What you should know about featured snippets
Recently my agency Ghergich & Co. teamed up with SEMrush to conduct an in-depth study on featured snippets. SEMrush generously compiled and shared 1,400,000 featured snippets from their database for us to analyze.
What makes this study different?
Our study focused on 30 questions, prepositions, and comparison search phrases instead of a random set of keywords.
Anecdotally, many other SEOs and I saw that pages that answer questions — such as who, what, when, where, and how — tend to be great at earning featured snippets.
Our goal was to see if our “gut feelings” were backed by data. In most cases they were, but with a few surprising caveats. Let's dive into the findings.
Featured snippet questions
Group findings
- The questions group as a whole is fantastic at earning featured snippets, especially paragraph snippets.
- “How” (46.91%) and “Have” (17.71%) significantly outperformed the other questions when it came to earning lists.
- “Which” (16.20%) was the top performer by a wide margin for earning tables.
Breakdown of featured snippet questions:
Featured snippet prepositions
Group findings
- The prepositions group, as a whole, earned lists at the highest rate of any group.
- “For” (11.38%) was best at earning table snippets.
- “Like” (94.09%) was the best at earning paragraph snippets.
Breakdown of featured snippet prepositions
Featured snippet comparisons
Group findings
- The comparison group as a whole excelled at earning tables.
- “Price” (38.56%) keywords earned tables at more than double the rate any other keyword in the group.
- Our “SEO gut” told us “vs” and “versus” keywords would rock at earning tables. Our gut was wrong. Instead, they were fantastic at earning paragraph snippets (99%).
Breakdown of featured snippet comparisons
Featured snippets overall breakdown
I find it interesting that each group of keywords had a very telling overall pattern.
The comparison group earning 11.72% tables seems like a low number. Remember, though, that the content has to exist in the top 10 search results and be in a proper table format.
In my opinion, there are many cases where Google simply does not have a good table to show, so it defaults to an easier format, like paragraphs.
Optimal featured snippet lengths
Key findings: Featured snippet paragraph lengths
The optimal length of a featured snippet paragraph is roughly 40 to 50 words, or around 300 characters. An earlier study by SEMrush also showed 40 to 50 words to be sweet spot for paragraphs, so I feel confident in this number.
Key findings: Featured snippet list lengths
The average number of items in a list was four, but that number is not what we should focus on. Instead, focus on the maximum number of items in the list. Here’s why that matters:
When creating a list, it’s a good idea to make it longer than the eight-item maximum (when possible). This prompts Google to display the “More Items...” text, which can lead to better engagement.
For that same reason, make each bulleted item have enough words in it so Google truncates each item. This can also be helpful if your list is shorter than eight items.
Key findings: Featured snippet table lengths
Like with lists, focus on the fact that Google is going to show a maximum of three columns and up to nine rows per table.
A few things are going on here:
- You can see Google is showing “143 more rows,” just like it does with lists.
- However, the website Restaurant Meal Prices is actually outranking the best source for this information: Denny’s themselves.
- The problem is that Denny’s does not have their data formatted the way Google wants to display it — in a table.
- Google used to show “more columns,” but seems to have dropped that support and now just picks the most relevant 3 rows.
- Clearly my new low-carb diet is not affecting my search behavior.
Practical application #1: Snatch featured snippets from competitors
Here’s how:
- Review your top 10 rankings for keywords that show featured snippets, but that someone else is ranking for.
- Check to see if your content matches the format of the featured snippet.
- If you have a format issue, fix it. If the format is correct, tweak your answer to better match search intent.
- Once you upload your new content, use Search Console to force Google to quickly re-crawl that page.
- You may earn the snippet within 30 minutes, but it will most likely take a few days.
- If more than a week goes by, repeat steps three and four.
Examples
I ran steps one and two on Moz’s The Beginner's Guide to SEO, which is a great example of what foundational SEO content should look like. Let’s look at some low-hanging fruit.
Keyword: "How search engines work"
Moz ranks #1, but Google believes that Makeuseof.com is doing a better job of answering the search’s intent.
