Ranking Content in Google’s Featured Snippet

More and more searches on Google result in a featured snippet at the top the of page above the search results. The snippets only show for question based  keywords like “how to create a graph in excel” etc. Getting your content in the featured box can be extremely valuable, as an online study found that the average click through rate increased 114%. Here are some factors that go into getting content into the featured snippet:

Inbound links don’t count towards being featured. They only count for getting into the first page of Google, which is a must.

The target search term will need to be one of your headers on the page. The headers are defined by any of the main H HTML tags.

The text you want to appear in the snippet will need to be below the header and should be approximately 54-58 words in order to fit the snippet correctly.

Avoid lengthy text with multiple steps. Sites that have done so have only the steps listed without any other information.

For the few non question based queries that show snippets, Google pulls a paragraph of text rather than any instructions.

Start the first sentence of your snippet with a structure that is similar to an answer. You can use phrases like “start by”, “begin with” etc.

Follow these few tips and you should be able to get content ranked in the top five or even the first page into a featured snippet.