It's been over two years since Google launched Featured Snippets, and yet many search marketers still see them as little more than a novelty. If you're not convinced by now that Featured Snippets offer a significant organic opportunity, then today is my attempt to change your mind.
If you somehow haven't encountered a Featured Snippet searching Google over the past two years, here's an example (from a search for "ssl"):
This is a promoted organic result, appearing above the traditional #1 ranking position. At minimum, Featured Snippets contain an extracted answer (more on that later), a display title, and a URL. They may also have an image, bulleted lists, and simple tables.
Why should you care?
We're all busy, and Google has made so many changes in the past couple of years that it can be hard to sort out what's really important to your customer or employer. I get it, and I'm not judging you. So, let's get the hard question out of the way: Why are Featured Snippets important?
(1) They occupy the "#0" position
Here's the top portion of a SERP for "hdmi cable," a commercial query:
There are a couple of interesting things going on here. First, Featured Snippets always (for now) come before traditional organic results. This is why I have taken to calling them the "#0" ranking position. What beats #1? You can see where I'm going with this... #0. In this case, the first organic is pushed down even more, below a set of Related Questions (the "People also ask" box). So, the "#1" organic position is really third in this example.
In addition, notice that the "#0" (that's the last time I'll put it in quotes) position is the same URL as the #1 organic position. So, Amazon is getting two listings on this result for a single page. The Featured Snippet doesn't always come from the #1 organic result (we'll get to that in a minute), but if you score #0, you are always listed twice on page one of results.
(2) They're surprisingly prevalent
In our 10,000-keyword tracking data set, Featured Snippets rolled out at approximately 2% of the queries we track. As of mid-July, they appear on roughly 11% of the keywords we monitor. We don't have good historical data from the first few months after roll-out, but here's a 12-month graph (July 2015 – July 2016):
Featured Snippets have more than doubled in prevalence in the past year, and they've increased by a factor of roughly 5X since launch. After two years, it's clear that this is no longer a short-term or small-scale test. Google considers this experiment to be a success.
(3) They often boost CTR
When Featured Snippets launched, SEOs were naturally concerned that, by extracting and displaying answers, click-through rates to the source site would suffer. While extracting answers from sites was certainly uncharted territory for Google, and we can debate their use of our content in this form, there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that Featured Snippets not only haven't harmed CTR, but they actually boost it in some cases.
In August of 2015, Search Engine Land published a case study by Glenn Gabe that tracked the loss of a Featured Snippet for a client on a competitive keyword. In the two-week period following the loss, that client lost over 39K clicks. In February of 2016, HubSpot did a larger study of high-volume keywords showing that ranking #0 produced a 114% CTR boost, even when they already held the #1 organic position. While these results are anecdotal and may not apply to everyone, evidence continues to suggest that Featured Snippets can boost organic search traffic in many cases.
Where do they come from?
Featured Snippets were born out of a problem that dates back to the early days of search. Pre-Google, many search players, including Yahoo, were human-curated directories first. As content creation exploded, humans could no longer keep up, especially in anything close to real-time, and search engines turned to algorithmic approaches and machine curation.
When Google launched the Knowledge Graph, it was based entirely on human-curated data, such as Freebase and Wikidata. You can see this data in traditional "Knowledge Cards," sometimes generically called "answer boxes." For example, this card appears on a search for "Who is the CEO of Tesla?":
The answer is short and factual, and there is no corresponding source link for it. This comes directly from the curated Knowledge Graph. If you run a search for "Tesla," you can see this more easily in the Knowledge Panel on that page:
In the middle, you can see an entry for "CEO: Elon Musk." This isn't just a block of display text — each of these line items are factoids that exist individually as structured data in the Knowledge Graph. You can test this by running searches against other factoids, like "When was Tesla founded?"
