DEEP DIVING INTO FEATURED SNIPPETS: How to earn more and rise to the top of the SERPs

WHY FEATURED SNIPPETS? They represent a valuable opportunity to drive organic traffic for sites that are capable of getting them.

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MAXIMUM AUTHORITY. Appearing in a featured snippet gives your content a big credibility boost in the mind of the searcher.

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LEAPFROG THE COMPETITION. By appearing in a featured snippet, you’re effectively ranking at position zero. Above all other organics.

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HUGE TRAFFIC VALUE. Sites are seeing 20 - 30 percent increases in organic traffic to URLs that appear in featured snippets.

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WHAT’S ON THE AGENDA?• Explain the research methodology

• Share the results of the research

• Provide tips for securing your own featured snippets

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THE DATA

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FIRST, COLLECT 1,000,000 QUERIES. We took the 1 million queries with highest CPC from the GrepWords database by Russ Jones @ Moz.

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NEXT, COLLECT 1,000,000 SERPS. We used STAT to grab the 1,000,000 SERPs for each query in our list.

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Here is an example of a featured snippet.

Not to be confused with a knowledge graph snippet.

93,832 FEATURED SNIPPETS.

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COLLECT ON-PAGE & OFF-SITE DATA. We collected the top-10 ranking URLs for each SERP where we found a featured snippet. This added up to 346,643 unique URLs!

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FINALLY, WE ANALYZED IT ALL. Tableau and Excel were our tools of choice.

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MANY TYPES OF SNIPPETS. MANY TYPES OF SERPS.

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FEATURED SNIPPET FORMATTINGTYPE OF SNIPPET % OF TOTAL SNIPPETS

Paragraph Snippets 81.95%

List Snippets 10.77%

Table Snippets 7.28%

This is a paragraph featured snippet.

This is a list featured snippet.

This is a table featured snippet (with an image).

27.58% OF SNIPPETS HAVE IMAGESTYPE OF SNIPPET FREQUENCY OF IMAGES

Paragraph Snippets 28.40%

List Snippets 26.30%

Table Snippets 17.70%

FEATURED SNIPPETS & UNIVERSAL RESULTSRESULT TYPE SNIPPET SERPS ALL SERPS

Places 0.00% 13.20%

Video 24.50% 20.50%

Images 13.90% 15.60%

News 5.40% 3.40%

Shopping 4.00% 1.70%

Twitter 0.00% 0.50%

FREQUENCY AT WHICH SNIPPETS ARE SOURCED FROM EACH RANKING POSITION

0.00%

7.50%

15.00%

22.50%

30.00%

RANKING POSITION

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12+

0.65%0.16%0.84%1.03%1.53%2.18%4.02%

10.42%12.88%

16.24%

20.46%

29.60%

INFLUENCE OF CPC

0.00%

3.00%

6.00%

9.00%

12.00%

CPC RANGE

$9.55+ $10.20+ $10.95+ $11.88+ $13.11+ $14.60+ $16.57+ $19.57+ $24.61+ $34.89+

7.65%

9.28%9.54%9.62%9.64%9.71%9.60%9.37%9.25%9.19%

INFLUENCE OF SEARCH VOLUME

0.00%

4.00%

8.00%

12.00%

16.00%

RANKING POSITION

10 20 30 40 50 60-90 100-140 150-320 330-27M

15.20%

12.60%11.10%

10.10%9.30%8.70%8.20%7.70%

5.90%

INFLUENCE OF WORD COUNT

0.00%

7.50%

15.00%

22.50%

30.00%

RANKING POSITION

1 2 3 4 5 6+

24.54%

12.19%

7.58%6.66%9.26%

10.49%

WORDS THAT TRIGGER FEATURED SNIPPETS

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HOW WE CALCULATED FREQUENCYWORD TOTAL OCCURRENCE SNIPPET OCCURRENCE SNIPPET FREQUENCY

lasik 3 2 66%

surgery 2 1 50%

age 1 1 100%

for 1 1 100%

seattle 1 0 0%

cost 1 1 100%

“math” or “finance” words like [salary].

FINANCIAL AND MATH WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

average 77.71%

salary 76.84%

many 72.06%

much 69.95%

deductible 60.32%

cost 50.64%

“time” related-words like [often]

TIME WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

often 73.38%

years 69.42%

deadline 60.11%

last 48.06%

when 47.89%

age 44.44%

“health” & “healthcare” related-words like [symptoms]

HEALTH & HEALTHCARE WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

psychologist 55.85%

eat 50.00%

symptoms 47.10%

burn 45.61%

hurt 45.53%

calories 45.21%

“general questions” & “transition” related-words like [definition]

GENERAL QUESTIONS & TRANSITION WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

forming 75.00%

does 79.94%

become 63.46%

cause 61.57%

definition 60.41%

removing 54.00%

“DIY process” related-words like [faucet]

DIY PROCESS WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

faucet 62.50%

fixing 59.26%

replacing 58.78%

clogged 58.55%

recover 56.05%

remove 55.99%

LOCATION WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

san 0.56%

vegas 0.55%

diego 0.50%

denver 0.43%

austin 0.38%

las 0.34%

SUBJECTIVE WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

free 1.58%

rankings 0.92%

comparison 0.19%

review 0.14%

good 0.05%

best 0.00%

IMAGE/VIDEO WORDSWORD FREQUENCY

videos 1.78%

photo 1.77%

picture 1.50%

pictures 1.20%

photos 1.10%

logo 0.88%

ON-PAGE FACTORS

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USE OF <TABLE> TAGS

0.00%

12.50%

25.00%

37.50%

50.00%

featured snippets regular results

33.87%

41.23%

USE OF <OL> TAGS

0.00%

12.50%

25.00%

37.50%

50.00%

featured snippets regular results

30.97%

43.85%

MATCHING QUERY IN <H1> or <H2>

0.00%

2.50%

5.00%

7.50%

10.00%

featured snippets regular results

7.11%

8.62%

THERE’S JUST NOT ENOUGH TIME. We also looked into social media and linking factors that might influence featured snippets. Check the white paper for that information.

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OK, SO HOW DO I EARN FEATURED SNIPEPTS?

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#1: ANALYZE YOUR KEYWORD OPPORTUNITIES. Use tools like STAT, SEMRush, even Google Search Console. Look for target keywords.

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#2: CREATE STRATEGIC NEW CONTENT TARGETED AT SNIPPETS. Refer to our data on which words trigger featured snippets. Look for ideas that make sense for your vertical.

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#3: BRING IN QUESTION AND ANSWER FORMATTING. When possible, devote a page to answering a single question. Try to find ways to incorporate FAQs into your content.

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#4: SLICE UP YOUR COPY WITH SUBHEADS, LISTS & TABLES. Well structured page sections makes it easy for Google to determine what content is most relevant to a given search query.

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#5: POLISH YOUR EXISTING SNIPPETS FOR HIGHER CTR. You can influence the display copy in an already earned snippet to drive up your click throughs.

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THANKS! Watch out for our white paper in your email.

Get the data at getSTAT.com/data/fs

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