Featured Snippets: Learn all about Google’s position zero

Have you ever heard about featured snippets? They are just another way that Google has found to display results quickly and accurately for users. This ends up further improving the audience’s experience on the platform by delivering more value to users.

Just as in other results formats, such as the carousel, local ranking, business side box, among others, featured snippets represent an excellent opportunity to stand out for those who produce web content.

In this article, you’ll learn about the main features of featured snippets, their importance and how to bring this possibility into your digital marketing strategy. Check it out!

What are featured snippets?

Also called Google position zero, a featured snippet is a website snippet that appears on the results screen, with the information searched by users being prominent. This information is extracted from the content itself contained on the page found by Google.

The content is presented with its relevant parts highlighted, which are always related to the terms searched by the user. All of this contributes to making it possible to obtain faster responses when using Google.

Capable of adapting to many different formats, featured snippets can provide, in addition to conventional website snippets, lists, videos, and even tables. Of course, what will determine this choice will be the content present on the website.

Why is position zero so important for your business?

Now that you know what a featured snippet is, the next step consists of understanding the importance of this concept for your content strategy. A conventional SEO strategy may place your website among the best ranked on Google, but it is possible to obtain even more benefits when you reach position zero.

Check out below the main reasons for adding featured snippets to your priorities!

More clicks for your website

Featured snippets are truly capable of attracting more clicks than the common results on SERP’s first page. Experiments carried out by Hubspot confirm a significant increase in the number of clicks when a certain content reaches position zero.

That way, an increase in traffic for a page appearing in the featured snippet was also observed. Therefore, when they appear, the snippets are in fact “stealing” traffic from the first position. A research carried out by Ahrefs also demonstrates such a fact.

More user attention

A featured snippet is often much bigger than the area reserved to traditional links in the rest of the results page. This allows more information from your website to be visible for your audience, allowing the delivery of even more value to them. Not even by working with sponsored links are you able to obtain so much space on Google.

Increased user satisfaction

Anyone searching on Google is certainly searching for an answer. By delivering it faster and more efficiently, your content becomes a highly relevant reference point for them. With increasingly more competition in this segment, winning over and building customer loyalty in this manner is quite valuable.

Visibility doesn’t depend on position

Did this make you feel that you need to be at the top of Google’s results page in order to have the chance of appearing in a featured snippet? Well then, it’s important to get rid of this theory. This content is independent of the link ranked first place among the results. All you need is to at least be on Google’s first page results. This will allow you to boost your position considerably from where you are placed.

Various formats available

Delivering correct information to your audience isn’t enough, since it needs to be properly formatted. Fortunately, featured snippets are capable of adapting to various formats to help you with this. For example, when searching for “iron-rich food”, Google displays a list as a featured snippet containing several suggestions.

How to make content score hits among featured snippets?

Achieving featured snippets for your website isn’t a matter of plain luck. In order to take advantage of the benefits they can provide for your website’s visibility, you need to implement a few actions similar to the traditional SEO techniques, but focused on how Google’s algorithm works with this format.

Below you will learn a few initiatives capable of helping you reach Google’s position zero!

Detect opportunities

Before you get started, it is important to analyze the opportunities available in this area. This is the moment to perform several searches on Google for terms related to your website in order to check which ones have featured snippets. If there are many gaps, this means that you have a better chance of scoring hits with your content in them.

Understand your audience

A good SEO strategy always tries to understand the audience’s needs in order to adapt the content in their favor. This is even more valuable when you seek Google’s position zero, since there’s only space for one website on it. Try to understand if your content pleases your visitors when you measure the time they stay on your pages, and analyze their sharing rate.

Answer questions

Featured snippets appear as answers to a user’s question. Therefore, in order to increase your chances of scoring a hit with your content on this page, it is worth formatting your material so that your replies are detected by Google’s algorithm. 

Anticipate which questions your target audience would ask to find your website and optimize your pages with them in mind. For example, work with short sentences and bullet points when you include your information in the content.

Outperform competitors

If another website already has a featured snippet related to a topic that you are searching, that does not mean it’s over. Just focus on improving your content so that Google’s algorithm and users can notice its superiority. This way, reaching position zero will be a consequence of your effort.

Are you all set to get started?

Considering how featured snippets can be advantageous for your content’s visibility and your company’s authority, it’s worth placing them among your strategic priorities. Try out the tips above to start taking advantage of the benefits of Google’s position zero.

This is merely one of the marketing aspects that deserve your attention. Learn more about how to structure your strategy’s actions by checking out 10 steps to establish your digital strategy..