While Google does a decent job of matching many forms of a question to answers in the Knowledge Graph, they can't escape the limits of human curation. There are also questions that don't easily fit the "factoid" model. For example, if you search "What is ludicrous mode Tesla?" (pardon the weird syntax), you get this Featured Snippet:
Google's solution was obvious, if incredibly difficult — take the trillions of pages in their index and use them to generate answers in real-time. So, that's exactly what they did. If you go to the source page on Engadget, the text in the Featured Snippet is taken directly from on-page copy (I've added the green highlighting):
It's not as simple as just scraping off the first paragraph with a spatula and flipping it onto the SERP, though. Google does seem to be parsing content fairly deeply for relevance, and they've been improving their capabilities constantly since the launch of Featured Snippets. Consider a couple of other examples with slightly different formats. Here's a Featured Snippet for "How much is a Tesla?":
Note the tabular data. This data is being extracted and reformatted from a table on the target page. This isn't structured data — it's plain-old HTML. Google has not only parsed the table but determined that tabular data is a sensible format in response to the question. Here's the original table:
Here's one of my favorite examples, from a search for "how to cook bacon." For any aspiring bacon wizards, please pay careful attention to step #4:
Note the bulleted (ordered) list. As with the table, not only has Google determined that a list is a relevant format for the answer, but they've created this list. Now look at the target page:
There's no HTML ordered list (<ol></ol>) on this page. Google is taking a list-like paragraph style and converting it into a simpler list. This content is also fairly deep into a long page of text. Again, there is no structured data in play. Google is using any and all content available in the quest for answers.
How do you get one?
So, let's get to the tactical question — how can you score a Featured Snippet? You need to know two things. First, you have to rank organically on the first page of results. Every Featured Snippet we've tracked also ranks on page one. Second, you need to have content that effectively targets the question.
Do you have to rank #1 to get the #0 position? No. Ranking #1 certainly doesn't hurt, but we've found examples of Featured Snippet URLs from across all of page one. As of June, the graph below represents the distribution of organic rankings for all of the Featured Snippets in our tracking data set:
Just about 1/3 of Featured Snippets are pulled from the #1 position, with the bulk of the remaining coming from positions #2–#5. There are opportunties across all of page one, in theory, but searches where you rank in the top five are going to be your best targets. The team at STAT produced an in-depth white paper on Featured Snippets across a very large data set that showed a similar pattern, with about 30% of Featured Snippet URLs ranking in the #1 organic position.
If you're not convinced yet, here's another argument for the "Why should you care?" column. Once you're ranking on page one, our data suggests that getting the Featured Snippet is more about relevance than ranking/authority. If you're ranking #2–#5 it may be easier to compete for position #0 than it is for position #1. Featured Snippets are the closest thing to an SEO shortcut you're likely to get in 2016.
The double-edged sword of Featured Snippets (for Google) is that, since the content comes from our websites, we ultimately control it. I showed in a previous post how we fixed a Featured Snippet with updated data, but let's get to what you really want to hear — can we take a Featured Snippet from a competitor?
A while back, I did a search for "What is Page Authority?" Page Authority is a metric created by us here at Moz, and so naturally we have a vested interest in who's ranking for that term. I came across the following Featured Snippet.
In very short order, our changes had the desired impact, and we took the #0 position:
What should you target?
Featured Snippets can require a slightly different and broader approach to keyword research, especially since many of us don't routinely track questions. So, what kind of questions tend to trigger Featured Snippets? It's helpful to keep in mind the 5 Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why) + How, but many of these questions will generate answers from the Knowledge Graph directly.
To keep things simple, ask yourself this: is the answer a matter of simple fact (or a "factoid")? For example, a question like "How old is Beyoncé?" or "When is Labor Day?" is going to be pulled from the Knowledge Graph. While human curation can't keep up with the pace of the web, WikiData and other sources are still impressive and cover a massive amount of territory. Typically, these questions won't produce Featured Snippets.
What and implied-what questions
A good starting point is "What...?" questions, such as our "What is Page Authority?" experiment. This is especially effective for industry terms and other specialized knowledge that can't be easily reduced to a dictionary definition.
Keep in mind that many Featured Snippets appear on implied "What..." questions. In other words, "What" never appears in the query. For example, here's a Featured Snippet for "PPC":
Google has essentially decided that this fairly ambiguous query deserves an answer to "What is PPC?" In other words, they've implied the "What." This is fairly common now for industry terms and phrases that might be unfamiliar to the average searcher, and is a good starting point for your keyword research.
Keep in mind that common words will produce a dictionary entry. For example, here's a Knowledge Card for "What is search?":
These dictionary cards are driven by human-curated data sources and are not organic, in the typical sense of the word. Google has expanded dictionary results in the past year, so you'll need to focus on less common terms and phrases.
