Insights

Position 0 – A Beginners Guide To Featured Snippets

Author - armstrong-admin
20.10.2021

Featured snippets have been around for a while now and it’s surprising manufacturing businesses are not doing more to exploit this aspect of SEO.

The featured snippet sometimes referred to as position 0 in the search results is occupied for the most part by web pages that provide the best and most succinct answers to questions.

Its value lies in its prominence on search results pages. According to analysis, featured snippets gain 35% of clicks in search results. If this doesn’t sound like a lot, compare the CTR with the remainder of organic results on the first page which shares 46% of clicks between them.

With competition for clicks only likely to increase, then position 0 can be a valuable means of traffic generation that is far better than the website will achieve with a page one organic listing lower down the first page of results.

Besides this obvious SEO advantage, appearing in the featured snippets means your website will be seen as the destination for knowledge in a niche subject.

Most of the population will turn to Google to answer a question rather than go and find the answer in a book. This is why in its quest to become the fountain of all knowledge, Google places the answer at the very top of its organic search results.

This is not to say that featured snippets always feature on search engine results pages (SERPS). This is what often puts people off trying to optimise content to appear in featured snippets. It isn’t actually clear which search results will show the snippet unless you type in that query and see for yourself but the more you optimise for this result the more you learn about the types of keywords to target.

What you find is that this search feature is only activated when a query demands a nice clear answer in the form of a short paragraph. Not every query does. So Identifying the types of questions people are asking Google is the key to appearing in this search box at the top of the organic results.

Some industry sectors are more naturally suited to having their content appear in featured snippets than others. Consumer purchases are unlikely to feature because the user intent is usually to buy that consumer product. Others may be better suited to video formats such as car reviews.

Staying on the subject of cars, if I was to type in ‘electric car’, for example, then I will see a set of electric car deals rather than a featured snippet telling me what an electric car is. Google views my user intent to be a buyer query rather than a query seeking knowledge about electric cars. The broad subject of electric cars is not going to be summarised well in a paragraph.

Contrast this with an example from a client website:

In this example, the query is weighted towards a technical component the majority of the population will not have heard of. There will, however, be an audience keen to learn what an ‘inline deflagration flame arrester’ is and how this might differ from a detonation flame arrester as the Q and A box underneath shows.

So now you know if anyone asks what an inline deflagration flame arrester is, this brings us to SEO and specialist products. If your business produces niche components, then a featured snippet offers the chance to leapfrog the competition and occupy the top of the first page of search results by creating pages or even blog posts that accurately and succinctly describe your product.

There is no guarantee of course that your website will feature, but the more niche queries you target with good content, the better the chances of your web page appearing in position 0.