sort of non-organic feature on it.
Even the organic results are becoming fewer – on average we’re seeing 8.75 organic links.
Unless you’re weather.com or some other major content provider with a direct deal with google.
Featured snippets come in a variety of forms – paragraph block of text.
A table format with other rich data.
Or an ordered list (typically on recipes and how to queries).
Alllright - time for marketers to ruin it.
Primarily for informational queries like – particularly ‘how to’ type queries or recipes
We know that featured snippets pop in and out of the top of SERPs
Specific threshold of inbound links that matter
There are specific phrases or language elements that trigger featured snippets.
From all evidence I’ve seen – only show up once you’re already ranking on page 1.
Describe parts of the snippet – header, content (list), and title tag / url link to original page.
Note how it can be scraped from one list of many. Note the header and specific structure of the list.
Here’s another example where the type of featured snippet changed over time. The last bullet here is a bit not safe for work
Change from list format to scraped text format (even though original page had it in a structured list). . Interestingly, it cut out the last list item that had questionable language.
This one is inspired by Barry (although he has triplets, right?) Because Google is scraping content directly from the page, there’s no real editorial checks (besides probably foul language, etc) on specific text in what they show
Non traditional list – but consistent formatting throughout – a specific CSS styling for each number, then raw text.
Depending on personalizaiton, location, device – you may get a different featured snippet result for the same query. Australian result from Huggies.
This is the huggies original content with the moz bar open.
Regular organic result - Snippet is showing the list of items from the page – as if google was preprocessing the text (read aloud).
Featured snippet with a list.
Back to a normal organic result at #1
Now switched to a featured snippet in block-text form.