We speak of a “featured snippet” or “rich answer” when Google highlights content at the top of the SERPs for certain requests.
Be part of the 0.25% who use it correctly!
Not using featured snippets is a mistake if you want to reach the top positions in search engines.
Rating made by Ahrefs
- Growth Hack Type: Optimization SEO
- Expected results: Significant increase in the number of impressions and clicks to your website
The highlighted part at the top of the page is the featured snippet.
For example, if you Google “Who is Elon Musk?” , here's what you'll see:
According to a 2019 report, around 19.5% of all queries have these rich responses.
If you make this request yourself, you will notice that FranceInter is not at the top of this query occupied by Wikipedia. However, Thanks to the featured snippet, it occupies the first place on the page: the Zero position
In other words, FranceInter gets most of the traffic for this request despite ranking lower than others. websites.
This is a tip that will allow you to:
- to quickly provide information to Internet users
- and to be more visible on requests where “big” ones are already present.
A site that gets a spot in a featured snippet invariably gets a lot more traffic than sites that outperform it in the SERPs.
Here's how to do it:
- Adapt content to explicitly answer user questions.
- Adapt the content to address the questions: How, When, What, Where...
- Write the best possible response (quality content).
- Have strong external relationships.
- Get strong social interaction.
- Structure the page with combinations of headers and paragraphs
- Create HTML lists.
- Use HTML tables.
- Optimize your images the images (formats, alt texts, etc.)
All of these are necessary, and these are techniques that you should put in place. But they are also techniques that everyone who aims for position 0 in your sector has started to implement.
Here are several little-known techniques to take a decisive advantage over your competitors and get the featured snippets you deserve.
Semantic HTML5 Techniques for Position 0
To put it simply, semantic HTML5 explicitly indicates the role that each part of a page plays.
This allows Google (and bing) to better prioritize content: to pay less attention to additional information, navigation, and footers and to focus more on the main content.
In the long term, structural semantic HTML5 will be the bare minimum required for any SEO strategy.
Semantic HTML5 is surprisingly powerful.
The vast majority of people who implement it properly get gains in terms of rankings.
Identify the main content of the page
In the example below, the main content is contained in the tag<article>. It's VERY easy for Google to isolate, prioritize, and extract this content.
Simply with this simple implementation, you will make Google very happy in exploring your content.
Do it today and you'll see significant improvements in your rankings.
Identify several potential featured snippets in your content
Adding multiple sections within the central article indicates that the page contains several distinct parts that Google can use to provide questions and answers.
<article>Place them in tags <section>within the tag.
Provide an anchor and a Section #id
You might have noticed this extra detail in the example above.
Adding identifiers to sections, with navigation using them as anchors, is a good idea, as it allows Google to extract the answer in position 0/featured snippet.
Like this:
This response comes from an element <section>on the page: the zero position comes from an HTML5 section with an id.
It uses the correct section description but not the H1 of the section as the title of the featured snippet.
Bonus : the Section/ID/Anchor combination is also useful in normal results; we get a “Go to”, the correct description (rather than the meta description)... and links to sites:
Simple to implement and effective, there is no reason to delay.
We almost always see an increase of 1 or 2 places in the ranking because competing sites have not yet implemented semantic HTML5 correctly.
Schema.org markup and Zero Position
Founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, Schema.org markup provides a way to present page content in a way that is simplified and native to search engines.
Google recommends using JSON-LD for tagging, So do it.
Simple and effective, adding one of these schema.org options to your page allows you to explicitly indicate all the necessary information: image, author, rating, about, about, logo, title, description... and Well ofother things, making it easier for Google to do its job.
Google rewards those who make their life easier. Here are the ones you are most likely to need (from the least specific to the most specific):
- Web page
- Article
- FAQS
- Local referencing
- Guide: How to do it?
- Job offers
The complete list can be found here: Google Search Central
1 million domains using this markup seems like a lot. Until you realize that there are nearly 400 million registered domains. So if you implement this, you will be part of ONLY 0.25%
Where do I put the Snippet in the Code of my pages?
You can place the Snippet by pasting it directly into the tag <head>or <body>web document.
The notation uses the "@context" and "@type" attributes to specify vocabulary (schema.org).
By convention it is placed in the header as in the example below.
How do you test the configuration of your schema.org markup?
If you do this process by hand or if you use a tag generator through a more or less reliable plugin, it is a good idea to use Google's rich results test tool.
This effective tool allows you to test the implementation of your schema.org markup: Google Search Central.
Within seconds, you'll immediately know if the code or page is eligible for rich results.
If the result is correct ✅
You will see the information you have entered appear on the left panel and everything will be displayed in green like this:
If the result is not correct ❌
This means that Google was simply not able to understand or find your Snippet.
You must therefore see if this snippet is well placed in the header and that the fields correspond to the examples that Google provided you with as well as to the naming rules of schema.org
READ MORE: Best SEO software for your website
Example: Brand Authority (Brand SERP)
By far the most important advantage in reaching position 0 is the most authoritative brand that provides a quality and well-formatted response.
That means a long and hard work to build brand authority.
The markup Schema and semantic HTML5 can be implemented immediately and relatively easily. They will give you an edge until your competitors read this article;)
Building brand authority takes time and resources. But it's worth it
Brand authority is not only a vital element in reaching position 0, it is also the central pillar of any SEO strategy.
The winning combination varies between featured snippets, so be sure to apply only the appropriate techniques, and make sure you implement them correctly:)
READ MORE: Learn how to perform a thorough technical SEO audit in 9 steps
Do feature snippets allow me to appear twice in the SERPs?
Throughout 2019, URLs that occupied position zero through featured snippets often enjoyed a double appearance on the first page of search results.
Twice! Some were even able to appear in the first place in the ranking, just under the zero position. Such scenarios were extremely beneficial for organic traffic; the more SERP territory you occupy, the more exposure you get, which can increase your click-through rate.
It was a paradise for marketers to occupy these top positions... the key word being “was.”
Google's latest update has caused the first page of search results to be uncluttered. URLs raised to zero with a featured snippet will no longer appear anywhere else on page 1.
This cleaning is known as deduplication 👇
Latest tips for setting up featured snippets
- Target the right terms: Find the terms you're already ranked for in positions 1 through 5. Use Google Search Console for this or SE Ranking
- Identify clear questions: Identify a clear question related to the query. Sometimes this question may be apparent in the query term itself (for example, “what is FTP ?”). In other cases, you will need to extract the question (s) from the query (for example, “nofollow links” gives you “what are the nofollow links”, “how to make a link nofollow” or “how to create a nofollow link”).
- Provide clear answers to the questions you identified above. These answers should be one paragraph long (maximum) and should be written in the simplest possible language. Study Simple Wikipedia to know how to write clearly.
- Give more details: The answer you create above should lead to a longer description of the problem and its solution. In other words, give readers a reason to read your page beyond the one-paragraph response.
