Google's Featured Snippets are amazingly powerful. We're seeing more snippets than ever before for more search queries. You need them.
We know this thanks to some brilliant articles and presentations from some super smart people in the industry, including Glenn Gabe (see: The Power of Google Featured Snippets in 2016 and a Google Featured Snippet Case Study – also, an extra big shout out to Glenn for helping me answer some important questions I had when writing this article!), Peter Meyers (see: Ranking #0: SEO for Answers), and Rob Bucci (see: How to Earn More Featured Snippets).
But even after reading everything I could find about Featured Snippets, one huge question remained unanswered: How the heck do you get these damn things?
All of this leads us to today's experiment: How exactly does Google’s algorithm pick which snippet to feature?
Obviously, Google isn’t manually picking them. It’s an algorithm.
So what makes Google's Featured Snippet algorithm tick?
For example, if two competing domains both have great, snipp-able results, how does Google decide to pick one over the other? Take this one, for example:
Why does WordStream (in Position 4) get the Featured Snippet instead of Moz (Positions 1 and 2) or Search Engine Watch (Position 3) on a search for [what is link building]?
What we know about Featured Snippets
Before we dive into the unknown, let's briefly review what we know.
We know snippets, like unicorns, come in all shapes and sizes. Your content must provide the answer in the "right" format, which will vary depending on the specifications in Google's algorithm. Snippets can be:
- Text.
- Lists (ordered or unordered).
- Images.
- Charts.
- Tables.
- Knowledge Graph.
We also know that any website can earn a Featured Snippet. Large brands and sites have no advantage over smaller brands and sites.
Finally, we also know that winning a Featured Snippet lets you enjoy some spoils of war, including:
- You get more website traffic.
- You gain greater visibility in Google's SERPs.
- You earn trust/credibility.
So that's what you need to know about Featured Snippets. Now let's dive into the unknown.
Important disclaimers
Featured Snippets pose a few problems that really complicated the analysis.
For one, snippets are finicky. You can do a search right now and see the snippet. But sometimes you can conduct the same exact search an hour later and the snippet won't be there.
For another, we're all working with limited data sets. We're limited to analyzing just the snippets we have.
Finally, snippets impact your organic CTRs. Some snippets will increase the CTR to your site – for instance, if you're ranked in fourth position but you have the featured snippet. But other times a snippet can actually decrease your CTR because the searcher already got their answer – no need to click through.
Google isn't much help either. Gabe asked Google SEO PR spokesperson Gary Illyes and got this frustratingly funny reply:
@glenngabe speculation: ancient aliens? Or, we look at many signals for determining what should be featured @JohnMu
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 23, 2015
Theory #1: Snippets aren't featured based on organic search ranking factors alone
This one is relatively easy to prove.
According to Gabe's data, ranking position played some sort of role in whether you get Featured Snippets. Every single snippet was taken from a page that was good enough to rank in the top 10 organic positions.
If you look at Bucci's data, however, he discovered that Google will take snippets from content that ranks on Page 2 of Google.
I found something a bit more incredible when I pulled a report of snippets – 981 in total – for my own website. Take a look:
- About 70 percent of the time, Google pulled snippets from pages in positions 1 to 3.
- About 30 percent of the time, the snippets “source” comes from positions 4 to as deep as 71 (wow!).
If Google's algorithm were relying just on traditional search ranking factors (e.g., keywords and links), then Google would simply pick the first “snipp-able” content fragment from the highest-ranking piece of content every time. Google would never have to go to Page 2 or further (Page 8!) for snippets when other there are other perfectly nice formatted snippets to choose from which rank higher.
Clearly, this isn't happening. Something else is at play. But what?
Theory #2: Having your content in a snipp-able format matters (but isn’t the whole picture)
Is it all about being the most clear, concise, and thorough answer? We know Google is looking for something "snipp-able."
For the best shot at getting a Featured Snippet, your content should be between 40 and 50 words, according to SEMRush's analysis.
Without a doubt, format matters to Google's algorithm. Your content needs to have the right format if you're ever going to be eligible to be snipped.
But again, we're back to the same question. How does Google pick between different pages with eligible stuff to snip?
Theory #3: Engagement metrics seem to play a role in snippet selection
To figure out what was happening, I looked at the outliers. (Usually, the best way to crack an algorithm is to look at the unusual edge cases.)
Let's look at one example: [how to get more Bing Rewards Points].
This page shows up as a snippet for all sorts of queries related to “getting bing rewards points,” yet the source of the snip is from position 10. What's crazy is that our page ranks behind Bing’s official site and all sorts of other video tutorials and community forums discussing the topic.