Why and how questions
"Why... ?" questions are good fodder for Featured Snippets because they can't easily be answered with factoids. They often require some explanation, such as this snippet for "Why is the sky blue?":
Likewise, "How...?" questions often require more in-depth answers. An especially good target for Featured Snippets is "How to... ?" questions, which tend to have practical answers that can be summarized. Here's one for "How to make tacos":
One benefit of "Why," "How," and "How to" questions is that the Featured Snippet summary often just serves as a teaser to a longer answer. The summary can add credibility to your listing while still attracting clicks to in-depth content. "How... ?" may also be implied in some cases. For example, a search for "convert PDF to Word" brings up a Featured Snippet for a "How to..." page.
What content is eligible?
Once you have a question in mind, and that question/query is eligible for Featured Snippets, there's another piece of the targeting problem: which page on your site is best equipped to answer that question? Let's take, for example, the search "What is SEO?". It has the following Featured Snippet from Wikipedia:
Moz ranks on page one for that search, but it still begs two questions: (1) is the ranking page the best answer to the question (in Google's eyes), and (2) what content on the page do they see as best matching the question. Fortunately, you can use the "site:" operator along with your search term to help answer both questions. Here's a Featured Snippet for [site:moz.com "what is seo"]:
Now, we know that, within just our own site, Google is seeing The Beginner's Guide as the best match to the question, and we have an idea of how they're parsing that page for an answer. If we were willing to rewrite the page just to answer this question (and that certainly involves trade-offs), we'd have a much better sense of where to start.
What about Related Questions?
Featured Snippets have a close cousin that launched more recently, known to Google as Related Questions and sometimes called the "People Also Ask" box. If I run a search for "page authority," it returns the following set of Related Questions (nestled into the organic results):
Although Related Questions have a less dominant position in search results than Featured Snippets (they're not generally at the top), they're more prevalent, occurring on almost 17% of the searches in our tracking data set. These boxes can contain up to four related questions (currently), and each question expands to look something like this:
At this point, that expanded content should look familiar — it's being generated from the index, has an organic link, and looks almost exactly like a Featured Snippet. It also has a link to a Google search for the related question. Clicking on that search brings up the following Featured Snippet:
Interestingly, and somewhat confusingly, that Featured Snippet doesn't exactly match the snippet in the Related Questions box, even though they're answering the same question from the same page. We're not completely sure how Featured Snippets and Related Questions are connected, but they share a common philosophy and very likely a lot of common code. Being a better answer will help you rank for both.
What's the long game?
If you want to know where all of this is headed in the future, you have to ask a simple question: what's in it for Google? It's easy to jump to conspiracy theories when Google takes our content to provide direct answers, but what do they gain? They haven't monetized this box, and a strong, third-party answer draws attention and could detract from ad clicks. They're keeping you on their page for another few seconds, but that's little more than a vanity metric.
I think the answer is that this is part of a long shift toward mobile and alternative display formats. Look at the first page of a search for "what is page authority" on an Android device:
Here, the Featured Snippet dominates the page — there's just not room for much more on a mobile screen. As technology diversifies into watches and other wearables, this problem will expand. There's an even more difficult problem than screen space, though, and that's when you have no screen at all.
If you do a voice search on Android for "what is page authority," Google will read back to you the following answer:
"According to Moz, Page Authority is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines."
This is an even more truncated answer, and voice search appends the attribution ("According to Moz..."). You can still look at your phone screen, of course, but imagine if you had asked the question in your car or on Google's new search appliance (their competitor to Amazon's Echo). In those cases, the Featured Snippet wouldn't just be the most prominent answer — it would be the only answer.
Google has to adapt to our changing world of devices, and often those devices requires succinct answers and aren't well-suited to a traditional SERP. This may not be so much about profiting from direct answers for Google as it is about survival. New devices will demands new formats.
How do you track all of this?
After years of tracking rich SERP features, watching the world of organic search evolve, and preaching that evolution to our customers and industry, I'm happy to say that our Product Team has been hard at work for months building the infrastructure and UI necessary to manage the rich and complicated world of SERP features, including Featured Snippets. Spoiler alert: expect an announcement from us very soon.
Update: You can now discover and track your Featured Snippets in Moz Pro!
I went to Brighton SEO in April this year and Rob Bucci from getstat.com did an awesome talk about this, I think you've linked their white paper about in this post but here are the slides for his talk as well.
I implemented some of his tips, like adding more tables and lists and we appeared in a few featured snippets for some search terms we were already ranking for.
Really good to test out on pages where you are not ranking in the top 3, but around 4-10. Seems to work great for those in my experience.
Rob and his team have done some great research on the topic.