Keyword: "What is link building"
Again, Moz’s guide is ranking #1, but it isn’t earning the featured snippet. These are just two examples out of many I was able to quickly find for The Beginners Guide to SEO.
I believe Moz could snatch featured snippets like these with simple text or format tweaks. The same opportunities are likely there for your site as well.
Bonus: Once you are in a good place with this process, expand it to featured snippet keywords you rank 11th through 20th on. Typically, with a content refresh and some internal linking or promotion, you can move those to at least the 10th position in Google. Once you do that, you can earn the snippet.
Practical application #2: Earn featured snippets during content production
It’s easier to snatch snippets than to earn them from scratch, so start there. However, you are constantly creating new content, right? ...Right?
When you craft new content, tailor it to earn featured snippets right out of the gate.
Here’s how:
- Compile a list of keywords in your niche that show snippets you don’t rank in the top 20 for.
- Create new content optimized for the format Google uses to display the snippet.
- Start with content that reaches people in the bottom of the funnel, like comparisons.. The volume is low, but the conversions can be high.
- Rinse and repeat.
Using this technique will give your editorial team a break. I've had the pleasure of presenting with Chris Bennett several times. To paraphrase one of his key points about content creation: When you use data to fuel topic ideation, content creation becomes more about resources and less about brainstorming.
Bonus: Once you’re in a groove with new content production, you can branch out to keywords you think Google would show a featured snippet for if the optimized content existed.
Keyword: "How to choose keywords"
Moz ranks second. To earn a featured snippet, it could incorporate a list format on this page or encourage a contributor to create a new post formatted specifically for this topic.
Remember, you don’t have to create an ordered list. For example, consider the following:
Fine, but not necessary:
- Collect Underpants
- ???
- Profit!
This format works, too:
- Collect Underpants: The collecting of underpants is a proven way to 10x…
- ???: This second step has been shrouded in mystery. However, if you RT this post, give me your email and five of your richest and most gullible friends’ emails, I will show you exactly how to…
- Profit!: I know what you're thinking: Wow! This is too good to be true! But it’s not! Simply input your credit card number to unlock my automated underpants-collection and profit-making system. Believe me!
Closing thoughts
Do your site a favor. Conduct a featured snippet audit and start snatching, earning, and creating data-driven content targeted toward featured snippets.
Do yourself a favor. Follow people like Dr. Pete, Rob Bucci, Eric Enge, Cyrus Shepard, and Glenn Gabe on Twitter. They all share studies, insights, and presentations on featured snippets (among other things). I plan to share a lot more snippets as well, so feel free to follow me, too: @SEO (shameless plug).
Lastly, be sure to snag the raw numbers in this Google Doc.
Thanks for the massive insight into featured snippets. I've now seen the importance of choosing the correct keywords, and as you mentioned about Moz not being at the top, this was very intriguing to me and I'm keen to work on my own stuff to see if I can improve it. Thanks!
Thanks Zulver shoot me a tweet once you earn one. Happy hunting!
VERY interesting results here, AJ. Also, the presentation was spot-in (love the featured snippet prepositions chart). Also, super easy to learn from and implement. A big "thumbs up!".
Brian is someone I really respect in the SEO comunity. So this is about as good of a response as I could hope for. So glad you found it useful.
Yowser - nice comment from Mr Backlinko :)
Hi A.J.
I really enjoy this post, I think rich snippets and specially #0 Rank is really important, and it's comming more and more importante month by month and, with this post, there are more chances to do a great job with this ;)
Just an idea, I really appreciate an update of this post in 6-12 months, so we can read if this tend is changing or not, what do you think about it?
I agree, with snippets being so new I'd love to see how Google develops them in the short term.
Thanks Sergio. I love that idea. I plan on doing a bunch of FS research this year so that should be doable.
That sounds perfect, thank you A.J. ;)
Hi A.J.,
So I read in many articles that when writing a listicle, you should make it 7 or maximum 9 bullets long. This way the article preserves its readability. But what you're saying here is that the more bullets the post has, the better chances it has to make it into a featured snippet. So basically, the post should be as detailed as possible so as to fully answer the searcher's question. Is that right?
