Do you know how many searchers type questions into Google’s search box, expecting the best answer? According to the Internet Live Statistics, Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on an average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year, worldwide.
Google does its bit and offers visitors an endless choice of sites to get answers from. But do you think that visitors are really interested in going through long-winded articles to find the right answer? Giving internet surfers answers to their questions and teasers of what a website majorly covers, featured snippets are emerging as a popular way of generating and distributing high-quality content that is optimized for search engines and geared to getting more clicks.
What is a Featured Snippet?
Referred to as the #0 spot on the Google search results page, a featured snippet is a highly sought-after spot by pages ranking among the top 10 Google search results. For a website, ranking somewhere between 6 to 10, trudging their way to rank #1 by means of various SEO techniques, can still be a tedious and slow task.
A featured snippet makes it very easy for a website ranking at #8 to reach position #0 almost instantly. When the content is featured, it gives the website/business additional brand exposure in the search results. All the web owners need to do is to make small adjustments to their page.
According to a study by Ahrefs, out of nearly 112 million keywords in their US database, almost 14 million had featured snippets in the SERPs. This means that more that 12% of the search queries received featured snippets as a result of the queries made on search engines.
Why Do We Need Featured Snippets?
Popularly known as “Answer Box,” featured snippets are selected text from a webpage that aims at answering a specific question asked by a user in a couple of simple sentences. They can also be called quality content, formatted in an interesting and catchy way. This content features on the top of Google’s organic search results, just below the ads.
Featured snippets are a great way to drive more traffic to a webpage. It can help a business redefine its position as a brand. Some of the key benefits of featured snippets include:
- Highest Click Through Rate (CTR)
- More traffic
- Boosts credibility and clicks
- Higher visibility over more authoritative brands
- Prominence on mobile devices
Featured Snippets Answer Questions
With advances in technology and devices that come with digital assistants, voice search is on the rise. The voice search functionality on search engines saves people from having to type out their queries. Users are now simply asking a question verbally, without needing to enter any keywords.
Featured snippets answer properly drafted questions. In fact, asking a question is the best way to find featured snippets. What, who, when, where, why, which, how, etc., are the most common question types answered by featured snippets.
The formatting of the featured snippet content is done using text, tables, numbered lists, bullet points, steps, charts and images. To optimize the content for Google’s algorithms, the word count of the featured snippet has to be kept somewhere between 40 and 50 words, to allow the content to fit perfectly in the space provided. This can be done by tightening the script, making it as crisp as possible.
Needless to say, featured snippets are proving to be very effective in helping websites move up the search engine rankings and increase brand exposure. However, there’s a catch. Featured snippets are also known to reduce the overall number of clicks. However, this only happens if you have completely answered a searcher’s question, such that they don’t need to look for more information. Try to lure the searcher with an enticing teaser of the answer, so that they can be tempted to click to read more.