Why the heck is this happening?
Well, when I look at this page in Search Console, I notice it gets an unusually high CTR of 21.43 percent, despite a ridiculously low average position of 10.
This CTR is 10x higher than what you’d expect to see at this position.
The other thing I noticed was that the page had remarkably great engagement metrics. The time on site (which is proportional to dwell time) was an amazing 14 minutes and 30 seconds.
This time on site is considerably higher than the site average – by nearly 3x!
Note: This is just one simple example. I did this for more than 50 pages (unfortunately I was limited by data here because I was looking specifically for pages that rank poorly, yet generate snippets).
What I found was that the relative time on site for pages that were snipped from low positions on the SERP has incredibly higher time on page, compared to the site average.
Basically, what I think might be going on is something like this:
Supporting fact #1: Marissa Mayer said it worked this way
In addition to this data, there are a couple more reasons why I think engagement metrics may be playing a key role in Google's Featured Snippet algorithm. These examples indicate that Google has long-held beliefs around good engagement metrics reflecting quality content.
Does the past hold some important secrets to our current plot? Let's see.
First, we'll head back to 2007 for an interview with Marissa Mayer discussing the OneBox and how features like news, maps, and products would get promoted above the organic results into the OneBox, based on click-through rate:
"We hold them to a very high click-through rate expectation and if they don’t meet that click-through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click-through rates per OneBox presentation per query. So it might be that news is performing really well on Bush today but it’s not performing very well on another term, it ultimately gets turned off due to lack of click-through rates. We are authorizing it in a way that’s scalable and does a pretty good job enforcing relevance."
Supporting fact #2: Google used the same algo in paid search a few years back
OK, now let's go back to 2008 – back when Google still had AdWords ads on the right rail. (Unfortunately, with the death of the right-side ad rail, all ads appear above the organic search results now – a moment of silence for the right-side rail).
Google would promote three ads to appear above the organic search results. How did Google decide which paid search ads to feature above the organic search results?
Here's what Google revealed in an AdWords blog post, "Improvements to Ads Quality":
"To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we'll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so. For instance, suppose the ad in position 1 on the right side of the page doesn't have a high enough Quality Score to appear above the search results, but the ad in position 2 does. It's now possible for the number 2 ad to jump over the number 1 ad and appear above the search results. This change ensures that quality plays an even more important role in determining the ads that show in those prominent positions."
What's important to know here is how incredibly important CTR is in the Quality Score formula. By far, CTR has the biggest impact on Quality Score.
So here we have spokespeople from both the organic search side and Google's own ad system telling us that CTR can play a vital role in helping Google ensure that a piece of content or an ad meets a high enough quality threshold to qualify to appear in the very prominent and valuable space above the organic search results.
That's why I strongly believe that Featured Snippets work very much the same way – with CTR and engagement metrics being the key element.
What does it all mean?
Featured Snippets give us yet another reason to focus on engagement rates. This year we talked about how engagement rates:
Any one of these alone is good reason to focus on improving your CTR. But wait, there’s more: I believe engagement rates also impact the selection of Featured Snippets.
So in addition to formatting your on-page copy to meet the snipping requirement, follow the guides on improving CTR and time on site.
A call to arms
One thing that's hard about doing research and analysis on Featured Snippets is that we're limited to the data we have. You need to have lots of snippets and access to all the CTR data (only the individual webmasters have this). You can't just crawl a site to discover their engagement metrics.
Why don't we team up here and try to crack this nut together?
Have you won Featured Snippets? What are your engagement rates like for your featured snippets – from the Search Console for CTR and Google Analytics for time on site? Do you see any patterns? Please share your insights with us in the comments!
hello moz community. are you ranking for featured snippets? if so, are you seeing the same thing i'm seeing here (that they seem to have remarkable engagement rates, like CTR and time on site). love to hear your thoughts on this.
Good read...We got quite a few. All have high CTRs and great engagement, yes.
Interestingly enough, I'm seeing images being pulled in that are two or three images down on the page. Not the first image or even the "featured image" we assign to the article. I'm seeing some of our tables being pulled in and displayed... Even some that are too large for Google to show. Also seeing lots of lists being pulled in.. some with ten or so bullet points taking up a significant amount of space above the fold.
i wonder if those images are unique? i have noticed that the images that i create (like unique figures - google can tell if your image is unique or if it's similar to others out there) have a tendency get picked. but i haven't done a full analysis of this yet.
Hey Larry,
I had the snippet for "vinegar on wood" but have lost it *after* structuring the post better (#1 result) - CTRs have tanked as expected.
