How to Optimize Website for Google Featured Snippets: A Step-by-Step Guide

Google Featured Snippets are an SEO feature and very powerful tool that Google has been rolling out since 2015. These are the boxes that appear at the top of Google’s search results when you conduct a question-based search.

Featured snippets show up in both organic and paid searches, so this optimization strategy is an all-around win. At first glance, featured snippets seem like they’re only helpful for getting people to your site. But there’s more to it than that.

Optimizing for featured snippets will also help you rank better in Google’s organic search results because you’ll be answering the questions that people are typing into the search box and they often appear at the top of the page. And if you optimize for both types of queries (questions and informational), then you can rank well in both types of searches!

Why Optimize for Google Featured Snippets?

Google Featured Snippets are one of the best ways to optimize your website for SEO and it has such a big impact on how many visitors your website will get from Google. Featured snippets provide a quick overview of specific searches, and they’re generally shown because the answer is deemed to be so good that Google wants to show it to users without them having to click through.

Featured snippets can attract significant organic traffic for websites and pages, so it’s important for SEO professionals, website owners, webmasters, or content creators to optimize websites and content for them. Check out these 7 benefits of featured snippets in SERPs:

  1. Increase organic traffic by up to 33%.
  2. Increase website CTR (click-through-rate)
  3. Increase brand awareness and conversion
  4. The snippet will provide a link to your website
  5. Enhance website authority
  6. Help you get higher keyword rankings in SERPs
  7. Displays summary of your web page top in Google search results.

How Can We Optimize our Website for Featured Snippets on Google?

Google is constantly trying to improve its search engine and provide more accurate and relevant results for users. One way it does this is by using featured snippets on Google Search Results Pages (SERPs). This section will discuss how we can optimize our content for Featured Snippets.

A Google Featured Snippet is a section of text that Google displays when someone searches for something on their search engine. It’s typically shown as a three-option box, with the top result appearing at the top-left corner of the box. You can use Google’s Featured Snippets tool to see whether you rank in them. If you do, you can optimize your content for Featured Snippets by following some basic rules:

1. Informative Sentences

In Google search, you find 55% of featured snippets are the paragraph type with around 250 characters. The title of these paragraphs starts with questions like “Why”, “How” or “What”, which provide formal and natural information. As a content creator, you should also focus on creating a solution to the audience’s problem by providing a valid answer. Because of high competition on question keywords like “what”, you have to find out questionnaire keywords (long trails and low keyword difficulty).

2. Create List

Lists are another common snippet feature. Write your content with some specific points in an ordered or unordered list. These lists answer the visitors step-by-step and solve all queries quickly. Keep your list shorter and full of information.

3. Use Tables

If you are presenting some data of a particular niche, the table is the best way to show every information that you researched. It will be easy to read and understandable for everyone. To optimize table snippets, you should use table tags in your HTML code.

4. Add Videos

Sometimes you have noticed that Google also shows video featured snippets on a particular search. People search for “how” related questions, your videos with complete answers could be at the top as snippet results. Google prefers YouTube videos, so you can create a YouTube channel to answer the searcher on Google. A video is the most convenient way to engage people, and it also increases the CTR.

5. Add Sufficient Question Keywords in Heading

Analyze relevant high-volume questions keywords and add them in your heading tags because Google starts crawling a website from the heading tag. You may take some questions ideas from many Q&A websites like Quora.com, stackoverflow.com, answers.com.

6. Use Relevant and Informative Graphics

Graphics is a very important part especially for listicle and paragraph featured snippets. Always use real and copyright-free images for getting better results.

7. Well Organized Web Structure

A clean and organized web page structure to be essential in addition to the semantic relevance to the keyword in question. There ought to be a place on the web page in which the search question seems in a header (h2, h3, h4, etc.). The content material you need to seem with inside the Featured Snippet must be placed in <p> tags under the heading.

8. Use Advanced SEO Tactics

After creating valuable content, your content should be optimized with proper SEO as per Google guidelines. Without proper search engine optimization, your web page won’t be eligible for Google featured snippets. If you face difficulty in SEO, you can consult with the best SEO agency in India and make your website 100% SEO friendly. Follow the below SEO guidelines to improve in SERPs:

  • Optimize Title Tag: Make your title catchy and attractive. Use your main keyword in the title tag. Your tile has less than 60-65 words with a 600-pixel width limit.
  • Optimize Meta Description Tag: Use primary and secondary keywords on the description tag with 160 words in length.
  • Optimize Web URL Structure: Try to keep web URLs short, readable, and up to 4 words.
  • Optimize H1 Tags: Use main keyword and related question keyword on heading tag.
  • Image Optimization: Use alt text, image file name, caption, image description.
  • Implement Schema Markup Tags: Schema markup helps Google to understand what your website is about and identify the web elements like list, table, location, content, etc.
  • Create Internal Linking: Google identifies the website’s most valuable and important pages through internal links. Internal linking improves user experience, increases crawl ability, and establishes hierarchy.
  • Provide External links: SEO experts says external linking is very important in modern SEO. If you provide external links of good content resources, then you win the trust of Google which is a very good sign for your website.
  • Create Backlinks: Link building to assist Google to apprehend your website’s authoritativeness.

Conclusion

Our recommendation for each person trying to grow their visibility in the Featured Snippet container is to first run a brief audit of the key phrases that you’re rating for inside your cutting-edge search engine optimization marketing campaign and the way a lot of them are question-primarily based queries. Once you have got this list, you could drill down on wherein you are presently rating, how properly your content material is structured, after which devise a plan to optimize your content material primarily based totally on the recommendation we’ve given above.

Also Read: 12 Powerful Strategies to Get Traffic from Google Discover