Two terms that more and more frequently have been popping up on people’s radar are “featured snippet” and “position zero”, which are actually one and the same. In today’s article we will give you short explanations of what a featured snippet is; How much organic traffic you can expect from a featured snippet; As well as how you should proceed to optimize for a featured snippet on your own site.
What is a featured snippet?
A featured snippet is the answer box that often appears at the top of Google’s search results. It’s also called position zero as it’s commonly shown right above the organic listings in the SERP. The answer is based on content fetched from whichever web page that Google identifies as the best source of information for a particular search query.
For certain searches Google replaces the answer box with a YouTube video. This is likely to happen for highly visual search queries, whenever the search engine finds it favourable from a user perspective.
How much organic traffic does a featured snippet provide?
According to a study made by Ahrefs, where they’ve chosen to examine 2 miljon featured snippets, it shows that in average 8,6% of the organic traffic clicks the link attached to a featured snippet. At 10.000 organic searches a month this translates to an estimated increase of 10.320 visitors yearly.
Not bad if you put that in relation to the work effort it usually takes to enable the possibility of a featured snippet.
How to optimize for featured snippets?
The most efficient way to optimize for a featured snippet is by placing the search query inside either an H1 or H2 tag and then follow this headline with a short and concise answer in form of either a paragraph, list or table.
Below you’ll find 3 different example pictures that clarifies this even further:
(Example 1: featured snippet in form of a paragraph.)
(Example 2: featured snippet in form of a list.)
(Example 3: featured snippet in form of a table.)
Conclusion
If you paid close attention while reading this article, you might have already noted it’s optimized for at least a couple featured snippets. If not, we recommend that you go ahead and read it again with new eyes. Hopefully it will give you insights on how to proceed, in order to optimize your own site in a similar fashion.