Once you've identified where the opportunity to nab a featured snippet lies, how do you go about targeting it? Part One of our "Featured Snippet Opportunities" series focused on how to discover places where you may be able to win a snippet, but today we're focusing on how to actually make changes that'll help you do that. Give a warm, Mozzy welcome to Britney as she shares pro tips and examples of how we've been able to snag our own snippets using her methodology.
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Video Transcription
Today, we are going over targeting featured snippets, Part 2 of our featured snippets series. Super excited to dive into this.
What's a featured snippet?
For those of you that need a little brush-up, what's a featured snippet? Let's say you do a search for something like, "Are pigs smarter than dogs?" You're going to see an answer box that says, "Pigs outperform three-year old human children on cognitive tests and are smarter than any domestic animal. Animal experts consider them more trainable than cats or dogs." How cool is that? But you'll likely see these answer boxes for all sorts of things. So something to sort of keep an eye on. How do you become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities?
Last time, we talked about finding keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. There are a couple ways to do that. We talk about it in the first video. Something I do want to mention, in doing some of that the last couple weeks, is that Ahrefs can help you discover your featured snippet opportunities. I had no idea that was possible. Really cool, go check them out. If you don't have Ahrefs and maybe you have Moz or SEMrush, don't worry, you can do the same sort of thing with a Vlookup.
So I know this looks a little crazy for those of you that aren't familiar. Super easy. It basically allows you to combine two sets of data to show you where some of those opportunities are. So happy to link to some of those resources down below or make a follow-up video on how to do just that.
1. Identify
All right. So step one is identifying these opportunities. You want to find the keywords that you're on page one for that also have this answer box. You want to weigh the competitive search volume against qualified traffic. Initially, you might want to just go after search volume. I highly suggest you sort of reconsider and evaluate where might the qualified traffic come from and start to go after those.
2. Understand
From there, you really just want to understand the intent, more so even beyond this table that I have suggested for you. To be totally honest, I'm doing all of this with you. It's been a struggle, and it's been fun, but sometimes this isn't very helpful. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times I'm not even looking at some of this stuff when I'm comparing the current featured snippet page and the page that we currently rank on page one for. I'll tell you what I mean in a second.
3. Target
So we have an example of how I've been able to already steal one. Hopefully it helps you. How do you target your keywords that have the featured snippet?
- Simplifying and cleaning up your pages does wonders. Google wants to provide a very simple, cohesive, quick answer for searchers and for voice searches. So definitely try to mold the content in a way that's easy to consume.
- Summaries do well. Whether they're at the top of the page or at the bottom, they tend to do very, very well.
- Competitive markup, if you see a current featured snippet that is marked up in a particular way, you can do so to be a little bit more competitive.
- Provide unique info
- Dig deeper, go that extra mile, provide something else. Provide that value.
How To Target Featured Snippet Examples
What are some examples? So these are just some examples that I personally have been running into and I've been working on cleaning up.
- Roman numerals. I am trying to target a list result, and the page we currently rank on number one for has Roman numerals. Maybe it's a big deal, maybe it's not. I just changed them to numbers to see what's going to happen. I'll keep you posted.
- Fix broken links. But I'm also just going through our page and cleaning it. We have a lot of older content. I'm fixing broken links. I have the Check My Links tool. It's a Chrome add-on plugin that I just click and it tells me what's a 404 or what I might need to update.
- Fixing spelling errors or any grammatical errors that may have slipped through editors' eyes. I use Grammarly. I have the free version. It works really well, super easy. I've even found some super old posts that have the double or triple spacing after a period. It drives me crazy, but cleaning some of that stuff up.
- Deleting extra markup. You might see some additional breaks, not necessarily like that ampersand. But you know what I mean in WordPress where it's that weird little thing for that break in the space, you can clean those out. Some extra, empty header markup, feel free to delete those. You're just cleaning and simplifying and improving your page.
One interesting thing that I've come across recently was for the keyword "MozRank." Our page is beautifully written, perfectly optimized. It has all the things in place to be that featured snippet, but it's not. That is when I fell back and I started to rely on some of this data. I saw that the current featured snippet page has all these links.
So I started to look into what are some easy backlinks I might be able to grab for that page. I came across Quora that had a question about MozRank, and I noticed that — this is a side tip — you can suggest edits to Quora now, which is amazing. So I suggested a link to our Moz page, and within the notes I said, "Hello, so and so. I found this great resource on MozRank. It completely confirms your wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Britney."