Thanks,
Stacey.
Hi Stacey, thanks for the comment. It's not really that a longer list has a better shot to earn the FS per say. Although that would be a good test to run :)
The idea behind the longer lists is that Google will show "More Items" for your FS. This can help you improve your CTR on your listing because people see that there is more info if they click through to your post. Let me know if that makes sense.
Yes, that's clear now! I will definitely keep this strategy in mind when writing listicles. Thanks, A.J.!
Did you do any research on what type of content was being produced by sites winning the comparison featured snippet? The 11.72% table total is higher than the other two groups, but that's likely because more people creating content for comparisons use tables than people creating content to answer questions.
Another interesting way to think about this: For a "comparison" snippet, and the exact same content, with the same link profile, etc, will the content formatted in a table or in paragraph form win? It could be the case that Google prefers the paragraph response, but we see a higher percentage of table snippets because more content creators are using tables than for other snippet types.
Hey Caleb, great comment! Totally worth looking into. From what I saw doing the research is that Paragraphs tend to win because they are everywhere and easiest to pull. That Denny's Example is an interesting one, where Google really really wants to show that format in a Table.
I did the same search for Arby's Prices, Wendy's Prices etc. Each time Google pics the table format to show from another site vs the actual restaurant.
Had to come back after sharing with my team to say this is a fantastic piece of data journalism and has some truly useful insights. Thank you to you (and your whole team) for putting the effort in to make this a fantastic observational study.
Wow Nick, so nice of you to say. I love your posts on keyword research. I am sure this can tie into a lot of what you are doing.
I've been blogging for 8 years now. The posts I write now compared to the ones I wrote at the beginning are miles apart. There's always something to learn.
When I first started working with an SEO expert, I felt like my writing got almost formulaic. I should add that I don't consider myself a writer. I love to answer people's questions and I love sharing my real-life experience to help others. But writing that same information (rather than sharing it verbally) requires me to think through each word, sentence and paragraph. When I had to add SEO rules to what I already considered laborious writing, I thought I'd never figure it out.
What I eventually realized is that it's good to know all the rules and to employ the tricks as best you can, but ultimately, you should just write the answers that best serve your customers. Although I do work to grab featured snippets where possible, in many cases, Google has rewarded me with the FS simply because I answered the question better than anybody else. When I keep that as my goal, the rankings usually work themselves out.
To your point, improving a post I've already written to capture the FS is much easier than writing one from scratch to try and take position. Both because you don't have to climb the entire mountain and because the "tweaks" needed are typically more of a formatting issue than a content one.
Thanks for the in-depth insight and for keeping me alert. :)
You are very welcome! Tweaks for me at least, feel much more approachable and a lot of times iwth writing...you just need to get started :)
Its really a great work A.J. , the Snippet really beneficial to improve the user / traffic for the website with the help of data , related terms in the search result. Rich Snippet is most important part for the current and future Search.
Really interesting data, AJ. Do you have any overall stats on how many of the queries you tested showed any kind of Featured Snippet at all? I'm curious about the prevalence rate within question phrases.
Well this is a bit tricky to explain but I was handed the data fro 1.4 million FS. From the conversation I had with SEMrush I think it from a database from around 80 million keywords but there were some other things going on. I think if I recall they pulled mainly keywords that started with the question, preposition or comparison search phrase and not anything else. Which if/when we do this again I will ask that we take a more holistic look.
However, at the end of the day we did inspect over a million actual FS so the individual numbers such as rows and character lengths etc. should be quite solid. But I am not really comfortable saying how that fits into an avg % of keywords because of this being an unique subset. I will ask for more info though and let you know :)
Thanks for the informative post A.J. Ghergich, I use to read a lot and White Board Friday from Mr Rank, But I like you post and love the Break Downs.
Hey, A.J! Thanks for the update on featured snippets. I’ve found snippets that answer “what” questions to be extremely useful- whether I’m searching for a new tool or a DIY guide. As for the bullet points, I think 5-6 quality points should do the trick, instead of going overboard with 9 or 10. We’d want to keep the content in featured snippets as brief and to the point as possible.
