How To Rank Our Featured Snippet - What Changes Are Needed On Our Page?

[fabfrug]

I've read a number of articles that have been helpful, but most of them are specifically still just trying to prove the value of the snippets and more recently show you how to find what search terms to rank for. What I'm really struggling with is exactly 'How do we rank for them, when we already have the #1 position and the featured snippet is going to another site'? Let me break this down a bit more:

1. We are measuring the 'SERP Features' within Moz Pro Tools and I've identified ~300 pages where there is a 'Featured Snippet' but I don't have the feature.

2. In a good portion of these, I'm outranking the site that has the 'Featured Snippet'. So I can compare my site, side by side to the 'Featured Snippet'.

Now that I have the question, my ranking and the competition all in front of me. What changes are recommended I implement on our page? Is there a recommended process to follow?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

In my (limited) experience with featured snippets I have found that an important step is analyzing what kind of html formatting is currently winning the snippet and try to recreate or better that in your own formatting. This can be tough depending on the snippet (I have seen some pretty crazy snippets that make you say 'huh?'), but often times tabular and list type formatting can work. If you are ranking well for the queries already then a refresh of your content/code might well bring the results you want. There have been some great articles on featured snippets recently on moz, check them out!

https://moz.com/blog/featured-snippets-from-start-to-finish

https://moz.com/blog/ranking-zero-seo-for-answers https://moz.com/blog/featured-snippets-a-deadsimple-tactic-for-making-them-stick

[fabfrug]

Awesome, thank you Lynn! I did have a chance to review each of these post prior to posting my Q&A, but I didn't feel they answered the question directly. I guess I need to openly admit I'm not technical, so I guess I'm missing what isn't being spoken about. I wouldn't really know the different types of 'html formatting' per se. Is there a best practice resource that I should start to look through, where I can pass onto our developer and have him apply to the site? Thank you!

[LynnPatchett]

HI,

There are a couple of other articles worth having a look at that if you haven't already:

https://moz.com/blog/what-we-learned-analyzing-featured-snippets

https://moz.com/blog/game-of-featured-snippets-how-to-rank-in-position-0

Both mention what kind of content is likely to make itself 'snippable' for a variety of featured snippet 'types.
It depends to a large degree on what kind of results are showing for the queries you are looking at. I have found tabular and list structures to work well for some best/top type queries I have looked at in the past. In some instances google will interpret list type data from non html list structure so you could (for example) simply put numbers (1,2,3 etc) in front of your list of things without actually using an html list format. Your developer would be able to advise further on this, but most cms systems have lists and tables built in so if the content you have makes sense to be in a list or table format - try it out!

There is a tip in one of those articles to try updating your page and then submit it through google search console for immediate results. I am not sure if it works all the time but I have seen some cases where we updated content and had a featured snippet result 5 minutes after submitting through search console. I am not saying to redo content again if you do not see results so fast, but in some cases it can give you an idea that you are on the right track and that the content is in a format that triggers the snippet.

Hope that helps!