Search Engine Optimization is constantly changing and if you are not keeping up, don’t expect your traffic to increase. Google are rolling out various changes to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) on a regular basis in order to keep up with user demands. It also allows them to keep ahead of their own search engine competitors and move towards the world of voice search. Some of the latest SERP features include:
- Featured Snippets – Tables, Lists and Images
- Question and Answer – “People also ask”
- Calculators
- Shopping results
- Definitions
- … and much more
Structuring your website using specific HTML and SEO tactics to get featured within SERP features can be highly beneficial. The Click Through Rate (CTR) will increase massively if you happen to achieve a featured snippet (also known as position zero) or an answer and question type of snippet.
Can You Have Multiple Snippets?
Targeting specific featured snippets to completely dominate the SERP’s for your target keywords is certainly possible. One of our clients Johnson & Phillips have achieved exactly this with one of their target keywords as shown below.
As you can see, not only have they got the featured snippet in the sidebar and a QA snippet but they also have position 1 and 2. The result of this is complete domination of the SERP’s and the CTR for this specific keyword has blown up quite significantly.
How To Get Featured Snippets
There is a huge range of a featured snippets and targeting each and everyone of them can be difficult. However, if you spot a competitor with a successful featured snippet, you know that you will be able to do so too. It is important to note that not every search query will have a featured snippet.
Below is a brief examples of changes that you can introduce to help get featured snippets:
- Table snippet – Introduce <table></table> markup and/or Table Schema
- Ordered list snippet – <ol></ol> implementation
- Unordered list snippet – <ul><li></li></ul>
- Paragraph snippet – include the keyword along with how, what, why or who and a descriptive H1, H2 or H3 tag.
These are just the four most common types of snippets. There are many more that include QA, YouTube videos and others. Making simple changes with basic HTML markup can help you achieve these snippets with ease and dominate the SERPs.
Prior research to the keyword you are targeting is highly recommended. If Google has already awarded a featured snippet to another website, then its highly likely you are able to steal that too by improving your content and adding relevant markup. If you have a tool such as Ahrefs, you will be able to find each snippet for a keyword.
Conclusion
If you are wanting more FREE traffic to your website with just a few changes to the structure of your content, then you must target snippets. Sometimes we have been able to steal snippets by simply adding either a schema markup or adding lists to the existing content.