Thanks Patrick! The reason I am advocating using more numbers or bullets is so you get the "more rows" tag and give extra incentive to click through. However, I totally agree that just making extra points for the sake of it is a bad idea. Fluff is always a bad idea. The other reason I like going with longer lists is that it works well with in-depth content.
Sometimes small list can be light on real details, but I totally get where you are coming from on this.
Hello Ghergich,
I really wonder after seeing this excellent study about featured snippets. Very practical and valuable suggestion I got through this post and have started work accordingly. The way you elaborated this amazing analysis is quite understandable and seamless. Thanks for sharing it.
Hello, Interesting topic! I'm really curious as to how this changes CTR on anything on that page i'd guess it annihilates them, but also if you've got competition strategy to over-come this. Certainly going to become a larger thing: will it be nerfed or converted into some form of PPC i wonder..
FS tend to get a very high CTR. When they first came out I thought the opposite. How the FS is formatted though can really influence your CTR. If you give everything away in 3 short bullets they have less of a reason to click through to your site. CTR can also vary by query type.
Super helpful and informative post here! It's great to have these graphics to reference as well. Thanks A.J.G. !
Xlnt work guys! Loving the calming muted blue/yellow/brown pallette. Also, is it "Ger-Gich" or "Ger-Jich" ... thinking the former. I narrate the tech blog summarizations for new start-up "Summurai" & the condensed form (<300 words) of your snippets study just landed on my desk. I will go with my gut & say AJ "Ger-Gich" since it makes the most sense (easier to say too!). Your high rate of interaction is way cool. So I have maybe 5 min before this has to be recorded ... tho i feel good w/Gergich! Muchas & Kudos! Elizabeth R. SoCal
Ha I just saw this it's Grrrgich. (Austin Powers Voice) First H is silent.
Super awesome compilation A.J. It seems to me that lists are most favored especially when the list is answering a question.
More lists and tables ...here I come
At the end I see you included ideas and ways that Moz could snatch featured snippets, but no data/results posted from testing those theories? Curious if the ideas you wrote were tested and the success rate in gaining those snippets for Moz.
I don't have access to change any of those pages :) but if you rank number one for something it will be easy to snatch the FS. Marie Haynes was tweating today she earned some after tweaks within a few hours. https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/8217469749...
Yeah, too bad though -- that would be excellent data if the suggestions were implemented and tracked. :) To date I have gained 14 of 25 featured boxes I was trying to gain (over a 4 month period). My organic placement was good (1-5) before the feature snippet and all were question phrases using paragraph answers for snippets. I have to say "easy" isn't how I would describe the process, but perhaps I need to start looking beyond highly competitive question boxes.
That's awesome Aurora! 14/25 is a fantastic start and in SEO 4 months is considered a pretty short timeline. I think you may be doing better than you are giving yourself credit for. Great stuff!
Hi Aj,
Thanks for sharing this awesome resource, This will definitely help to get search snippets and as they are on the rise we can benefit from there.
One more concern that I see none raised here is, isn't Google using us to feed its AI? Will Google someday not use this strategy to display everything it can directly in the SERPs and then eliminate the chances of people having to visit real websites? Just like lyrics blog, amazon product searches etc?
I am not being negative here, but thought it was a good chance to address my fear and get it answered maybe?
-Swadhin
Hi Swadhin, I think that is a valid fear. It does seem like the organic listings are being pushed to the side sometimes. However, we have 0 control over that so there is no use in worrying about it. If Google goes too far in one direction searchers will start to show less engagement or pick an alternative. Google will adjust accordingly (or at least should).
So in a way, the people who are actually searching shape what and how Google displays content. So our job as SEO's is to match our content with the searchers intent. If we do that we should be fine come what may :)
THIS IS OUR NEW BIBLE!!
Thanks for sharing this analysis
Take me to church ♫
WOw, great article!
Can you tell me how much time did you guys spend on analysing that much data?
This is really impressive, left me in awe...
