How to Use Featured Snippets to Increase SEO Traffic [PDF]
Featured snippets started showing up at the top of search results in 2014, and the SEO community collectively gasped. What did this mean? Was Google scraping content? Would this kill CTRs overnight? Is the #1 organic ranking now the #2? How should SEO respond?
The dust has settled, and as featured snippets have grown into SERPs we have developed some insights:
- More featured snippets appear every day. One study demonstrated that 55% of featured snippets were new over the previous 12 months.
- Featured snippets are actually great for CTR. A 2016 study showed that featured snippets produced a 114% CTR boost for the pages they displayed.
Two years since their introduction, featured snippets are not only a staple of Google search results pages, but a primary target of most SEO campaigns. Because Google chooses from any of the top 10 organic search result URLs for the featured snippet, landing your content in the box is the closest thing to an SEO shortcut marketers may ever see.
How to Use Featured Snippets to Increase SEO Traffic is a collection of industry insights and our own tested best practices. It will walk you through:
- What exactly is a featured snippet? There are other features on Google SERPs that are often confused with featured snippets, but are not the same thing.
- Why should you care about featured snippets? Discover how these simple features are shaking up the SEO industry, and get the details you need to sell the boss on SEO.
- How do I capture the featured snippet for my keywords? Explore the different types of featured snippet, and learn to position your content to show up in the coveted box.
You will also get a simple checklist and a short list of other industry-leading resources about featured snippets: everything you need to start enjoying the improved brand awareness and CTR that a featured snippet ranking can provide.
Profound Strategy’s SEO Best Practice Series
This collection of PDFs was originally developed for Profound Strategy’s staff and client training. Now, we have made a portion of this material available to the public. Other PDFs in the series include: