How Do You Optimise for Google's Featured Snippets?

Optimising for featured snippets helps to boost visibility, while helping you each your audience using voice search.

What Are the Advantages of Featured Snippets?

Appearing in featured snippets is very advantageous for your website:

• Brand exposure – in addition to providing the right answer to your users question, featured snippets helps gain brand exposure. Featured snippets falls into the Zero-click landscape, helping to ensure your brand is at the top of your audiences mind
• Boost website authority –appearing in featured snippets is a great way to boost your brands authority in your industry. This can be done by ensuring you follow the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Trust, and Authority) principle. 

Featured Snippet Types

Featured snippets can display a number of different formats within search engine results pages (SERPs). This can include lists, paragraphs, and tables. The snippets can also use videos and images. 

Paragraph snippets tend to be more common, showing in eighty two percent of featured snippets, while list snippets only appeared in ten percent, and table snippets in seven percent. 

Paragraph Snippets

Paragraph snippets contain a few sentences in text form, providing a straightforward answer. Paragraph snippets often answer the what, who, when, and where questions. 

Table-style Snippets

Table-style snippets answer robust questions that requires a variety of information to address the answer. Content appears in a table format to address questions, such as which, best, types, and different use cases.

List-style Snippets

List-style snippets appear for questions that require step by step instructions or a long list. List-style snippets are often used to answer questions of how, have, and best.

How to Rank on Google Featured Snippets

With a better understanding on what featured snippets are, you will want to conduct a thorough keyword analysis, creating content that answers your audiences most commonly asked questions. In order to rank in Google Featured Snippets, you should:

• Review what is currently ranking – analyse content your competitors are using, providing you with valuable insights.
• Use headings related to topics or questions – provide users with the right information. Adding a “What is” heading helps Google understand the question and answer format 
• Address users questions – focus on users questions first, then optimise your answer in your chosen format 
• Make sure you choose the right format – review current formats being used to determine what format you should use to improve your chances of being selected for a featured snippet
• Add Videos and Images – add images and videos with your written answer, if you feel it is appropriate. 
• Optimise your website – when your site is optimised for SEO success, it enhances your content relevance and authority, helping to improve your chances of being awarded a featured snippet 

Conclusion

While appearing in featured snippets does not necessarily mean an increase in website traffic, due to the zero-click landscape, it does boost brand visibility, credibility, and authority.