With Google Evergreen changes, featured snippets have become a major opportunity to increase brand awareness, traffic and eventually leads! “But what are featured snippets?” You say. Well I’m glad you asked! Featured snippets are those boxes you see at the top of a Google search that let you see what’s on a webpage before you click. They often show lists, images, short paragraphs and other bits of information taken from a web page. The answer is taken from one of the top rankings, 1-4, and put above everything else. In other words, if you’re competing with other big players for a keyword, featured snippets are your fast track to the top. So why would you ever give this space to your competitors? Now is the perfect time to utilise featured snippets to your advantage. And it’s actually pretty easy to do – we’ll show you how! Featured snippets designed to provide one definite answer that Google believes fits our search query accurately. The answer is directly and automatically taken from the webpage it links to. Users are getting answers served from Google result page itself, and only visit sites the information was taken from if they’re looking for more information. Google, being constantly on the move, is forever tweaking search engine features. There were quite a few recent discussions in the industry around recent featured snippets updates, and what that will mean for websites. Actually, people are really only concerned about one specific new update from Google. A new featured snippet format will display information from publishers without rewarding them with traffic, making it harder for users to connect directly with the brand and click to where the piece of content originated from. Danny Sullivan, from Google, in a tweet to the SEO community stated that Google’s primary goal wasn’t to scrape and “steal” content from publishers but to serve users to the best of their ability, having to compromise in order to have the search ecosystem thrive. Though it might look like a disadvantage to publishers at first glance to as it could result in a loss of traffic, these new featured snippets might actually provide an opportunity. Let me explain – What if for certain queries, your site was ranking in “Position 0”, above the usual map stack for local queries and other organic results? It is well known that on mobile devices people tend to scroll down the search results less AND 80% of voice search answers are directly coming from featured snippets! As voice search usually only presents users a single answer, securing a featured snippet for a certain query could actually make you and your site the only answer for this query! The forever evolving search industry, led by Google, is a fast-paced environment and as marketers or business owners, it is extremely important to seize any opportunity presented, and get that golden traffic back to your site!
What Are They Used For?
Featured Snippets and Mobile Optimisation
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