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

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

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

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

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

5 HUGE TRAFFIC VALUE. Sites are seeing percent increases in organic traffic to URLs that appear in featured

6 WHAT S ON THE AGENDA? Explain the research methodology Share the results of the research Provide tips for securing your own featured

7 THE

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

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

10 Here is an example of a featured snippet.

11 Not to be confused with a knowledge graph snippet.

12 93,832 FEATURED

13 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

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

15 MANY TYPES OF SNIPPETS. MANY TYPES OF

16 FEATURED SNIPPET FORMATTING TYPE OF SNIPPET % OF TOTAL SNIPPETS Paragraph Snippets 81.95% List Snippets 10.77% Table Snippets 7.28%

17 This is a paragraph featured snippet.

18 This is a list featured snippet.

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

20 27.58% OF SNIPPETS HAVE IMAGES TYPE OF SNIPPET FREQUENCY OF IMAGES Paragraph Snippets 28.40% List Snippets 26.30% Table Snippets 17.70%

21 FEATURED SNIPPETS & UNIVERSAL RESULTS RESULT 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%

22 FREQUENCY AT WHICH SNIPPETS ARE SOURCED FROM EACH RANKING POSITION 29.60% 30.00% 22.50% 20.46% 16.24% 15.00% 12.88% 10.42% 7.50% 4.02% 0.00% % 1.53% 1.03% 0.84% 0.16% 0.65% 7 RANKING POSITION

23 INFLUENCE OF CPC 12.00% 9.00% 9.19% 9.25% 9.37% 9.60% 9.71% 9.64% 9.62% 9.54% 9.28% 7.65% 6.00% 3.00% 0.00% $9.55+ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ CPC RANGE

24 INFLUENCE OF SEARCH VOLUME 16.00% 15.20% 12.60% 12.00% 7.70% 8.00% 8.20% 8.70% 9.30% 10.10% 11.10% 5.90% 4.00% 0.00% RANKING POSITION M

25 INFLUENCE OF WORD COUNT 30.00% 24.54% 22.50% 15.00% 10.49% 12.19% 9.26% 6.66% 7.50% 0.00% % 4 RANKING POSITION 5 6+

26 WORDS THAT TRIGGER FEATURED

27 HOW WE CALCULATED FREQUENCY WORD TOTAL OCCURRENCE SNIPPET OCCURRENCE SNIPPET FREQUENCY lasik % surgery % age % for % seattle 1 0 0% cost %

28 math or finance words like [salary].

29 FINANCIAL AND MATH WORDS WORD FREQUENCY average 77.71% salary 76.84% many 72.06% much 69.95% deductible 60.32% cost 50.64%

30 time related-words like [often]

31 TIME WORDS WORD FREQUENCY often 73.38% years 69.42% deadline 60.11% last 48.06% when 47.89% age 44.44%

32 health & healthcare related-words like [symptoms]

33 HEALTH & HEALTHCARE WORDS WORD FREQUENCY psychologist 55.85% eat 50.00% symptoms 47.10% burn 45.61% hurt 45.53% calories 45.21%

34 general questions & transition related-words like [definition]

35 GENERAL QUESTIONS & TRANSITION WORDS WORD FREQUENCY forming 75.00% does 79.94% become 63.46% cause 61.57% definition 60.41% removing 54.00%

36 DIY process related-words like [faucet]

37 DIY PROCESS WORDS WORD FREQUENCY faucet 62.50% fixing 59.26% replacing 58.78% clogged 58.55% recover 56.05% remove 55.99%

38 LOCATION WORDS WORD FREQUENCY san 0.56% vegas 0.55% diego 0.50% denver 0.43% austin 0.38% las 0.34%

39 SUBJECTIVE WORDS WORD FREQUENCY free 1.58% rankings 0.92% comparison 0.19% review 0.14% good 0.05% best 0.00%

40 IMAGE/VIDEO WORDS WORD FREQUENCY videos 1.78% photo 1.77% picture 1.50% pictures 1.20% photos 1.10% logo 0.88%

41 ON-PAGE

42 USE OF <TABLE> TAGS 50.00% 41.23% 37.50% 33.87% 25.00% 12.50% 0.00% featured snippets regular results

43 USE OF <OL> TAGS 50.00% 43.85% 37.50% 30.97% 25.00% 12.50% 0.00% featured snippets regular results

44 MATCHING QUERY IN <H1> or <H2> 10.00% 8.62% 7.11% 7.50% 5.00% 2.50% 0.00% featured snippets regular results

45 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

46 OK, SO HOW DO I EARN FEATURED

47 #1: ANALYZE YOUR KEYWORD OPPORTUNITIES. Use tools like STAT, SEMRush, even Google Search Console. Look for target

48 #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

49 #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

50 #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

51 #5: POLISH YOUR EXISTING SNIPPETS FOR HIGHER CTR. You can influence the display copy in an already earned snippet to drive up your click

52 THANKS! Watch out for our white paper in your . Get the data at

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