How to Optimize Your Content for Featured Snippets

Are you wondering how to optimize your content for featured snippets? It’s not surprising.

Ranking for the featured snippet is an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. Aside from getting more readers to click on your content, it provides higher visibility over more authoritative brands.

According to an Ahrefs study, featured snippets are stealing clicks from #1 ranking sites on SERPs.

There’s just one question; how can you optimize your content to claim this coveted spot on the search engine?

Unfortunately, it’s not an exact science. While Google selects the result that appears on a featured snippet, the search engine giant did not disclose the process involved.

However, some practices can increase your chance of nailing this top spot on the search engine result page.

5 Ways to Optimize Your Content For Featured Snippets

Here are five things you to should do to optimize your content for featured snippets.

1. Use Long-Tail Keywords

Google’s featured snippets as we know it today are optimized for voice search. The snippets exist to provide quick answers to queries from not just the traditional dialog box but Google Assistant too.

So, when preparing your answer, pay attention to long-tail keywords that start with the following:

• What is
• How does/do
• How to
• Why is

Remember to keep the content up to date. Evergreen content is always good for the reader’s experience.

2. Provide Clear Succinct Answers In your Content

An essential way to optimize your content for a featured snippet is to provide clear and concise answers to the question.

Present the question in an H2 subheading, with the answer in the next text below with the paragraph markup. The answer should be clear and short – about 50 words – and written as naturally as possible.

After that, use the rest of the article to develop the answers and provide supporting information. Remember to include related keywords in the question subheading.

3. Format Information In A List

Featured snippets don’t always come in the regular paragraph format. Occasionally, the answers to queries require a listed format. That’s where the list featured snippet comes in.

As expected, you must outline items in your content in a list format to increase your chance of showing as a list featured snippet.

Use the subheading tag for the things on the list to enable Google to read and understand the content.

4. Consider The Table Structure

With so much focus on the paragraph and list featured snippets, it’s easy to underestimate the table format. Experts estimate that it comprises almost 30 percent of all featured snippet, which makes them just as important.

So, how can you optimize your content for the featured snippets in table format?

The most obvious answer is to structure your content in a table format and include charts. However, that’s a popular misconception.

As long as the record or row of data is four or above, Google will extract the data and reformat it into a table. Remember, the magic number is four.

5. Utilize Strong SEO

Since Google typically displays content with high organic search ranking as a featured snippet, a strong SEO may be the most important thing.

So, acquire high-quality backlinks, use on-page keyword optimization, and focus on other essential SEO practices.

And even if you don’t get that featured snippets in the end, at least you should have a spot on the first SERP.