I don't know if that's going to work. I know it's a nofollow. I hope it can send some qualified traffic. I'll keep you posted on that. But kind of a fun tip to be aware of.
How we nabbed the "find backlinks" featured snippet
All right. How did I nab the featured snippet "find backlinks"? This surprised me, because I hardly changed much at all, and we were able to steal that featured snippet quite easily. We were currently in the fourth position, and this was the old post that was in the fourth position. These are the updates I made that are now in the featured snippet.
Clean up the title
So we go from the title "How to Find Your Competitor's Backlinks Next Level" to "How to Find Backlinks." I'm just simplifying, cleaning it up.
Clean up the H2s
The first H2, "How to Check the Backlinks of a Site." Clean it up, "How to Find Backlinks?" That's it. I don't change step one. These are all in H3s. I leave them in the H3s. I'm just tweaking text a little bit here and there.
Simplify and clarify your explanations/remove redundancies
I changed "Enter your competitor's domain URL" — it felt a little duplicate — to "Enter your competitor's URL." Let's see. "Export results into CSV," what kind of results? I changed that to "export backlink data into CSV." "Compile CSV results from all competitors," what kind of results? "Compile backlink CSV results from all competitors."
So you can look through this. All I'm doing is simplifying and adding backlinks to clarify some of it, and we were able to nab that.
So hopefully that example helps. I'm going to continue to sort of drudge through a bunch of these with you. I look forward to any of your comments, any of your efforts down below in the comments. Definitely looking forward to Part 3 and to chatting with you all soon.
Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all soon. See you.
If I want to target featured snippets I usually check code from competitor sites and see what they do.
I noticed lots of lists and tables in different niches, if not that then just text and how they structure the page and it has worked great for me. Great article by the way, enjoyed watching the video! :)
Preciesly how I actually ranked for my local city seo expert snippet.... was super weird but validating to know you could search my money keyword and see a Snippet result. Stole that basically from a medium or quora post I believe haha.
It's amazing what one can obtain from just checking to see what's currently there on the front page. You usually can get a very good idea of what Google likes by just researching a wide variety of national search terms.
Exactly! Even the SERP Features themselves can tell you a lot about searcher intent.
Thanks for putting this up Britney - great read! In your "Understand" section, it's refreshing to read an article where the author can be really honest and upfront about whether results will be certain or not. Also, didn't know that you one can request edits to Quora. Can't wait for part three.
I feel like this is post is actually a $1000 tip or something. Imagine getting so good at snippets you can use that as a foot in the door or actually digital service to sell. Thank you Britney!
Thanks for the Quora tip! To be honest I wasn't much interested in featured snippet but now I'm going to watch video number one :)
Double spacing after a period = worst thing EVER! ;)
Small point - you said the Chrome extension 'Check My Listing' - I couldn't find that in the Chrome Store but I did find the 'Check My Links' extension and I think you may have meant that - and in fact if I zoom in on the whiteboard image that exactly what you have written.
Exactly, sorry about that. Check My Links chrome extension is my go-to in finding broken on-page links.
For the broken links I'd prefer Redirect Path chrome extension over anything else. Sometimes the link seems to be okay at first glance, but there could be a long redirect chain that may create some issues. It shows you all 301, 302, etc. codes in the redirect path, as well as the 404 or 500 errors.
Hi Dimitar,
Thanks for mentioning this chrome extension. It's quite helpful with the Check my Link extension to checks the issues with the links that appear to be fine (not broken) but have some redirect issues.
This is an awesome post! Actionable tactics to go after featured snippets is something that I was needing to refine. Thanks Britney for the WBF that made it easy digest.
Thanks for tuning in, Joey, so glad you enjoyed it! Hope it helps snag you some featured snippets! --Keep me posted.
It was a great video Britney but could you share with us the Check my listings extension which you spoke about as I couldnt really find it in the Chrome store. And also when it comes to claiming the featured snippet how important do you see content relevance with page and link metrics? For instance, do you think its easier for a fresh site without much/any links to claim the featured snippet based purely on content quality? Or does it need to have some level of authority in rankings in order to do so? Have to done any correlation analysis on this?
Check My Links - its on the Whiteboard image.
I think she means the Check My Links Chrome extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my...