Thanks for sharing your experience and these sheets
Thats really useful, thanks.
Out of curiosity - are adult sites able to obtain these answers boxes? As Google have clearly stated that adult content aren't eligible for rich snippets.
So, theoretically, it should be possible, since the SERP itself would be adult (and already filtered as needed) and Google would just draw from those results, but I can't actually find a featured snippet on any adult-content questions. Reached out to Google to see.
Thanks, if you could let me know, that'll be fab.
Hi Peter
Okay ... Does this mean that it is preferable to focus our efforts on small paragraphs within our content before a hypothetical meta description for getting google interpreted as that little text as our snipett?
I don't think you should try to optimize every page to a one-paragraph summary, but definitely consider your content experience from a search user point-of-view. If someone lands on your page to answer a question, are they able to get to that answer quickly? I believe "optimizing" for answers can be win-win for SEO and users, done well. Doing it well is labor-intensive, though.
Hey Dr. Pete, thanks for putting this together! I was refreshing my memory on the ins and outs of featured snippets and your post has been extremely helpful.
As you mentioned, getting in position "0" is invaluable, do you have a good strategy in place to determine which snippets you have the best opportunity to take over the featured snippet? Also, I was wondering how you think featured snippets will change over the next year or so as voice search become more popular? Do you think they will be each more important for brand recognition? Thanks!
I've got two more recent posts that might be of use:
Featured Snippets: From Start to Finish
How to Rank on Google Home
One trick, if there's a featured snippet on your desired keyword but you're not in it, is to use the same query with the "site:" operator (e.g. [site:yoursite.com "desired phrase"]). If a page on your site is eligible for a Featured Snippet, it may surface this way. It gives you a sense of which page is most likely to rank and for what content.
Hi Peter
I am experimenting with keywords following the advices of the article, but the featured sniped strategy will be different in each country. In Spain, for example, there is few featured sniped and videos have better SERP.
Has featured sniped a variable importance depending of the country? What could be the strategic approach with this in mind?
Thanks
Yes, definitely - I don't have global stats, but they're definitely more prevalent in English-speaking markets right now. Parsing constructing answers takes a fair amount of natural language processing, and probably doesn't easily translate between languages right now. Expect that to change over time.
So it would be an opportunity for pages in countries where it is not completely developed. Maybe we have to think in a featured sniped strategy approach to be ready
There are some keywords on which my website is ranking at position #0 and the same page is on 2nd page of SERP. Also, those are Information related blogs. Its possible to Rank for topics like "How to's" "what is" "where is" and its difficult to rank for those keywords which can generate business sales...
Another change i observed was, while doing a voice search, quora's answers were regularly showing up at Position #0.. but now i cant see quora much.. Is google giving less importance to QA websites or is there problem with quora?
I ranked 6th on the first page but then I read one of your article which Rand has tweeted a few days ago. I immediately aplied those tactics and now my Post is at zeroth position. But with that the position also improved to 1st and CTR increased to 16%. All is awesome but I face two problem...
1. The post is not consistently showing at the zeroth position. Sometimes it shows as a normal post ranking 1st or second.
2. The result is only visible for google India and not at google.com. Although this is not a big concern because the site is optimised for indian content but still I am mentioning it here.
Interesting to know regarding India vs. US. Is the content in Hindi (or another dialect) or English? Featured Snippets are a real-time calculation, so they do seem to shuffle around.
Hi Dr. Pete.
I read an article on SEMrush on the same topic just before reading this article. They included a graph showing that Quora appears more in Featured Snippets than Wikipedia. Wikipedia has more authority and quality content than Quora but Quora's content updates much faster than Wikipedia. It looks like content freshness is also a factor. What do you say about this?
It's possible, but I think there are a lot of other factors involved. Quora is naturally question-oriented, so may just be well suited to Featured Snippets. Wikidata powers a lot of the original Knowledge Graph, and so I think Google is intentionally trying to rely less on Wikipedia for Featured Snippets (also knowing how powerful they are in regular organic). That's one site where they might manually move the needle on Featured Snippets, but I can't prove any of that.
Is the tool you mentioned at the bottom of the article available yet? Thanks!
Hi Lisa, thanks for the catch! It is -- the Moz Pro toolset now offers SERP feature discovery & tracking. I added a note above to reflect that :) Thanks again for letting us know this needed an update!