First thought was we may get a unicorn in this one but no. I have to say that you make a lot of sense on the gauge of how something ends up in the snippet is the interaction with the page and overall CTR that gives it value for that. This is just another great reason to build quality content that can serve your users the best.
Great post into this un-knowing world of the snippet.
Google needs to know if the answer is "correct". Engagement rates seem to be how they check
What if people are engaging with an answer because it ridiculously incorrect or makes people angry? Will troll snippets become featured?
No because you need good task completion rates. High bounce/low time on site (etc.) is a troll ctr detector: https://moz.com/blog/do-website-engagement-rates-impact-organic-rankings
Have you seen any incidences where CTR drops BECAUSE it becomes a featured snippet and no one needs to click on it? Wonder how Google treats that..
Great post about featured snippets. One question I have is how do you track the pages from your site that are producing featured snippets? I have been able to dig through query data, but have a hard time determining how many snippets our site is receiving.
Exactly this. Is there a best way to track featured snippets?
In Moz Campaigns, you can see it under Rankings / SERP Features, then filter to Featured Snippets.
I also use SEMRush and BrightEdge that have the same report.
yes same. Me too
At my previous company, we got a bit lucky with our first snippet. We were averaging position 4 for our target keywords, and wanted to improve time-on-page and engagement with our page. So we included a survey at the beginning of the post: https://www.snacknation.com/blog/healthy-office-sna...
After about a week or so, the survey section was featured as a snippet for the main keywords we were targeting, including "healthy office snacks" and "healthy snacks for the office".
I have only just enabled AMP on my website- only a couple days and I am already noticing an increase in traffic and a steady number of snippets. This is the first correlation I've heard connecting the quality and number of snippets to the engagement rates! I suspect you are absolutely correct.
thanks for sharing these observations.
I really want to see the snippet pulled from position 71? The page it was pulled from is probbaly really really well-made.
Hi Larry -
Great post! For what it's worth, I just recently uncovered a featured snippet for a keyword that my site was ranking for. It's an extended list post optimized for two terms that don't get very many searches (in fact, the post was more or less an experiment for something else).
The page had been ranking in the top ten for those two keywords for several months and did have a relatively high CTR in the SERPs even for what little searches those keywords garnered. However, in looking through GA, the bounce rate for the page itself was high (just under 70%) and time on site for sessions that entered the site through that landing page was under a minute, with an equally small pages/session figure.
So of the three steps in your simplified diagram, I'd say it met 2 of the 3 criteria. (Maybe 2 1/2 if you weigh the CTR higher).
Just thought I'd share.
-B
Super post, especially since it is so difficult to get data on this scale about snippets. Question: how do I know if my site has been featured in a snippet (since querying your own results seems a little impractical) :)
Again, amazing work on getting this data together. And very few other sites or resources on this very topic.
moz keyword tool + semrush
Wow, this is mind blowing. I didn't know about "snippets" before reading this but I definitely saw a lot of them and now I know that they are snippets.
Where I find them the most is where I find a definition for something like a word I don't know, always a snippet highlighting what I'm searching and I don't even need to visit any site, that's pretty cool.
It seems to be quite impossible for me to do it right now but I can clearly see a huge potential and lots of posibilities here. Always learning cool things here, much appreciate.
By the way, seems like you are a big fan of GoT, love it! Great memes mate.
This piece should be in the dictionary under great content. Well thought out, backed by data and part of a larger, over-arching philosophy. This is how you get 14 minute time on page. Nice work LK.
Fun write up, Larry!
Although, the article should be titled "Why" one shows up for this spot vs. "How." The "why" you've certainly cracked - it all comes down to engagement/CTR for the results rather than position.
That would mean the "how" comes down to how you've written your title and META Description tags. It comes down to great copywriting and alignment with the query. Look at that first example: sure, the query was "What is link building?" and while the other results had a spot on title tag for that query, your page's title and description proposed a solution... "Learn the fundamentals of quality link building" - poetry!
Google can't judge how things are written, so it uses the metrics it has to make that call.
