{"id":317,"date":"2017-08-09T22:30:24","date_gmt":"2017-08-09T22:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seoeaze.com\/blog\/?p=317"},"modified":"2017-08-09T22:30:24","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T22:30:24","slug":"how-to-achieve-featured-snippet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seoeaze.com\/blog\/how-to-achieve-featured-snippet\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Achieve Position Zero: A Featured Snippets Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Featured snippet is somewhat a mysterious search feature. This tutorial explains what featured snippet is and provides step-by-step guide for optimizing your website pages to rank at position 0.<\/p>\n

Ranking at the first position on Google search results is the ultimate goal of SEO for most site owners. However, achieving this dream can be a grueling task if you are in a competitive market. To rank at position 1 in Google search engine result pages in such a market will take investment and efforts that many site owners are not able to put in.<\/p>\n

I am not trying to undermine your ability to do SEO, what I am stating is there is an opportunity to even outrank that coveted position 1 in Google. With a featured snippet you get to rank at position 0, and this ranking has less to do with link metrics, but more with the actual content of the page. What it means for you is, even when you are behind in terms of backlinks<\/a>, featured snippets can help you steal the traffic from the top position competitions in the Google SERPs.<\/p>\n

It is not hard to imagine that what impact featured snippets will have on a page\u2019s visibility and traffic when it appears at position 0 even when the URL of the very same page is ranked below position 5 or even on page 2 in Google SERPs.<\/p>\n

What is a featured snippet?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

According to the Stone Temple Consulting at present 30% of Google search results contain featured snippets. These snippets appear above the normal search results, that is why they are called position 0 rankings. The prominence of rich answer continuing to grow, it\u2019s time you also include optimization of your pages to be included in rich snippets. Here is a graph showing the growth of rich answers in Google\u2019s search results:\"\"<\/p>\n

Image Credit \u00a0–\u00a0https:\/\/www.stonetemple.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

A featured snippet is similar to direct answers, but it also contains the URL and the title of the page along with a rich snippet from the page\u2019s content that attempts to answer the searcher\u2019s query. Here is an example of a direct answer for a search in Google SERP:<\/p>\n

\"What<\/p>\n

When the user tried to look for the definition of Search Engine Optimization, Google provided him with a direct answer sourced from its own knowledge base<\/strong>. This has no significance for your website as there is no page title or url shared in the direct answer. Now if the same searcher looks for information on \u2018how to do SEO\u2019, Google provides this result at position 0:\"Featured<\/p>\n

As you can see the featured snippet has the page title as well as the URL, it is very likely to increase your page\u2019s Google visibility as well as get more traffic. The content that appears in these snippets is programmatically detected by Google depending on the user\u2019s question. Almost every website owner with feature snippets in the SERPs, has reported a significant increase in the CTR (click-through rate) for the website pages that have featured snippets.<\/p>\n

Why do you have to care about the featured snippet? <\/strong><\/h3>\n

As we mentioned before ranking in the top spot in Google SERP in a competitive market is a challenge, appearing in a featured snippet is a lot easier. But it is not the only reason to optimize the web pages for position 0<\/strong>. Another reason is that you easily can steal traffic from the top ranked competitors if your web page appears at position 0.<\/p>\n

In an analysis of over two million featured snippets, Ahrefs found that there is a significant drop in organic traffic of first result when a featured snippet is present in Google SERP. Here\u2019s a chart from Ahrefs:\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As you can see that the first result gets 26% CTR when there is no featured snippet. However, the CTR drops to 19.6% for a first result when there is a featured snippet. Surprisingly, the position 0 page stole 8.6% CTR from the position 1 result<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Do you need more reason to focus on optimizing your website pages for featured snippets? Now lets move on to the steps to snap the coveted position 0 spot in the SERPs.<\/p>\n

How to rank for \u2018position 0\u2019? <\/strong><\/h2>\n
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  1. Have a clear view of the opportunity for your site <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If you followed this tutorial this far, you understand that with featured snippets Google is trying to provide easy answers to searchers. This is the reason why not all websites can expect to be included at position 0. If you are a local business or an ecommerce store, you are better off investing your time and budget in ranking in Google map results. You can get a better idea why is that from this Stat Search Analytics study<\/a>. The study details that searches related to local, info\/help, factual, shopping or images and videos rarely returned a featured snippet.<\/p>\n

    You are in luck if your website deals in a market where frequently asked questions are common or you are in an industry where jargons and technical terms are used and people need to search explanation of those terms or your web pages have data presented in tabular format. All of these characteristics make your site or web page an ideal candidate to be included in a featured snippet. The aforementioned study after reviewing 92,0000 search queries concluded that following search types are most likely to generate a featured snippet:<\/p>\n