I honestly did not track it. But I know there was a lot of time put into actually compiling the data. That was done over the course of a few weeks. Then when I had time we started to process through it and ask for additional data as things were revealed. Then came writing and design so it was a labour of love that I couldn't have done alone. Really appreciate your conment. When you work hard on something the reward is when others find it useful.
Ni biggies, I assumed it took you a lot of hard work and dedication... And I completely agree - the biggest reward for hard work is its usefulness! Just keep doing that. :-)
Cheers!
Wow this data is incredibly useful. I love all every single big SEO analysis. I loved the one Ahrefs did recently. Thanks for making that happen Moz!
Hi A.J.
Thanks very much for putting the effort in to this extensive research and insightful article, with 2017 clearly going to be the year of 'Featured Snippets', this is an asset that will be highly valuable in every SEO's toolkit when it comes to creating a 'Featured Snippet' strategy!
Great research A.J. keep up the awesome analysis!
Kev
Thanks for the kind words Kevin really glad the community has found it useful.
Great piece A.J. It was easy to understand and you shared some great examples. I'm working on a content piece now and though I wasn't thinking of trying to rank for a FS, this might be a good idea once I've the main draft done. As a few comments said, I'd love to see an update in 12 months to see how the landscape has changed, if at all.
Thx Duane, you should totally go for it. Nothing beats practical application. Just remember you need your piece to rank in the top 10 for that phrase so you have a shot at the FS.
What a great study! I've been testing different strategies to get featured snippets lately (with some success), and there's several things I want to go try now. However, my biggest takeaway from this is to try using more lists and tables :) Thanks for doing this
Awesome Jon let me know how it goes once your start formatting some tables. Always interesting to see live results.
Awesome in depth analysis, AJ! Thank you so much for putting this together. Counting myself lucky for having the opportunity to work with you and your talented team, so excited for our next round of content creation. 2017 is going to be a GREAT year. Cheers! :)
Hi A.J.
Thanks for this! This is a cool example of using data to showcase some pretty darn cool learnings! To your point on comparison group earnings - if Google is defaulting to easier formats because it doesn't have a good table to serve as a featured snippet, it might be worthwhile to simply create content that either references a table or is formatted in a way where data would be easy to table. Definitely going to play with your ideas here. Thanks again for taking the time to piece this together!
Thanks for the kind words and I totally agree. I think it is a huge opportunity because comparison searches are at the bottom of the funnel. So that is a fantasic place to make sure you are gobbling up share of search.
Hey A.J. - Great research! I'm curious why you think Google is favoring paragraphs over tables when it comes to vs/versus keywords. I would have guessed the same as you. Do you think it's more to do with a lack of good comparison content in tables, or do you think it's truly Google's format preference?
Hi Taylor, I really think it is the lack of content in that format. I will need to test it further but that is my hunch as well.
Hello A.J,
I would say your team did awesome analysis and research regarding featured snippets, actually I have one question regarding it as I also do publish blogs on my site, related to software niche, could you suggest me what should be the content length and other important stuff to implement the featured snippets for the blog like 'How To Choose The Best Custom Software Development / Company'.. Any reply of your will be appreciated, Waiting for your positive reply! A.J..
Hi Bhushan, happy to help! "How to" content almost always wants to be in a list format. So I would do a longer format article on what you need to consider when hiring a software development company and how the best fit for you may vary by your projects requirements.
Each section can be broken down by 1 2 3 etc. Try to come up with at least 9 unique points so you earn the "More Rows" tag.
Hello A.J. Thanks for the reply and your help..I will surely implement your concern in my blog.
Thanks Ghergich for the blog and for sharing with us interesting things related to featured snippets. We are a company dedicated to SEO and web design in Spain. It is a very interesting blog, I can see how important the keywords (like, for, how, have, which ...) and even know how Moz isn't earning the featured snippet. Thank you for sharing your knowledge about featured snippets with us. Good day and regards. :)
Thanks Juan, I included the Moz examples because it's fantastic content most of us in the SEO community are very familiar with. I was able to find so many FS opportunities for it. So make sure to revisit some of your best content and look at how it can be tweaked to earn more FS.
Great work A.J.! Really informative and helpful. Snippets are on the rise and I guess so "People Also Ask" box. I've seen so many queries that trigger these results as well.
