Get Bigger Gains by Using SEO for Featured Snippets

So, first of all let’s understand what Google Featured Snippets are? And how they are useful? Here, in this blog post we will discuss about the detailed use of featured snippets. So, let’s begin:

Introduction:

Today, searches are made in different ways and the way people perform search has completely changed especially in few years when technology has started evolving and there’s increase in popularity of voice and mobile search.

Several updates like Hummingbird and Caffeine play an important role in maintaining the changed search trend. Google is in the business of making it easy for searchers to find the answers for their queries.

They constantly make efforts to offer best possible user experience. This means answering the query directly on search results page instead of making searcher click through a website. There are two forms of answers: Direct answers and Feature Snippets.

These look similar to the ones when they are displayed in the search results. Direct answers are sourced from Google’s own knowledge directory or selected sources and answer some simple queries.

While Featured Snippets are available from third party websites and quickly feature the link to the source. These are displayed in response to such complex queries as compared to those that trigger a direct answer.

Using featured snippets; Google takes snippets of relevant content from various web pages thus preferring semantically perfect along with ordered and unordered lists. These can then be displayed directly below paid listings and above first organic result.

Let’s see how featured snippets can lead to 500% increase in Sessions:

To measure the value of featured snippet, a particular key page is tracked on a client’s site. The on page elements of this page were optimized in February 2015 so that it can easily match search intent of the users.

These optimizations included on page copy to make it longer and in depth thus adding images to the page and include structured mark up wherever possible.

The page was optimized in Feb 2015 and then no such content based changes were done. Later in June, a featured snippet was seen for a single high value keyword. Visibility for featured snippet then improved constantly which led to 500% increase in sessions.

Mobile Sessions increased by 505%:

Google’s organic mobile traffic increased by 505% and on the other hand desktop and tablet sessions increased by 578 percent and 399 percent respectively.

Click Through Rate increased from 2% to 8%:

Google displays right content in SERP and most of them are worried about potential drop in click through rate. This page’s CTR jumped from 2% to 8% in the particular period. On the other hand, revenue from organic visitors on landing pages saw an improvement of up to 677%.

Big Brand Competition:

This page competes against more authoritative brands with stronger back link profiles and it has seen higher ranks 1 to 3 during the period of analysis. Hence, we can say that Google Snippets are useful in getting better rankings.

This makes Google’s goal of answering user questions much easier as compared to its competitors.

Wind Up

Lot of negative rumours about Featured Snippets are seen. Here, you can find their positive aspects as well as potential opportunities. Changes in the way Google displays or orders search results usually favour big brands.

So, next time you are willing to boost your click through rates then try to make use of Google Snippets.

For further information about any of the Google updates, stay tuned with us.