Google’s algorithm may make you quite tiring at times when you have lost a big chunk of your traffic or when you have to redo your SEO once again! But those algorithm changes are made for a reason. Google’s every update is done keeping in mind the best experience it can offer for its users! They always wanted to produce the most relevant and quick answers for their users on the search engine results page. So whats now? What is Featured Snippets?
It’s not just to threaten you when someone says google can find out if you are using unethical means to dominate the search engine results page, it actually can! Over the years whenever websites get ranked using unethical Blackhat SEO means Google rolls out an update in their algorithm.
Google Featured Snippet Update
As a part of Google’s constant updates for the enhancement of its search results, it has rolled out an update with a featured snippet. Featured snippets are also called as “Rank 0” of a SERP.
In February 2019, Google rolled out an algorithm update which had featured snippets as a part of it. The featured snippet is also called rank 0 which is even more important than the 1st rank of a SERP. It appears right below the google search ads and above any other organic results in the search engine results page and hence it’s called rank 0.
This feature enables the user to read or get a quick glimpse of the answer to their query right at the SERP itself hence enhancing the user experience. Google also focuses more on showing the most relevant answer for a query as the featured snippet.
Many websites claimed to have lost their traffic considerably after this update since the users are reading the content in the SERP and not entering the website.
What is Featured Snippets?
I’m pretty sure that you all have come across several featured snippets while you were searching an answer for your query on Google.
Google featured snippets are quick and relevant answers that can solve your search queries. As mentioned already, it is referred to as Rank 0 or Position 0 since its on top of all other organic results.
To make things more clear, we can take an instance of searching for queries like “How to manage finances better” or “what is a featured snippet” google fetches you paragraph a set of instructions either bulleted or numbered with the solution most relevant to your query that is a featured snippet.
Here are some examples of featured snippets
These snippets are usually extracted from most relevant answers which rank on the 1st page of google sometimes the most relevant answers for the query will also get extracted from a low-ranking page on Google’s search engine results page.
These featured snippets are either a simple paragraph of text for “what”, “why” and “where” kind of queries. They also appear as a bulleted or numbered list for “how” kind of queries. The numbering is usually used when the list has a chronological order. Featured snippets also appears as a table for certain queries.
What are not Featured Snippets?
There are some answers that Google’s SERP produces to us instantly when we search for some terms such as the weather forecast, any symptoms, the calculator that appears when we search a mathematical function, Rich results these are not featured snippets and should not be misinterpreted.
How to Enable a Page to Show up as a Featured Snippets?
Unfortunately, you can’t! It’s solely based on Google’s new update in its algorithm. It strives hard enough to show the best possible results as a featured snippet and we can’t do anything about it other than writing better content!
Why are Google Featured Snippets Important in 2020?
In most cases the Rank 0 is also the Rank 1 of the organic results. Also, it’s understood that the user will read the answer on the google page and just leave there but that’s not the case most of the time! Even though these featured snippets may increase no click searches, it also produces the best answer to the users. When a user gets the best result for his query at the top position there is a high probability that they are going to click open it!
Attaining the Rank 0 will definitely make a drastic hike in your organic traffic! So choosing a keyword that doesn’t have a featured snippet and writing the most relevant content to that query will increase your chance of getting to that position 0 which in turn increases your impressions and clicks.
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