Are featured snippets and "People also ask" box are connected? What questions (will, have, what, when.....) trigger these boxes in the result? and what format works for these rich boxes? (I've seen paragraph snippets only.)
I'm more interested in this research because recently Google is showing a featured snippet for my website that generated a lot of traffic, sessions, and clicks. The query for which that snippet is appearing shows four "People also ask" box in the search result.
Great question! I think you will find this a great read and it should help https://getstat.com/blog/people-also-ask/ I have not studied them specifically yet but they seem to follow very similar pattern.
Around 3/4 of the time I seem to see the FS site being listed in the PAA. But it moves around a ton so they are still really experimenting with this. But overall I would say it is a pretty safe bet that if you are optimized for the FS you are likely optimized for the PAA.
This has certainly given me a lot to think about. The actionable tips for snatching the "position 0" seem so simple and doable, I question why I've never thought of conducting featured snippet audits for all my clients before! I know for a fact that many of them rank first for a query, but have a competitor appear in the featured snippet above. Looking forward to seeing what kind of results I can produce based on this.
Hi Ria, I would love for you to hit me on @seo after your snatch the snippet and let me know the CTR difference you see. It should be a nice boost :)
Awesome analysis. How many hours went into this?
Way too many lol.
Hi AJ, I know this has been said before, but congrats on a great post. I don't normally post just to say congrats but am making an exception in your case, your post is that good! Many thanks.
Thank you! I am more of a lurker myself especially on comment sections. These posts take a lot of time to create and comments like that make it rewarding. Thank you!
Great research! Im curious about the method you use for finding and compiling a list of keywords in a niche that show snippets, we operate in the insurance market with several niche website.
A good free tool is answer the public. Most of the paid tools I know of are hard at work on FS as well. So I expect some cool stuff (I have seen) to be released this year.
Hi A.J. and Remko,
Firstly A.J., great article! Valuable information based on quality research - that's what I love to read.
Remko, I just finished writing an article on how to find easy featured snippet opportunities: seorave.com/find-featured-snippet-opportunities/ (hope it's okay to link!).
Hope you find it helpful :)
Cheers,
David
Yep been using the keyword magic beta for a while. Has a few bugs they are working on but its a fantastic start.
Thank you for sharing your research! Very easy to follow.
In your Forbes list example, I don't notice any list markup such as <ol> in the article. It's mainly paragraph titles beginning with numbers. However, in the Google snippet it IS in a list. I have seen some Google snippets pull a list from the end of the article. Very interesting to me.
Yeah many times Google will simply compile the list. In fact I would go as far as to say it may be better to do the longer format content with 1. 2. 3 in front of each section and let Google combine it. Just be very mindful of the text that comes right aver the #1...
It is very exciting to know that you can learn a little more every day, great post
Hey A.J.
Regarding your example of Keyword: "What is link building", do you think that website is having a featured snippet because of the keyword usage? They seem to have it in the link, in the starting sentence and soon after.
Also in the "search engines work" case, those featured in the snippet have these 3 keywords in the link. Is this a determining factor? What do you think?
Cheers
Normal on-page optimize surely plays a role. So you need to combine optimization with format. When you do that it's much easier to earn the snippet.
Excellent analysis. Thanks for sharing. My team is building a social scheduler that will have emotions and sentiment analysis of the social posts. Eventually Im planning to do an analysis to see what emotions cause the most shares and site visits. It would be an interesting thing for you guys to also do an emotions/sentiment analysis of the snippets vs the full text and see if Google is going after snippets that are only informative or are they going after some emotions too.
Hi Ghergich,
Thanks for writing an in-depth and well researched article. Google is now working hard on Displaying Data in a more structured and more formatted way. So if our Website use write snippet and have more organized data then i think it will boast our ranking.
BTW Rand Fishkin made a prediction few days ago in https://moz.com/blog/8-predictions-for-seo-in-2017 that google will giving a great benefit to paid traffic with the help of graphs techniques.
So if you have a well organized/structured data in your website then it means you are still in SEO game.