First of all, I’m sure you’re wondering about i;,
What is Featured Senippet or zero content?
There are many types of Zero content as well as much controversy as to whether it is more conducive or less conducive to capturing clicks, as there are times when this content causes the user to have all the information they are initially looking for in the Featured Snippet and not click on the result.
But in most cases, if you ask a Webmaster if they want their website to appear in the zero content, they will answer in the affirmative. That is why we are going to list 10 tips, as a guide, to get your content to appear in the Featured Snippet.
How many types of Featured Snippet are there?
Nowadays there are 3 types of featured content in Google:
Text Featured
Google takes an excerpt of text from a page and places it in text format along with an image to respond to the user’s search needs.
For example:
Search keyword: “what is the Santa Maria Flood“.
The result that is highlighted is one of Wikimurcia.com where it explains what it really is, or rather, what was the flood of Santa Maria.
Is there a protocol that we must follow for Google to interpret it?
Well, no. The answer is a resounding NO. You don’t have to tag the content in any way for Google to interpret it as featured content.
But, can we do something to make it not appear?
Yes, we can. We can adopt the necessary means so that Google finally takes your content and highlights it and not someone else’s.
Advantages of appearing in the “Zero Content”.
- Obviously, appearing as featured for a particular keyword generates a (free) brand image that is not generated in any other way.
- Possibility of Priority Clicking. If the text satisfies the user’s search needs, but he wants to complete it, he will obviously enter that content before any other.
Disadvantages of appearing in the “Zero Content”.
- Possibility of “No click”. If the featured content has really answered the user’s search needs perfectly, the user will not click on the result, because he already has what he wanted. See the following example:
Keyword: “what is an oak wine“.
The user has searched for “curiosity” and the featured content explains what an oak wine is and what a reserve wine is in comparison. Therefore, it is probably no longer necessary to access the website. And the website will never be able to tempt or persuade the user with any offer.
Lists
This is another form of Featured Content. You search for something in Google and the search engine returns a text extracted from a website where it explains step by step (in list mode) what you are looking for.
For example. Keyword: “Best wordpress plugins“.
The result is a list with the best ones from the website tuwebdecero.com. Here are 6 results. And, either by clicking on see more or on the link on the page, you will go to the named website of José Peña. That’s why the lists are so interesting, because Google itself gives you the CTA (Call to Action) to click on the content.
Tables and charts
They are placed especially when they show price tables, or tables of features, or something like that. They are very interesting, because a table in itself does not say anything if it is not explained, therefore, the percentage of clicks on this type of featured content is very high. This type of table has stolen a lot of traffic to pages like mismarcadores.com or marca.com who have been completely screwed.
Video Snippets
In this case, the element that will be shown as highlighted will be a video, usually from YouTube, although it can also be from another platform such as Vimeo. It is very common its use by youtubers, or even bloggers who increasingly bet on video communication.
How to get featured in the Featured Snippet?
Next, we are going to give some guidelines that we will adopt to make the content, whatever it is, can be chosen by Google for the Featured Snippet. But first we need to know which keywords trigger featured content. To do this we can use tools like Semrush. We can simply filter by featured content and we already have all the data to export or to work internally:
1 – Content Positioning
Obviously if the content is not well positioned, Google will never show it as featured. Therefore, the first mission is to position this content.
2 – Answer the most basic questions for the context of the post
If we want to be “The Chosen Ones“, we must do things right. Therefore we must make an exercise of introspection, find out what the user is looking for contextualized with the keyword you want to search and raise the same questions within the web to answer them.
For example, let’s imagine that we are in the tattoo sector. It is normal that someone who wants to get a tattoo or intends to do so will search for the following:
- How to apply the tattoo cream?
- How much does a tattoo cost?
- How long do I have to apply the tattoo cream?
- What is the best tattoo cream?
- What happens if the tattoo peels?
We did not invent all this, since Google itself suggests a good number of these, related to the keyword or key phrase that we have searched for.
3 – Bet on Long Tail
Long Tail keywords (long tail) are more likely to appear in Google’s featured content. In addition, it has much less competition, and searches are more direct and profitable.
4 – The first paragraph is key
Especially for Text Snippets. It is about answering the question of the post in the first paragraph of the content, so that it is not too complicated for Google to establish the answer as outstanding to the question asked.
5 – Length of the answer
Look at how they do it in other niches, in other sectors and you will see that almost all of them follow the same pattern: very rarely is it more than 300 characters.
6 – Use question formats that best suit the type of content:
How, what, how much… This leads me to bring to light a magnificent study prepared by our brothers at SEMRUSH, super interesting in which you can draw a lot of conclusions and which I will talk about at the end of the post.
7 – use lists with headings H2 – h3…
Here we can not fail. If what we want is that Google takes as highlighted a list of our content, the ideal is to put the headings of the lists as h2 or h3. But you have to put them all the same, it is not worth using some with h2 and others with h3.
8 – For the lists it is very interesting that the lists are numbered
Most Google lists have numbers. And those who do not have a Google number, Google puts them at your own risk. Therefore, everything that we can make life easier for Google to take it as we have it will be much better.
9 – Bet on keywords with lower search volume
In the Semrush study that we will talk about next, we found that up to 78% of the content positioned with keywords between 10 and 100 searches, get the Featured Snippet. As the volume of searches increases, this figure also decreases to 0.02 or 0.04% for words with more than 100,000 searches.
10 – Don’t get obsessed
This is something vital, logical and even common sense. We fight to appear, but many contents like mine fall by the wayside. A very small percentage makes it. That’s why we must follow these guidelines, because it doesn’t guarantee anything, but this way, we will make it much easier for Google.
Featured Snippets Study
Promise is a promise. I’m going to talk next about an essential study that our brothers at Semrush have developed. It is a global study of the use of featured content by Google, as well as its use and evolution. I’m going to summarize it in a few points, or conclusions.
1 – Not all the contents have Featured Snippet
In Spain, only 7% of the contents have access to the featured snippet that Google shows on the front page. This is a very small figure. In Mexico and Colombia it is about 4 points more, but it is still very low. In the case of Mobile it is a little more equitable, but it is more or less in the same range (7% range).
2 -What and How better than Where
The questions that most enter in the featured content are “What” and “Who”, very prominent, above “what” and “where”. In the latter case it is normal, since Google usually shows a map, or even a Google My Business location.
3 – The number of keywords affects whether or not to appear in the content 0
According to the study we see that the lowest percentages of appearance are for keywords of 1 or 2 words and for 9 or 10. According to the table the ideal is to be between 6 and 7 words.
4 – The search volume also affects
If we notice, we can see that, for very low search volumes, the FS percentages are around 80%. While as the search volume decreases, so does the percentage of appearance.
5 – What we do for Spain is not valid for the rest of the countries
We already know that each geolocated version of Google has its own DB and is different in all versions. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t follow the same criteria in some places as in others. In most cases what changes is the number of urls or the number of competitors, which will make that keyword more searched and thus hired.
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