Featured snippets are where you want to be on Google’s search results page. It’s position zero, featured at the top of the page, even above the featured ads and is higher than position number one. Getting the featured snippet spot can increase traffic to your site exponentially. But how do you get your site to be the featured snippet?

Choose the Right Kind of Featured Snippet

There are three different types of featured snippets: paragraph snippet, table snippet, and list snippet. Each serves a different purpose. For example, the paragraph snippet tends to provide a response to an asked question. A list snippet shows up when users are looking for something that provides a list, such as a list of steps in a process, or a list of results for a question. Table snippets occur when there is structured data for Google to arrange in an easily read manner.

The most common snippet type is the paragraph snippet, which occurs more than 85% of the time.

Finding Featured Snippet Opportunities

The next step is to figure out where you’ll have the opportunity to be selected for a featured snippet. It’s easiest if you’re already ranked number 1 or otherwise very high on the SERP. You don’t have to be the highest-ranking result, but you’re more likely to be chosen if you rank highly for a particular keyword. You should at least be on the first page of the SERP.

Choose the keywords that you rank the highest for and focus on those. Check out the SERP for those keywords and see if Google provides a featured snippet for that keyword. It’s possible to have one page trigger the featured snippet for a variety of different keywords if there are several for which that page ranks highly.

You can also find new featured snippet opportunities where you don’t already rank. However, you would need to create content designed to answer the question posed by the new target keywords. Your content would need to answer the question better than the webpage that currently holds the featured snippet position.

Format for a Featured Snippet

For each of your chosen keywords, examine the current featured snippet. Why might it have been chosen and not your website? Often, this has to do with formatting. For example, if a particular search query is best suited to a list snippet, Google could be choosing the page that has the format needed to most easily create a list snippet: H2 headings.

Featured snippets are created automatically by a machine, so it’s important that the html be easily parsed. If you use to create a list, Google may not be able to see it for the list that it really is. However, if you use

or
, Google will be able to interpret it much more easily.

Answer Questions for Featured Snippets

The best way to get the coveted featured snippet position is to figure out exactly what question users are asking when they search for your target keywords. Then, answer that question in the clearest way possible. Look at the current featured snippet and examine it for opportunities to answer the question better within your own content. It’s important to avoid copying what the current top results are doing, but you can use them as a stepping stone to create your own content that better suits potential readers’ needs.