Thank you for the tips on how to out rank competitors. Is it true that these 'info boxes' can reduce click through rates to your website after potential visitor's questions has been fully answered? Wikipedia was the first to note a slump in traffic as people get quick answers and leave without visiting the website. If you are on number #1 it may not be worth it to be on number #0 unless it has buyer keywords. You need to be strategic and list your points where possible and hide other points below number 4 or 5 to make sure people visit your website. You will not get email opt-ins from people who read the snippet.... my thoughts.
We're seeing a surprising number of examples where Featured Snippets boost click-through, but yes, there are definitely going to be examples where the question is simple enough that the snippet answers it without elaboration. It's tough to pin down, though. If you've got a "What is..." question that can be summed up in a sentence, then Featured Snippets might drain CTR. For most "How to..." and similar questions, that couple of paragraphs or bullet list isn't going to be enough.
Hello Peter,
Educational, interesting and challenging!
When we have just convinced our clients to understand that SEO is not static, that every week there is something new, that there are great opportunities in the local SEO...
… you open for us a new door: the why, what and how are not just for Wikipedia, Moz or Amazon.
In this regard, I have a client who is consistently on the first page, but he does not sleep well. His daily nightmare is the competition.
Despite my recommendations, it has not made technical improvements, so the danger is permanent.
I am thinking about whether appearing in a Featured Snippet is relevant or not for his market. Nevertheless, it might indirectly convince him that the SEO, technical SEO included, deserves his major efforts.
Thank you for studying, and devoting your time for us all.
Great post! I'm very impressed with this table parcing feature of Google. But how does it determine that table is relevant to query. And is it mandatory to rank first in this instance? Thanks.
Hey Pete,
I am absolutely intrigued by the whole Schema and Structured Data element, that is becoming more prevalent in Semantic SEO by the month. I love your graphs and in depth explanations of the Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Panel and #0. I am always encouraging clients to get on board and focus on getting into the Featured Snippets on Google.
Keep 'em coming!
Kevin
We photobombed your post! ;) Elaborating a little on the how & why questions, we've found that the best way to get the snippet is to answer COMPLEX questions better than anyone else on the page, and to be sure the article includes snippet-able (self-contained) chunks of text. Little more on this strategy here: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/10/13/google-answer-box
It's kind of sad how long it took me to get around to actually writing this post, for as long as I've talked about it :)
Cool. Never really gave much thought to the Featured Snippets being good for boosting CTR.
Awesome!
Nice post, Google is taking search results into next level.
Great article that I saved when it first was written and am glad I came back to.
Question for Dr. Pete: Is there a good way to find topics or keywords that have existing snippets? Is it a better strategy to try and compete for #0 on an existing snippet or to create new content in hopes that Google creates a new snippet?
Thanks in advance.
We don't have a lot of good data right now on what it takes to get a Featured Snippet where Google isn't displaying one. Some of that's dependent on the algorithm itself (or some tiny part of it), but there have been a couple of case studies where people seemed able to produce on. Taking over an existing one is going to be easier, in many cases, and probably a safer bet.
I have been noticing these in the SERPS and was wondering what they were, well now I know many thanks for this article very imforative indeed
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en-IN
Wondering ... are Featured Snippets present in all of Google's portals across the globe? If I'm working with a client who is expanding out of the U.S., will these tactics work universally?
Thanks for the great insight too Pete!
This is interesting...I will try to implement it
I have a doubt about RSS feed
My blog: www.thepicz.com is not having a valid RSS feed and it is showing so many issues when I validate it.
Can you help me in creating a valid RSS feed
I've done one experiment in a similar, related area to this. I've documented it on my blog. (Done in Australia, "Voluntary Administration" as the keyword) -- A "qualitative" study (personal experiment with client).
Summary of findings and thoughts:
1) Answer box for more legal terms -might- still be dominated by authoritative sources (.gov sites, for example) -- where having a formalised answer from a formal entity -might- be important (hunch, no data to support this aside from anecdotal experience).
2) Formatting articles in a kind of "long form" / "Wikipedia" style format as "definitions" can be helpful for both answer box, organic ranking, "people also ask", and jump to links for sub-queries (seen results in most of these).
3) At least in this niche / for this experiment, it appears Google has intentionally biased certain keywords towards information and away from transaction over time. (Reasonable data to support that in the experiment).
Detail: documented in this post. https://shawnpowrie.com/marketing/seo-for-highly-information-biased-niches/
Very interesting and insightful article, thanks.
