Securing 11.3% more clicks: How to skyrocket your digital marketing strategy by optimizing for featured snippets

If you’ve ever run a query on Google, it’s likely you’ll come across its Featured Snippets feature. Whenever you ask a question on the search engine, a Featured Snippet will appear to tell you the answer without the need for any extra clicks or navigating away from the website. Because of their prevalence, Featured Snippets have become an essential marketing strategy for businesses.

Today, as much as 11.3% of all search results will include a Featured Snippet. This means that you can significantly improve your click-through rates and brand awareness by crafting content specifically for Google to feature.

The reason that Featured Snippets hold such strong SEO potential is because they have the ability to work for just about every industry and niche. If your target audience is capable of asking questions about your line of work, it’s possible to use Featured Snippets to improve your discoverability ahead of your competition.

But how should you market your business to incorporate Featured Snippets as part of your marketing strategy? Let’s explore the how and why it’s of one of Google’s most powerful new features.

What is a Featured Snippet?

Featured Snippets have become relatively common on Google, and chances are, you’ve already interacted with them without realizing it.

Featured Snippets are Google’s attempt to answer a question without the need for users to scroll to its search engine results pages.

Although the platform now often uses an AI Overview to answer questions, Featured Snippets will still be featured above the fold, making the feature an excellent tool for exposure.

Featured Snippets also focus on specific passages of text from your website that Google’s crawlers believe best answer a search question.

“Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page, not after as with our standard format,” notes Google Support. “You might find featured snippets on their own within overall search results, within the ‘People also ask’ section or along with Knowledge Graph information.”

“We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description about the page and when they click on the link to read the page itself. They’re especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice.”

Why focus on Featured Snippets?

Some marketers have been skeptical about the power of Featured Snippets, citing that its ability to provide direct answers to questions means that users are less likely to click-through to your website.

Despite this, optimizing your content to appear above the fold on Google’s results pages is an extremely powerful way of showcasing your brand and demonstrating value-adding thought leadership to your potential clients.

Featured Snippets offer a vast range of benefits for businesses across a number of verticals seeking to boost the quality of their marketing campaigns. These include:

• CTR optimization: The simple ability to appear above all of Google’s SERPs can significantly improve your click-through rate as users seek further information to add context to the answer provided.

• Thought leadership: Featured Snippets work by directly answering questions. This means you can position yourself as a voice of authority in your respective field and a valuable source of industry expertise.

• Brand exposure: With the majority of Google searches arriving via smartphone, Featured Snippets hold valuable real estate when it comes to screen space and make your branded webpages far easier to spot.

• Voice compatibility: Voice assistants will use Featured Snippets to answer verbal questions. This means your brand can optimize its marketing for voice searches for even greater reach.

Now that we’ve looked at the qualities of Featured Snippets in terms of what the feature can bring to your SEO efforts, it’s time to explore how your business can build an effective marketing strategy to boost your visibility online.

Becoming a Featured Snippet

How can you optimize your content to be used as a Featured Snippet by Google? Fortunately, the search engine has helped to shed some light on how the strongest query responses are selected.

“Featured snippets come from web search listings,” explains Google’s Help Center. “Google’s automated systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet to highlight for a specific search request. Your feedback helps us improve our search algorithms and the quality of your search results.”

With this in mind, you should look to adapt your content so that it’s easy for Google’s network of crawlers to interpret. How can you create a successful Featured Snippet? By taking some of the measures listed below, you can give your content the best chance of being picked up by Google.

1. Avoid plagiarism

In the world of search engine optimization, plagiarism is almost always a terrible idea. But for Featured Snippets, it can risk ruining your strategy before it’s had a chance to get off the ground.

When you steal content, Google’s crawlers can identify duplicates and not only automatically favor the original copy but severely penalize your website in a way that could see your other SERPs suffer.

Always look to keep things original when optimizing for Featured Snippets and creating a new piece of content focused on actionable answers for common searches can help improve your chances of becoming a Featured Snippet.

To boost your chances further, look at providing fresh perspectives from your experiences. Provided that you’re adding logical new insights for your audience, the chances are that Google will look at your content more favorably.

2. Provide answers

When creating content for Featured Snippets, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re looking to answer questions. If you’re not actively seeking to answer questions, Google probably won’t see the value in featuring your content.

You should also remember that your target audience here will be Google’s crawlers just as much as your readers. This means that you should write in an easy-to-interpret way and feature the answer to the search you’re anticipating clearly at the beginning of your blog post for ease of reference.

Featured Snippets usually come in the form of explanatory paragraphs, and you should aim to create two to three explanatory sentences that are easy to utilize as a Featured Snippet before adding further context to help those who click-through to read more.

Many tools can help you discover the type of questions to answer for the best opportunity to gain exposure as a Featured Snippet. Ahrefs is one of many strong resources that features a Keywords Explorer to discover questions based on their Keyword Difficulty, which is a metric that determines how easy it is to rank higher on results pages.

3. Schema Markup

Marketers haven’t always enjoyed a strong relationship with Schema Markup due to the tool’s technical HTML coding framework, but it can make all the difference in empowering Google to interpret the content on your website.

Even if you don’t have any coding experience, Schema Markup is extremely easy to get to grips with, and the internet has plenty of useful tutorials on hand to help out.

Schema Markups essentially tell crawlers exactly what your webpage is explaining and allow you to provide important context surrounding content that may be harder to understand without further explanation.

Adapting content for Featured Snippets

The good news is, if you’re concerned about marketing to crawlers as well as humans to optimize for Featured Snippets, this strategy doesn’t require an overhaul of your ability to write blog posts or articles.

By adapting your content with low-difficulty Google queries in mind that are specific to your industry, you can win more leads and experience greater click-through rates than ever before.

Industry-specific CRM tools can also help. Buildertrend’s construction CRM software helps builders boost profits through increased lead generation.

No matter what industry you’re based in, Featured Snippets represent a key opportunity to boost your exposure, improve your click-through rate and grow your sales. As a builder trying to market your construction business in a competitive industry, Featured Snippets is a cutting-edge tactic you can use to get ahead.