For years, the world of SEO has been haunted by the same question: ” How to achieve the No. 1 position in the search results? “.
Achieving the top position in a competitive and valuable search became the obsession of SEO professionals. The first page simply no longer enough.
This phenomenon has good reason to be. Some studies have shown that about 30% of clicks on search results occur on the first position and more than 50% in total are attributed to the first three positions.
What does this mean? In simple language, be in the position number 10 could be considered similar to being in position number 100. Very few users (or none) visit your page.
There are many possible theories to explain these results, 3 of which seem most likely:
Now, why is it important to know all this before even touching the main topic of this post?
Because snippets featured have the ability to dramatically change the world of SEO.
The results are featured snippets “rich data” that are generated by Google from the content of the pages present the results of a specific search. Also known in Spanish as prominent fragments, as well as its English name suggests, these results are featured at the top of the page, occupying what in the SEO industry, has begun to be known as “zero position” .
This definition may seem complicated, but surely you’ve seen a snippet featured. Here’s an example:
Let us pause to analyze this outcome for a moment. At first glance, I is evident why many SEO professionals have turned their attention to the No. 1 spot featured snippets:
All these factors combined have an important result: a greater number of clicks will get the result to the snippet featured .
A study by Hubspot found that featured snippets produced an increase in clickthrough rate (CTR) up to 114%.
If this is not enough to convince you of the importance of featured snippets, I doubt anything will. On the other hand, if you are interested in understanding how they work featured snippets, this guide is essential for you .
There are 3 basic types of snippets featured: paragraph, list, and table.
There may be slight variations in the composition of each, because Google is experiencing increasingly frequent with these, but they tend to be classifiable under these 3 types.
Let’s examine each briefly:
I invite you to perform some searches and analyze the results. Understanding the behavior of featured snippets will be very useful for the next section of this guide.
As I said in this post, it is not necessary to be the holder of the first position of a search for the snippet featured. This generates many opportunities for new and less authority pages.
However, they are always featured snippets generated with the content of the pages in the top 10 search positions.
This means that if you want to win the zero position, you first need to position your content on the first page of results.
Once you have achieved this, you can move to implement improvements in your content to increase your chance of winning the coveted featured snippet.
As you probably have noticed you to see the examples in this post, the vast majority of searches that generate featured snippets are formulated as questions.
Google will try to get within your content, an appropriate response to the user’s query. However, remember that Google uses computers to analyze the content of your page and how advanced it its algorithm, it will be difficult to understand answers that are hidden in metaphors or mixed with humor.
It is advisable to present an answer to the user question in the traditional way ; similar to what you would find in a dictionary or Wikipedia.
Although it can not have complete certainty of results, a lot of SEO experts agree that use tags <h2>, <h3> <h4> and <h5> to include the keywords used by the user to perform searches can significantly increase the chances of getting a snippet featured.
If we combine the tips 1 and 2, you will realize that to optimize your content featured snippets, we recommend that:
This tip also has to do with the HTML format your content. In this case, if your content lists, procedure or set of data, we recommend that you use the appropriate format to organize the text of your page:
At the time of this writing (May 2017) there is a group of SEO professionals who have criticized Google for the use of content from various sources for the composition of featured snippets:
As can be seen in the capture, text snippet featured belongs to a completely different image source domain.
This is extremely interesting.
Concern is generated due to practices such as these can result in Google simply build complex responses to the content on the results page, eliminating the need for the user to visit a page to find the information you need.
By actions such as these by Google, SEO experts see the future of the profession to be able to create and position content that addresses complex searches, which Google will have more difficulty in understanding and responding.
After reading this guide you should have a functional knowledge base to adapt your SEO strategy and take the opportunity that lies in the featured snippets (and win the zero position).
Note : If you analyze the structure and composition of this article you will realize that follows many of the practices that I recommend to optimize your content for featured snippets
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About the Author
Eduardo Yi is an engineer turned professional digital marketing. His experience includes work in startups in Boston, San Francisco and New York.
Currently, Eduardo works in a company ed-tech and professional runs a project called productop10 .
Twitter handle: @eduardoyi