What’s a featured snippet got to do with it?

As Tina Turner once sang… Oh no, wait. She wasn’t talking about featured snippets. But now you have that earworm going, let’s dig into what featured snippets are and what you can do about them.

What is a featured snippet exactly?

A featured snippet is a piece of informational content that appears in Google’s search engine results page or SERP. It is content taken directly from the webpage and will include a link to the page, a URL and the page title.

Why are Google snippets important?

For the user, the benefit is that you can get answers to your questions without having to click into anything.

For your website it means it can help you rank higher on organic Google searches if your content answers the question asked and it’s selected as the featured snippet.

Types of featured snippets

There are three types of Google snippets, and they’re sort of self-explanatory by title. They are:

• Lists
• Tables
• Paragraphs

A list has a list of bullet points as in the clip above, a table is a visual representation of pertinent information and a paragraph has a few lines of content answering as closely as possible the question asked

How to create snippets

The bad news is you can’t make your content appear in Google snippets. The good news is that creating good content is what will help your content appear in Google snippets.

So what does your content need to do? In essence, it needs to answer questions. If your content doesn’t answer the user’s question, there is no hope that it will come up as a Google snippet. However, this is where the ever-present ‘make good stuff’ rule comes in. If your content is strong, full of information, and keeps people on your page/website, you’ve a much stronger chance of having it featured as a Google snippet.

How to create good snippets

As always, the answer in any question related to how to rank higher in Google searches is to create good content, whether written or video.

Here are a few tips on how to create content that will hopefully help your website or page be featured as a Google snippet.

1. Create great content

 As mentioned above excellent content is everything. Your website has to answer the questions your client or reader is asking, has to provide knowledge and present you and your business as an authority on your chosen subject or business.

2. Know what questions your customers or readers are asking

This comes back to your market research and also fulfilling a need for your customers but it also comes down to knowing what sort of questions your customers would ask and crafting content to answer these questions. A good way of doing this is having a question and answer page so you can actually write out the question and the answer, making it even easier for Google to see that you’re answering the customer’s query

3. Create good content – regularly

I can’t stress enough how important good content is, and also providing it regularly. This helps prove your content is original, increases your website views and shows your authority, all of which will play into Google choosing your site over another hopefully. All of these tips work to help with organic Google rating also, FYI.

Can you use it for video?

Unfortunately videos don’t seem to be able to contain Google snippets in the same way as written content does, but there are ways to mark up your video content to make it more

findable by Google, and therefore rank higher.

Although, Google does seem to be testing a ‘suggested clip’ option which jumps the video to the part of it that answers your question, so who knows what could happen further down the line?

When all is said and done…
The bottom line is, creating engaging, original, informative content is the key to getting your site featured higher organically with Google search and will hopefully lead to your content being even further highlighted via Google snippets.

So, what’s a featured snippet got to do with it?

Everything, Tina, everything.