SEOs of Earth - quit trying to game the system (or Game of Thrones the system) and focus on creating great work. The payoff is right in front of you.
moz+semrush+manual works for me
Today is a great day at Golden Financial Services, thanks to Moz and Larry Kim. I live by Moz, and have done so for the last 4 years. Everyone of your strategies I follow to the "T". Anyways, my page is ranking #5 for "credit card relief programs" (organically). And we just stole the #1 position (we now have the featured snippet for the search phrase "credit card relief programs", stealing it from our competitor National Debt Relief. According to Moz's pro tool, the Page Authority for my credit card relief program page here is only PA: 21 (not very high but the page offers the most updated debt relief information online), and we still achieved the victory. I used the information within this post, but also a few other posts within the Moz blog pertaining to this subject. Another factor to our success is due to Moz's amazing Keyword Explorer tool. We put "credit card relief programs" into this tool, then finding all the related questions and phrases -- this insight allowed us to organize the page with the right keywords and most frequently asked questions.
Within 6 days after I implemented all the steps recommended within this post, we won the featured snippet for "credit card relief programs". If you want to verify this just go onto Google, type in credit card relief programs and look for my site NoMoreCreditCards.com. Woo hoo, thank you again Moz.
what a great success story. congrats paul!
Interesting, thanks for this...I've just quickly checked our stats for the featured snippets we hold. We have pages ranking between position 4 - 7 getting the snippet. I had a look at the CTR and time spent on page, the CTR for our pages is higher than the site average (lowest snippet 28.57% CTR ranging up to 67.17%) but the but the time spent on the page is a lot lower than the site average. I think this might be due to nature of the content and that we are able to provide really quick answers to the question.
Other things I noticed for the pages where we have the snippet is really low bounce rates (<1%) and the majority of users are then clicking through to deeper parts of the site to go into more detail. I'll be keeping my eye out moving forward for pages with high engagement to see how they fair in the snippets.
Some of our Travel clients are ranked and getting featured on snippets. Though, some of the facts were known to us, but you have brought a bigger discussion forth now, are these only factors to get featured on snippets? Is there something more to it? As our websites were not snipp-able even when they got featured on the Google snippets.
My understanding says, there is lot more related to content, it's presentation and CTR which is contributing to get featured on snippets. Having said that, there is no definitive or sure shot way to get snippet on google.
almost any web page with content ranking in the first few pages for a keyword is "snipp-able" (the range of sizes were between 5 to 60 words). i think the engagement metrics (CTR, dwell time, etc.) help google figure out if it's the correct answer or not.
I have several posts with prominent fragments, and I had no idea why other artociles, more extensive do not have the same impact.
I will review the metrics of the articles that google highlighted to draw conclusions.
Thanks for your article.
Hang on, if you're checking the CTR in Search Console doesn't that include Featured Snippets CTR too? So that could be why it's so high?
Search console registers snippets as position 1. The example I gave had average position of 10. Therefore we can assume that for that example, it wasn't showing up as a snippet that often in comparison to when it shows up "regularly" in searches
Thanks for the great article, very helpful! :) How do I know though I appear as a Featured Snipped? By googling my keywords I guess? Now we just have to figure out how to improve the CTR and time on site haha. Cheers, Natalia from www.sofasession.com
Being very agree with the post I think it has a lot to do with domain authority, I know many websmasters who have implemented the featured snippets and nothing, which does not appear.
In addition I think that depends on the country, in Spain few webs have the Featured Snippets visible, it is worth that our fiber optic lines are quite worse, but Google loves us little :)
Sorry for my poor english.
Really interesting point of view, Larry. Do you think that elements that block the user experience (such as pop-ups, overlays...) can also be a factor that may hurt you from getting a snippet?
my company uses pop-ups and we rank for around a thousand snippets. so i don't think they hurt for now. (that may change). what we found was that pop-ups dramatically reduce bounce rate and increase time on site, so if anything, i'd imagine that helps with snippets rather than hurting your chances.
Interesting read Larry, though I was looking for the magic dust of how to get featured snippets....it's just not here. It doesn't seem anyone has figured out the real process yet. Create good content, answer the question fairly quick and concise, pray for a good CTR.
Hi Brian, here's a moz article specifically about how to raise those CTRs. (CTR isn't just based on prayer, but perhaps that helps, too). :)
Really nice to know all of this. Fortunately, I started listening to the podcast immediately after launch, i like u written.
Super post, i am a fan of this site.especially since it is so difficult to get data on this scale about snippets i always appreciate the system of the pages post.Question: how do I know if my site has been featured in a snippet . I am #Gustavo Woltmann from Panama. i am searching for some publishers to get more profit
thanks
Hello Larry
Amazing post for Featured Snippets! I really love your post its commendable articles! its really interesting articles!
thanks rajiv
Very interesting! Yeah but if we get to that point where some of the answers are answered without having to click on any of the results... How the heck Google will know if I got the answer from this zero position or I didn't and just close the window?
Thans for sharing
David
they can just compare the difference between the CTR from when the snippet was shown vs. not shown.
