Featured Snippet is a piece of information that answers a user query on a search engine ranking page. Featured Snippets contain content excerpted from an article snippet, image/video, and title along with a URL pointing back to your article.
One thing is for sure, when you start searching on Google you have seen Featured Snippets countless times.
What is a Featured Snippet?
In the SEO world, Featured Snippet also has another name which is the top 0 position on Google. Because whenever you search, you will see featured snippets placed at the first position of the search page, in the top 1.
Example featured snippets about GSA
For example, when you search for the keyword which is GSA, Google will answer you with a “frame” in the first place; above all other search engines. Usually, this content is taken by Google from the content in the top positions of the search engine.
Users will be immediately provided with the necessary information by the Featured snippet so that they do not have to click on the article to view and search. So, you probably already understand what the featured snippet is.
What is a Rich Snippet?
Rich Snippets are snippets that are richer than usual on any web page on the search engine results page (SERP). Rich Snippets include basic parts such as URL, title, and meta description. Moreover, it also includes other additional sections such as Internal links, navigation, avatars, ratings, reviews, etc.
Why is Snippet important for SEO?
Reasons to Optimize Featured Snippets
- Very simply because Featured Snippets have so many benefits. You don’t have to be in the top 5 to get into the feature Snippet. In some cases, even if you are in the top 20, you can still fly to the top 0.
- Being in the top 0 positions will help your brand increase its credibility and visibility on the SERP.
- Featured Snippets help your website get more traffic. In many cases, the top 0 position also has a higher CTR (Click Through Rate) rate than the top 1 position.
- If you’re in the top 1 and you’re in the top 0 at the same time, that’s great. To optimize this top 0 position, you do not have to spend any extra cost
Tip: Optimizing images for SEO and Meta Description will help improve traffic significantly. Read more at What is Meta Description
So, you understand why you need to optimize Featured Snippets. So what are you waiting for without optimizing right away?
What is the role of the Rich card?
Make the website more prominent and attract the interest of more users. Thereby increasing the rate of users visiting the site and increasing the click-through rate.
Help increase your website space on the search page. This is really useful because search engines basically limit the size of basic information, either in characters or in pixels. Thus, your page will take advantage and attract more users when your page “occupies” more space.
Improve CTR increase rate, Rich Snippets indirectly affect website ranking on the search results page. Visitors to the page will be, Google will appreciate and increase the ranking of the page.
Types of Featured Snippets
Text format
The type of Text Featured Snippet can be simply understood as a box with text inside or a box with both text and images. It can be said that this is the most common type of snippet.
List featured snippets
In Featured Snippets of this type, the answer is displayed as a list.
Table Format Snippet
In this type of Featured Snippet, the answer is presented in the form of a table.
Instructions on how to optimize Featured Snippets
Find words that are likely to show Snippets
You must know that, in Google, not every keyword can optimize Feature Snippet. Usually, google will appear Feature Snippet for the following cases: Definition; Compare; Making. Along with many other cases.
The best way is to search for keywords that are currently being Googled to the top 0 positions if you yourself can’t know which keyword Google will give feature snippets in. From there, optimize the article to be on it.
There are two ways: competitor analysis in the global market and domestic competitor website analysis. It’s very simple to see what keywords your local and global competitors currently have that are showing on Google Snippet. From there, optimize the website content so that it is better to be put in the top 0 positions by google.
How to do this: Proceed to list competitor domains – Put in Ahrefs analysis > Organic Keywords – Select Features > Feature Snippet
Then you will come up with a series of domestic and foreign competitor keywords that are in the top 0. Then, list and group synonyms into a cluster so that it can be easily optimized for each cluster.
Analyze Featured Snippets for keywords
Analyze the number of words Feature Snippet allows to appear above. For example, the Feature Snippet of keyword A appears 52 words. At that time, you need to arrange the content layout so that the explanation will have a length ranging from 50-60 words to make the google declaration simpler and easier to recognize. Thereby helping to bring that content up more effectively. It is necessary to analyze as well as create layouts for the appropriate Featured Snippets.
You should analyze to know which form of Featured Snippet (text, table, or list) to lay out this section content according to what Google Snippet appears. Then you will get the Feature Snippet data of the keyword and proceed to step 3
Optimize article layout
Optimizing the article layout is not the introduction, body, and conclusion like in level 3 but the structure of tags (H) in the article to separate into groups of content. Depending on the depth of the article, you can reasonably allocate h2, h3, h4,… H tags refer to related categories as possible.
You can refer to the example below:
When writing content, you need to research keywords. To find out which H tags to include in my post before I wrote this article, I looked through the keyword research table. To check through the main keyword before writing an article, if you do not research, you can use the keyword tool. Next, you find related keywords in the article that users can search for and put them in as H tags. To find these H tags many people use google’s suggestions.
Optimizing article content and form
Most of the articles displayed in the snippet have deep content. In my experience, I find that the snippet rate of articles with content over 1500 words is much higher.
Especially images in H tags, for each H2 tag, you should at least give an illustration. This will result in a better user experience as well as better readability.
Need to optimize Onpage SEO standards for images and content. You can refer to standard SEO articles for newbies if you do not know how to write standard SEO articles. If you already know and do content marketing then this will be simple. The more the content covers the topic, the better. This is an important factor in making your content deeper as well as clearer.
Submit to Google the article
You should submit the URL so that google quickly receives new articles. To ask google Bots to crawl data, I recommend using google webmaster tools (search console).
This will help Google promptly update the content of your article, thereby helping your content even appear on a featured snippet when Googlebot re-crawls it.
Note: when optimizing the Top 0 Google Snippet
The higher the rank, the easier it is for the article containing the keyword to get a snippet. Usually, the position is from the top 5 and above, but with the exception of the top 10.
The Snippet position is very competitive, so it will change constantly. This is the location that attracts the most traffic. So when there is a better optimal opponent, it will take it back from you.
Backlinks Hub provides you with the foundational factors to rank in the top 0. There are still many other factors that you need to learn to fill this position.
The deadline for Featured Snippets is like waiting for SEO results. Be patient to reap the results!
How to Create Rich Snippets
By highlighting structured data through the popular Schema language, SEOs create Rich Snippets. Most of the Rich Snippets above can apply these. Google currently supports 3 types of structured data: JSON-LD, RDFa, and Microdata. However, JSON – LD is recommended.
However, you can create Schema Markup scripts to add to the source. Its main purpose is to instruct search engines on what information to include in a Rich Result. But no matter what you do, this does not guarantee the results will be informative. To decide whether the result is of that type or not, Google will use an algorithm to decide.
To check if your website has been optimized to display Rich Snippets or not, you can use SEO tools such as Ahref; SEMrush; Google’s Rich Result test.