Exactly! Thanks Simon & Kevin. Sorry about that mixup.
That's a useful plugin, thanks Kevin. I usually use this plugin "Nofollow simple"
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nofollow...
hello, I love this write-up on. How to Target Featured Snippet Opportunities . I have a question. You made emphasis on cleaning broken links. Can broken links reduce my page or domain rank thereby limiting page visitor. Please shed more light on this point. My websites have lots of broken links. Thank you.
Great question! Not necessarily, however, Google's algo evaluates on-page content for quality in a number of different factors. Who's to say that broken links aren't one of them? :)
Thanks for the information. I have this doubt too. There are some large sites full of broken links and I wonder if this actually hurted them or not. I'll try to fix my problems as well!
Great article! What I typically do is, look at what’s currently being featured and replicate that, and or add that keyword in the form of a question with an h1 tag.
Definitely some value here! Thanks again
Great WBF Britney! I just wanted to add that I have watched a lot of your presentations from over the years and (I hope this does not feel back handed) but in just 2-3 years time you have gotten exponentially more comfortable in front of an audience and a camera! You're so charismatic and its been fun to watch you find your voice and presentation style. Keep up the great work!
Thank you SO much! Really appreciate you letting me know that Mppond. :)
I'm really hard on myself and am continually working to get better at my speaking skills. Hopefully, you'll think this again in 2-3 years time!
Great series! I think the biggest challenge with going after featured snippets is explaining the value of them to a client. Optimizing for position #0 takes a big chunk of time and A LOTTTT of patience. Has anyone seen a correlation in traffic, CTR, CRO after earning position 0?
Colin
Very limited for me to be honest, but have high expectations for it all. The quality of the snippet matters just as much because I didnt get much traffic from my snippet but the quality really could have been better.... still think it's a good idea though.
Such a great point! I've seen it both help and hurt CTR to a website (depending on the query).
You should checkout what Wil Reynolds is doing with PowerBI: https://learninbound.com/videos/wil-reynolds-2017/Essentially merging PPC data with SEO data to get more actionable (dollar based data) to show clients. Hope that helps.
We have seen a correlation of competition getting new position 0s while you remain ranked #1. We've seen a steady decrease in traffic in position 1 due to other sites lower on the page jumping up into the featured position...to the tune of 20-40% session drop to individual pages.
Does putting your list of numbered points in expandable accordion panels confuse Google?
For example, here's a screenshot of my attempt to grab a snippet: https://bit.ly/2GnsJNq
Because I made the assumption that Google isn't smart enough to extract the simple list of numbered points from the accordion panels, I repeat the plain list of numbered points above the accordion panel version for the presumed sake of Google, although that does not create a good user experience. Is this approach necessary, or can I delete the plain list?
Feel free to include subcontext within a numerical list. I doubt Google likes duplicate lists. Just ensure that your lists are marked up properly (and experiment with different types of markup).
Excellent follow up post! These whiteboard friday's that Moz has been pumping out lately have been some of my favorite blog posts. I'm a visual learner, so it really helps seeing the video. Much easier than reading through a ton of words lol.
I am interested to see if I gain any snippets in the near future. Better brush up on my archery skills!
Thank you so much John! Keep me posted on your progress! May the odds ever be in your favor.
Hey Britney, great work! One question for you: In the SEMrush organic positions report, I can filter by SERP features > Featured Snippet. This shows me what searches I rank for that also have a featured snippet. Is this what you meant when you said Ahrefs does the work for you? Am I doing it wrong?
Thanks,
Daxon
Great question! Unfortunately, that seems to only show Featured Snippets that your URL currently has... let me know if you find another way! :)
Cool post Britney, congrtas!
In SEMrush, if you use the "position tracking" feature within a project, it will show you the featured snippets your URLs already have (under "already featured") but also all the feature snippets available for the keywords your are tracking (under "opportunities")
I hope this helps,
Alessio
Definitely helps! Thank you, Alessio, looking forward to checking that out!
Great series on WBF with hints on how to get a featured snipped. I have also also observed that in certain cases Google will create a featured snippet out of the first few lines of a how to procedure. For example try this query "bsnl adsl modem configuration linksys" without quotes
Hi Britney,
Thanks again for the awesome series. The video and the instructions provided are very helpful. I will use these to get my featured snippet. Eagerly looking forward for the next video of the series, any idea when it will be here.