You say, "dwell time", that makes it sound like Google is using Google Analytics in it's search engine rankings (how else would Google know the "dwell time"). Do you mean to suggest GA is being used like that? Or maybe you're thinking they get this from bounces back to their site?
Getting to the point... does this mean that GA gives your site an advantage in SERP?
dwell time can be measured by google directly from the Google serp. they don't need to (and have said they don't) use google analytics data for rankings.
Interesting article, Larry. Thanks.
I noticed that out of the 981 instances only 0.01% came from page 2-N, which might be just outliers.
10 out of 981 = just over 1%
Good article. It wouldn't surprise me if Snippets have their own ranking metrics much like the page they are associated with but when two pages are competing for the Snippet spot, the two sites are compared against an additional algorithm specific to snippets with things like community interaction or other such factors.
data points to YES
Excellent post explaining in depth how to try to get a featured snippet. I have observed that most often Google will display a featured snipped from the websites ranked in the top ten that either have a one paragraph answer to the query or a complete ordered list of the procedure to be followed (As in case of recipes).
I have also seen that sometimes Google displays the start of the paragraph that describes the procedure for example my website is featured for "bsnl broadband configuration linksys" without quotes
I am yet to see featured snippets taken from the second page onwards and would like to see a screenshot or a mention for which query they have been observed.
there was a lot of discussion about this on Twitter today. Scroll to end of thread for a screenshot of this phenomenon https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/793418563289743360
Thanks para shared. I hope that google doesnt feel in love for the big companies that pay a lot of money to stay in first position. I hope that care his political actuation.
I'm curious why the page sitting in position 10 with such high click thru is rewarded with a Featured Snippet but not a boost in organic rank. I get that they are probably separate processes, but, if I follow the hypothesis, it seems like there's a subsystem detecting signals that should be fueling the core ranking algorithm but something is stopping it from reacting as we've been led to believe it should.
Also makes me really question tools that use click curves and try to calculate "share of voice".
you're right. we know that engagement rates impact rankings. why doesn't the featured snippet always (or, more often) get pulled from the top ranking content in the SERP? My theory: that's where we are headed. That high engagement content will more and more likely be given ranking points and so featured snippets will be less and less likely to be pulled from lower in the serp. I really think the featured snippet algo is where the search algo is headed, hence my interest in the topic!
Hmm...
One of my sites previously had a snippet for a term that we ranked #4 for. CTR and TOS were great, and that post brings in 6-7k hits each month.
BUT, after implementing AMP for the site, we lost the snippet and traffic has fallen for that term.
Thinking I should disable AMP for that post. Thoughts?
they are fussy and appear and disappear for unknown reasons. if you believe it is lost for good and not just a "normal" fluctuation then i would certainly consider turning off AMP as a test to see if you get it back. I wouldn't expect it to work this way but you never know unless you test.
Good article as always Larry. I'm curious though on the engagement ingredient because whilst Google will have clear line of sight on CTR performance through search console, they won't have clear line of sight on any websites not using Google Analytics when attempting to pull in other metrics such as dwell time. I wonder how this stacks up if we did similar research to see how sites not using GA were performing in featured snippets?
This factor makes me question whether engagement data is used in the algorithm. At least engagement stats that go beyond what Google has consistent and direct access to.
they aren't using data from google analytics. they're measuring it directly from the SERP.
Hi Larry,
Since it's happening that Google is showing featured snippets from pages ranking in page 2 too, could not this contraddict partly your "engagement" metric as factor?
Not a critic, only a question :-)
PD: just saw you have somehow answered to a similar questio
it's a great question. basically: why does Google even have featured snippets? Shouldn't the first result on the SERP simply "be the answer"? When you use stuff like Google Home, when you ask it a question, it doesn't give you 10 options to choose from. it picks a singular answer. same thing with mobile and voice search - people just want the answer. So i think that's where things are headed. It would definitely explain the huge increase in featured snippets over the last year that others have observed. If true, I'd expect to see the featured snippets being pulled from lower result pages to become increasingly rare as the core algo catches up to (or increases weighting of) the user engagement-based signals that featured snippets algo seems to be using. I could see the two of them converging in the next 18 months.
In summary, featured snippets appears to provide google with a lighter weight way to test out the impact of user engagement signals in the serps, without having to completely up-end everything else in their core algos.
Thank you for this most illuminating write up. We're still waiting for Google to the implement featured snippets in CIS region countries.
Really all a game, life is a game, this website is a game, this article is about the game. Different strategies have to position ourselves well, but very good you've written, I jot me.