How to Take Advantage of Featured Snippets for SEO
Over the years, Google has constantly sought to improve the performance of its algorithm for indexing and searching for information.
In fact, Google’s goal has always been to be able to offer users an intelligent search tool, that is, capable of interpreting and therefore satisfying the user’s real “search intent “.
To do this, it has released continuous updates of the algorithm that go exactly in this direction.
In this scenario, the so-called featured snippets have assumed a leading role for SEO activities and therefore for the indexing of websites.
According to the guidelines of the algorithm, featured snippets are used to represent Children book illustration continuously updated content, which changes over time and refers to “events” that occur in real time.
And of course “evergreen” content.
What does this mean in practice? Simply that featured snippets can be leveraged for SEO of valuable content.
The era of standardized content, created exclusively to “cheat” the algorithm, is now over.
Google is now an intelligent entity and knows how to recognize what is artfully created for indexing and what is really useful and indeed of value for its users.
The featured snippets are therefore a tool to give users the opportunity to find, among the billions of information available on the web, the most useful for its purpose or more in line with its search intent.
But what are featured snippets in concrete?
Have you ever noticed when you search what the first page of results (SERP) looks like?
At the top you will find Google Ads that is the paid advertising of advertisers.
Immediately below you can see a box with a few lines of text and an image; and then the classic search results to follow.
That box is a featured snippet.
Let’s try to clarify further.
The featured snippets are not the so-called instant answers, that is the answers that google provides to specific standard questions (for example: “what’s the weather today?”);
Nor the knowledge graph, the box that sometimes appears on the right when looking for a brand, a company, a person and a particular place;
Nor the most popular rich snippets, those information that appear in the description of each search result, such as reviews.
So what exactly are featured snippets?
We can in 4 categories depending on the type of content they convey:
- Paragraphs of text (the image from the example above)
- Numbered or bulleted lists
- Tables of contents
- YouTube video (of course …)
How do I create a featured snippet?
At this point the question arises: how do we tell Google which type of content among those listed above should it consider as featured snippet?
Unfortunately there is no “button” to operate them.
It is Google through its algorithm that decides whether a content can be classified as a featured snippet for a given keyword or query.
But then all this talk is useless, you will think…
This is not exactly the case.
What you need to do to try to get Google to classify your content as a featured snippet is to create “evergreen” and valuable content.
Then you can take advantage of two parameters that can help you in this classification: one is simply the description Meta tag and the other is the structured data for creating rich snippets.
The point, in conclusion, is very simple. If you can make Google perceive that your content is of great value to users, it will not hesitate to classify it as a featured snippet. And your SEO will gain a lot, rest assured.