Hi great WBF. Possibly one element not canvassed directly is page speed - great discussion on clean up. We have had a number of clients pop in FS's once the pages have page speed that is world class... we see it as a big and climbing factor on FS's.. as well as everythign else..
Great WBF, Britney :)
Really curious to hear about what will come out for the optimization you did to get featured snippets (especially the Quora's one).
One thing that happened (in italian language tho) was that after changing removing a definite article in the keyword (from title tag and beginning of the body text) we got a featured snippet for that query without the article, but lost it for the one with the article. The opposite happened once we re-added the definite article.
Regarding featured snippet: Is Google still so much based on exact matches sometimes?
Interesting!? There are so many factors at play now it's impossible to say with certainty that exact match will or will not help you. Think you're doing all of the right things by testing out various formats. Keep up the great work Stefano!
Thanks for this post Britney. Personally grammarly has helped me so much with simplify the page and your Quora tip is just amazing. Can't wait for part 3!
One of our pages that currently has a featured snippet actually displays a picture from another website (though from Google Images). I am guessing this is because I don't have an image on the page. Have you ever seen this before? I was thinking about adding an image to my page to see if I can grab it as well. Thoughts on that?
That's been pretty common actually. They test a few images for various FS over time and then seem to go with the best performing one. However, I'm not sure if that means image clicks or no FS clicks.
I was thinking about adding a picture to the page to see if I can grab anyone that might be clicking on the picture. It's a terrible picture of a graph you can hardly read, which makes me think people might be clicking into it to see what it actually is a graph of. Who knows...I'll try it though. Thanks for the response and the video!
Have you seen any issues with losing your featured snippets when moving platforms and having your URL's change? We have three pages that are "hubs" and I am about to complete a migration from Magento to Shopify, so all of our URL structures are changing (redirects in place). Do you think I will lose those featured snippet spots due to the URL change or possibly the content format changing?
Hey Jeff,
YES! I have. Most recently with moz.com/rand moving his content to his new SparkToro website. Always had a hunch that /wp-content/images work better than CDN images and secretly uploaded a few images onto Rand's WordPress site (Rand's the best & I knew he wouldn't mind! :)) to then pull into Moz.com pages and they worked like a charm. Had several in Featured Snippets for some of his older Whiteboard Fridays (like "How to choose a domain name"), but they have since not returned. It seems G doesn't like our CDN images as much? Will keep you posted!
You will definitely see Featured Snippets fluctuate due to your change, however I would continue to encourage G to index your new site properly and feed that content back into Google. The proper redirects should help as well. Keep me posted Jeff!
Great topic, lot's of questions answered in this video... but that hair though! Cleaning pages is where I'm at right now. Also appreciate that you give an honest shout out to AHREFs capabilities vs Moz and SEMRush
Hey Mike! My hair does what it wants and houses all of my SEO secrets.
Keep me posted on the page clean up, it's worked really well for Moz so far. Had to give compliments to our competitive tools, know many SEOs use several and want to be as helpful as possible.
Hey Britney. I loved this Whiteboard Friday, and I learned a lot- thanks.
Quick question:
You mentioned that blog post summaries at the bottom of the page or at the top work really well, and that Google often pulls them for the snippet. I understand the bottom part- summary=conclusion.
But what confuses me is this:
If the summary is a the top, won't that discourage people from scrolling down and reading the content?
Is it worth it to have more people leaving early just to try and gain the snippet?
Also:
If a summary is shown in the snippet, won't that affect click-through rate in a negative way?
Or is it a necessary trade off; A clashing of numbers hoping that spot #0 in the SERPs brings in more click than it takes away?
I know I ask a tonne but I am curious to see what you think
Thank you again for this awesome Whiteboard Friday,
it got me thinking:)
Great questions Nikola!
1. It's sort of like the inverted pyramid in journalism. It's ok to tell people, what you're going to tell them up top and then dive into the details below. There will be exceptions but it's worth trying on appropriate pages..
2. Great question! I have seen some websites see a decrease in clicks, this is typically for simple short answers, however for most sites, you'd rather be that #0 position (and also featured in voice search) than be below that and more likely to get even fewer clicks.
Hi Britney, thanks for the reply.
Yes, I figured it would be something like that.
Inverted pyramid exists for a reason, and nothing beats being the first thing folks see in the SERPs. I've never done it with my site, but no doubt I will one day.
