source: How to Optimize Your Content for Google's Featured Snippet Box
Uncover what a Featured Snippet is and what steps you can take to help your business earn more visibility on a search engine results page.
Here are the takeaways…
- Backlinks matter much less for ranking in the Featured Snippet when you already rank on page one.
- There should be an area on the page where the search query appears in a header (
h2,h3,h4, etc.). - The content you want to appear in the Featured Snippet (the answer to the query) should be placed in a
<p>tag directly below the header mentioned above. This answer should be between 54–58 words long. - Google doesn't always just pull through a whole paragraph of text into the Featured Snippet. If you add "Step 1," "Step 2," "Step 3," etc. to the start of each subheading within a page (
h2) then Google will sometimes just pull through the subheadings and list them chronologically, like in the example above for this URL. This is particularly prevalent in question-based queries. - Featured Snippets for the same query often have different content within Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.com.au, and Google.ie. Try "how to search on Google" as one of many examples.
- For shorter, less question-orientated keywords that display a Featured Snippet (e.g. "Inbound Sales"), it's much more likely that Google will pull through a paragraph of text as opposed to a step-by-step. Page structure is incredibly important here.
- Google tends to prefer 'answers' that begin logically as an answer would.