I especially liked your conclusions re where this is heading and thinking about mobile, watches and wearables and how all this gets adapted to each one of them giving the most relevant result. So I am wondering what other things you think are in line to change soon / get refined in order to fit better the small screens? (related to search
Looking forward to see what you are going to announce soon, what your Product Team is working on.
Keep up the good work.
Great content! I'm very surprised about the real time content generation in the Featured Snippets without structured data, the example with paragraph/ordered list is very interesting. Also, I saw results that aren't consistent for days, like Google Dancing...
this change should eradicate hoax content and aim to answer direct query from people who are inquiring online giving them prompt and direct answers.
With this implementation you can check current time, current weather, live telecast score updates of your favorite sports and so on.
Google can even check flight schedules
Dr. Pete, this is a very good article.
Considering I am a copywriter, it has always been interesting for me how Google extracts this information - and finally I got the answer why. Now it seems perfectly logical that mobile devices have driven this format, and not so logical that it stays in desktop search results. But that's a whole different story.
Thanks for explaining.
Best,
PopArt Studio
I am absolutely intrigued by the whole Schema and Structured Data element, that is becoming more prevalent in Semantic SEO with time. I loved your graphs and in-depth explanation of the Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Panel and #0. I am always encouraging clients to get on board and focus on getting into the Featured Snippets on Google, this will help me convince them further.
Dr. Pete,
I have a problem. After reading your article I know have more questions. I have a website that ranks #1 for many question style results and it has a DA of 48. But for some reason will not rank for any featured snippets. (Note: It does show up for several related questions.) There even is an instance where someone on Quora copied and pasted my exact list with backlinks to my article, but the Quora result takes the featured snippet even though I am ranking #1 for that search query.
Is there a way a website can be "banned" from featured snippets? My spam score on OSE is 0 as well. That said I don't have any structured data on my website. What would you recommend?
Hmmm... that's interesting (although sorry you're in that situation). I don't know of any Featured Snippet specific bans. If Google felt you were low-quality enough to ban from the Featured Snippet, I doubt they'd be ranking you #1 on those SERPs. I wonder if there's some kind of issue where they're seeing a lot of similar, duplicate content out there. Are you seeing a similar problem with sites like Quora on other SERPs or just the one?
Sorry, without examples, it can be hard to pin down. This is probably a better fit for Q&A.
Great content. I need to go to a sweat lodge and ponder the applications for the domains I control. Interesting how table content, which we've been getting away from has some play here.
Great informative, i think we need to impliment in blog too.
Thanks Dr. Peter J. Meyers for sharing your experience.
Very Neatly explained content, well complimented by screenshots and stats.
Why and how are what usually users look up for, just 2 days back I was researching a website(health) whose metrics were not so great but was getting around 96% organic traffic out of 100k monthly visits, all his post had 3-4 questions and answers in form of how, what , why etc. apart from very structured coding and rich snippets used.
Great explanation. I was manually checking keywords for my wifes site a few weeks ago and found that she had picked up a few of these answers sections just from the basic Schema that I'd done. I'll be curious to see how it plays out over the next few years.
I always wondered where do these "ranking 0 content" snippets coming from....so does this mean that, if a website answers a lot of questions and makes sure the data is properly formatted and optimized, google will automatically pull this data from them? Or do they base their signal / ranking also on how others link to it, how visited it is, etc?
As I mentioned, you have to rank on page 1, so there's definitely an authority aspect. Once you're on page 1, though, it doesn't seem like traditional rankings signals are as important as relevance signals and matching the question. So, think of ranking on page 1 as a hurdle you have to overcome first.
if 30% of #0 are taken from #1 (and so on), then clearly traditional ranking signals come into play (although, you know, correlation, causation, etc.), otherwise the distribution would be more random (unless I'm misinterpreting your graph).I'd like to see some examples of a lower ranking page winning a #0 from a higher ranking one. I'd also like to see how any changes in #0 correlates with changes to how those pages rank for other search terms.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that other ranking signals have no importance - there's definitely some interplay. For simplicity's sake, though, I think the key take-away is that there are opportunities for anyone on page one, to some degree. We're starting to view ranking #1-5 as high opportunity for Featured Snippets, but I strongly suspect that will evolve over time and Google will get more sophisticated. This is a real-time calculation, so there is a snippet sub-algorithm in play.
I haven't seen snippets with pictures in them yet, but I can see how they would work.
