Everything you need to know about Featured Snippets
Posted on 05.03.20 by Suchismita
It’s been a while since Google has rolled the featured snippets, which has become an increased area of focus in search engine optimization all through these years. Google is known to keep updating its features and policies to create a seamless user experience.
The latest update suggests a few changes in the featured snippets area. The following points highlight the new policies:
1. No extra URLs for featured snippetsNumber one ranking URLs from SERPs were promoted to featured snippets. A feature that allowed top-ranking URLs a chance to gain higher organic traffic and advantages over other search engine results. Moreover, Google provided two spots for such URLs in the SERPs. Well, not anymore.
Google is trimming down the extra URLs from search results for featured snippets. The process of trimming down such duplicate URLs is called deduplication.
1. Deduplication has no impact on search console performance reportsTA featured snippet and organic position are already counted as the top-ranking position. There is no ‘take back’ from this status.
This means, even if Google takes back the organic number one position but a URL doesn’t lose its featured snippet status—then it will still be ranked in number one position.
What exactly is the featured snippet?
Do you see highlighted search results on the top when you enter a query in Google? This is a featured snippet. It was started with an aim to provide an answer to users' queries right away. Primarily, there are three types of featured snippets.
- 1. Paragraph Snippet
- 2. List Snippet
- 3. Table Snippet
The secret sauce behind getting featured snippets
There is no mystery behind getting featured snippets. You just have to answer straight to the user. The simpler your answer is the likely are your chances to get featured. The content should answer clearly to the questions asked without any ifs and buts. Changing the long-tail keywords into something simple that a user will actually enter in the search query can help you realize your goals.
How to establish what is your audience asking?
A clear answer would go on online forums that engage people in conversations like Quora. This is a great place to be if you lack time for offline market research. All you have to do is type a generic question and wait for Quora to give you a list of other suggestions. Another way of doing this is to enter keywords and find out the different range of questions that users enter for a particular topic.
How to compete with the first rankers?
This step requires you to do a lot of research and analysis, but trust us, it is not as tough as it sounds, if you follow the following steps:
- 1. Do competitor analysis and layout a list of low-competition keywords. While searching
for the keywords, target the informational intent rather than the clear questions.
- 2. Browse Google for exploring more questions. Pay attention to the 'people also
ask' section that enlists questions that Google suggests people might be asking in
place of what you might have searched.
- 3. Follow twitterazis to discover untapped opportunities. People are more than active on
twitter, also the social media platform features ‘trending topics’ in particular
areas—from where you can pick the lingos that people are using.