Thanks again, and I look forward to part three of "Featured Snippet Opportunities"
The worst thing ever is Double spacing after a period
THE WORST!!! Lol. It makes me crazy! :)
Do these steps work for Arabic content as well?
Very nice video and nice blog. It's very much easy to understand this.
Hey Britney thanks for another Great WBF!
While experimenting for some good FS's results we added few of the points which were mentioned in "People Also Asked" (Only relevant one) just to cover more opportunities, and the result we got were phenomenal.. Now were in FS's position.. also in some places we see some of our images getting ranks in FS's with others FS's result, which gives us a way to look back to our content and revamp in with the hope of getting the position.
I liked your suggestion of being as simple as possible and adding summary to make sure when ever any user visit this page they get their answer and this is what making difference in both Search and Voice search results.
See you in the 3 session of FS!
Cheers
Brilliant Ankit! It makes sense that Google would view your included PAA answers as topically relevant/helpful and perhaps take you more seriously for other Featured Snippets. Thank you so much for sharing this!
I love the Whiteboard Friday. I liked the idea of cleaning titles and H2s, it seems silly, but we usually make the mistake of making sentences that are too long. However, with a good research we can know what words are looking for our buyer people and guide our text to these keywords.
This is a lot of work, but the results come at the long term. I just think that all of this without a good backlink profile to your page won't payoff, so I like to split mu efforts of onsite optimization with on going (allways ongoing) backlink building actions.
I wonder if on-page optimization has an unnecessary bad reputation when it comes to long-term vs. short-term benefits. For what it's worth, I've seen on-page optimization influence SERPs in a short amount of time, too. (I'm working on a case study involving influencing Featured Snippets in a matter of hours on a tiny site with very, very few backlinks.)
Granted, from my perspective, on-page optimization is a lot easier than link-building. So maybe it's a matter of working your strengths. =)
I ranked for a Featured Snippet by total accident on an affiliate blog I own. There's no real traffic for this keyword, I just felt like writing one day and was surprised to learn I had the featured Snippet a few months later. If I had to try and make an educated guess as to how I was able to rank it this search term, I would have to say I answered four popular, yet relatable questions to the subject in the intro.
A lot like how SearchEngineLand did for the keyword "What Is Rankbrain SEO." They have twenty-three H2's in their article all ending in with a question mark. Google may see this as an authority piece providing answers to a number of questions related to the original search query.
Definitely some value here! Thanks again Britney
Thanks for the tips Britney! Your helping hand is always welcomed in the quest for new snippet chances!
Awesome Britney. Great ideas, going to go over my posts again. Simplify! I like to explain things, probably too much.
Thanks Britney :-) I will watch for part 3 :-)
Have you tried A/B testing the theory in the following way? You'd be surprised, guaranteed:
H1 ...
H2 ....
(not H3) but bold
(not H3) but bold
(not H3) but bold
(not H3) but bold
H4
Once you test this, get in touch with me, and I'll walk you through the strategy.
Its truly the little things that make the big things happen. All the things you mention are building blocks or the fundamentals of what to always be on the look out for. However more so than not they go unnoticed. Thank you for the reminder, very helpful!
Thanks for sharing interesting Article Britney.... Featured Snippet gives the underdogs a brilliant chance to beat out the business competitor!!!
What's a good type website using snippets? in addition to product reviews.
Also try to add long tail keywords to your content, I use tools like answerthepublic
Great lesson!
Excellent tips to make these days more quiet. Friday whiteboard its always perfect to change things and big help.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks again for the awesome series. The video and the instructions provided are very helpful. I will use these to get my featured snippet. Eagerly looking forward for the next video of the series,
Hey Britney. Fantastic video!
I was curious as to where I can find the featured snippet capabilities within Ahrefs? I have Ahrefs but never knew it could provide all those featured snippet recommendations?
Hey, Zach! The first part of this series got me thinking about how Ahrefs could help myself—turns out it can do a lot of the heavy lifting. I've put together a quick step-by-step walkthrough on how to knock out the tactics Britney lays out in the first video using Ahrefs. Depending on the scope of your project, you might not even need to export. =)
https://overthinkgroup.com/featured-snippets-ahrefs/
I had no clue about features snippets, okay dont judge. So just thanks for posting
Muy buena publicación, leer la publicación y ver el video me ayuda a entender los conceptos y también a mejorar mi inglés. Muchas gracias !!