It certainly takes the boredom out of looking are rows of text - oh yeah, I've stopped using the text results and keep going for images or maps instead, maybe that's why I haven't seem it!
I admit to be in the group of those that find the topic interesting but have not yet managed to put it as a top priority in the agenda... Your post has made it clear though that this is a must do topic.
From what you describe and the fact that you mention Google is not monetising this (at least today) I would pressume it applies mainly to non-tranactional searches. If this were the case then it needs to be looked at I suppose more as a branding effort rather than a pure direct sales effort
Hi Peter,
Great article, very informative.
I am wondering what type of mark up can be added to areas of content on a web page? I know you say Google are just reading Html and developing there own format of answers, but can Json-ld still be used to access the Google Answers?
Another great post Peter. #0 position sounds good :) Major results are coming with feature snippets. This is the right time to start working on this. Google evaluate their results frequently and it is vital to implement this on certain extent.
Do you have any data with Voice based searches? Does feature snippets works same for voice search?
Thanks for the article!
You stated that the snippets have doubled in the past year and fivefolded since its launch. What do you think the futur will bring for these snippets (i.e. how will it evolve further)? Furthermore, I was curious about the implications of voice search for these snippets if you have any ideas about this..
Super informative article. What about ranking #0 for local search results? I have yet to see a hyperlocal featured snippet...perhaps it's in the works?
Great article, but this feature only working in google.com i hope it comes in international google soon....
Google has confirmed that Featured Snippets are operating in multiple countries and languages (I've seen quite a few examples in the wild), but the frequency depends a lot on the language, and they're not everywhere. For now, you have to experiment a bit.
Interested in the HDMI cable example as it strikes me as different from the others. However, what I wanted to note was that #0 can also be pulled from YouTube descriptions- it was when I just searched for "what is an HDMI cable". I have a feeling that certain engagement-based ranking factors might play a part in deciding where the answer is taken, alongside relevance.
Over the past year, we've seen more Featured Snippets on commercial queries, but it's not clear if this is intentional on Google's part (i.e. that they're specifically targeting some commercial queries), or if they've generally lowered the threshold and allowed more Featured Snippets to appear, and this includes some commercial queries. How they decide which queries qualify for Featured Snippets seems to be decided in real-time by some part of the algorithm, so there's no clear set of boundaries that determine which queries qualify and which don't.
Just a thought, but maybe there's more 'answers' readily available for commercial queries as there's plenty of businesses eager to answer those queries. It may make it easier for Google to choose from the best answers when there's more 'consistent opinions' to choose from?
Great post! I've been noticing a steady increase in Answer Box results as well. We've managed to rank in the Answer Box for a number of queries, but there are still instances where lower ranked competitors end up being chosen instead of our site. Any tips on how to show up aside from formatting content as an answer to a question?
Hello Dr. Pete! As always you have had a marvelous work and I want to be honest to you. I really like the Elon Musk's works and when I saw the image of him I didn't doubt of continue reading (nice example you took). Well, the dissapointing thing is that you have to be in the first page of Google to use de "0" position, as you said. But not all is bad. This stimulate us to continue improving our SEO techniques to gain this reward. By the way, I didn't know that you have to create content that answers the question, if not exactly, almost. I liked the example you posted of Tesla motors. It's amazing how Google can read in phew seconds trillion of pages to gave us an answer that is in some context. This encourage me to become better and better... I have to say the truth... When I search something and the "0" position apprears to me, automatically I click on it, so that's true, it improves the CTR!
Also you need some trust on your domain, no chance get snippet if first year...
Thanks for sharing, so good information !
still trying to make this happen :-)
It's Really Most Improtant for SEO purpose, Previous I thought question title is no matter on google but now it's matter thanks Moz for such amazing article.
Hi Peter, Thanks for this article! Early days we are fighting for #1 ranking and now #0 ranking. Let me try and optimize few of my website pages for #0 ranking means Featured Snippets :-)
Thank you for the information! It helps me a lot. :)
Helpfull Information, i try doing for my site.
Hi Peter, very good article about Ranking # 0. Let's try some of our keywords by following your advice. It is challenging, sure it's not easy
These Many Day I was search for Optimizing Schema in my website, I just reached the correct post for my Schema Snippet
Very interesting the Ranking # 0 . I'll start testing the technique. I expect to see results. Thanks for sharing.
Nice information, thought provoking too for sites content.
So good, thank for your information !
Thank you very much for your information. I think i rate it as very satisfied.