
Meyers took me through a basic keyword search on "SEO" to demonstrate how Featured Snippet identification and targeting works in Moz Pro.
Featured Snippets are prominent on mobile devices and are the only result for voice searches on Android and Google Home.ĭr. Meyers, they launched at less than two percent, so growth has been huge in the past two years. Of the searches in Moz Pro's 10,000 keyword daily tracking set, 15 percent have Featured Snippets. In many cases, Featured Snippets seems to increase credibility and drive clicks. Websites listed in the Featured Snippet also retain their organic listing (they double-dip). They rank "#0," above the first traditional organic search result. Meyers laid out the major benefits of snagging a Featured Snippet spot linking to your webpage: One caveat: not all search results include Featured Snippets but the percentage is rising across desktop and mobile results. Thus, the first rule of optimizing for a Featured Snippet is making sure you're ranking near the top of that keyword SERP. Plus, because it's taken from page one, your link is also somewhere else on the page so you get to double-dip with two rankings."įeatured Snippets populate the knowledge card with an attributed answer and a link, which the Google algorithm extracts from one of the websites near the top of the search results. "Suddenly, with Featured Snippets, you get attribution and links that give you this prominent position, good credibility, and higher click rates. You can edit a knowledge card but it's difficult to do and there's no attribution," explained Dr. "The Knowledge Graph can handle a question like 'how tall is the space needle?' but when you get into more complex queries like 'what color is the space needle?' it can turn into an odd answer.
What are Featured Snippets? More From PCmag
Knowing how to use tools such as Moz Pro to identify and target Featured Snippets is becoming an important skill in the ever-changing SEO game of keeping pace with Google.
These boxes are also key to the way the search engine interfaces with evolving platforms such as Google Assistant, Google Now, and Google Home as users ask questions and initiate voice-activated searches. He refers to snippets as the "number zero position" since the box appears above even the number one search result on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).įeatured Snippets have only been around since 2015 but they're rapidly becoming more prominent in how Google populates results in desktop- and card-based mobile layouts. Meyers, Marketing Scientist at Moz, has spent a lot of time researching how Featured Snippets work. Moz Pro packs so many tools and features into its platform that, unless you go in with specific SEO goals in mind, the user interface (UI) can be overwhelming.