How to Discover Featured Snippet Opportunities for SEO

Winning featured snippets is one of the best ways to get visibility on page one of Google's SERPs. It's a competitive environment, though, and there are tons of specific considerations when it comes to increasing your chances of earning that spot. Today's Whiteboard Friday, number one of an upcoming three-part series, is brought to you by Moz's resident SEO and mini-pig advocate, Britney Muller. She covers the keyword research you'll need to do, evaluating your current ranking, and recording relevant data in a spreadsheet with the help of a couple useful tools.

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Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going over all things discovering featured snippet opportunities. So this is the first part to three videos. So this will be the discover, but we're also going to have a target and a measure video as well. So really, really excited. It's going to be a ton of fun. I'm doing it with you, so you're not going to be alone. It's going to be this cool thing we all do together.

Part 1 of 3: Discover, target, measure

So for those of you that don't know what a featured snippet is, it is one of those answer boxes at the top of search results. So let's say you do a search like, oh, I don't know, "Are teacup pigs healthy?" which they're not, super sad. I love pigs. But you'll get a featured snippet box like this that tells you like, "No, they're actually starved." It gives you all this information. So it's different than something like "People also ask..." boxes or your typical search results.

They're particularly appealing because of the voice search component. So most voice searches come from those featured snippet boxes as well as it just being really appealing in general to have that top spot.

#1 Keyword research

So this process is pretty straightforward. You're going to start with just your basic keyword research. So you're also going to focus on questions. A.J. Ghergich did this incredible study write-up, on SEMrush, about featured snippets, where he discovered that around 41% of all featured snippets come from questions, which makes sense. The how questions are really interesting because those results are most likely to result in lists.

Now, lists take both the form of numerical as well as bullets. So something to kind of keep in mind there. But what's interesting about these lists is that they tend to be a little bit easier to truncate. So if you know that Google is showing 8 results, maybe you go back to your page and you make sure that you have 10. That way it lures people in to click to see the full list. Really interesting there.

#2 Evaluate your current ranking

You also want to evaluate your current ranking for these particular keywords. You want to prioritize keywords based on ones that you rank on page one for. It tends to be much easier to grab a featured snippet or to steal one if you're also on page one.

#3 Put data into a spreadsheet

From there, we're going to put all of this data and more data into a big spreadsheet so that we can really analyze and prioritize some of these opportunities. So some of the metrics I came up with — feel free to share some ideas below — are your keyword, average monthly search volume, current featured snippet URL, that's this guy over here. What is that domain authority and page authority? You want to make note of those. Is it a featured snippet hub? This is such a cool term, that A.J. came up with in his article, that essentially coins a featured snippet URL that ranks for 10 or more featured snippet boxes. You probably won't know this right away, so this might stay blank. But once you start seeing more and more of those same URLs, you might think it's one of those hubs. It's kind of cool.

Featured snippet type. Is it a paragraph, a list, or a table? Is there any markup? Is there schema markup? What's going on, on the page in general? Just sort of scope all that out. What's your rank? This is actually supposed to be over here. So, again, you want to see if you're ranking 10 or under on a particular page, hopefully on page 1.

Then is there an image? So the featured snippet images are really interesting, because Google likes to swap them out and remove them and test them and do all this crazy stuff. I got to talk about these images and the tests that I've been doing on them on the Two Peas podcast with Brian Childs, part of his MozPod podcast series. It was super fun. I share some secrets in there, so go check it out.

Then what's the type of image? So typically, you can start to see a theme of a particular niche or industry in their featured snippet images. Maybe they're all stock photos, or maybe they're all informational type photos. Maybe they all have the same color. Really interesting to sort of keep an eye on those.

What's your desired featured snippet URL? This will typically be whatever URL is ranking. But maybe not. Make note of that.

Other notes, you can mention where Google is pulling the featured snippet from that page. I think that stuff is super interesting. You can do all sorts of fun stuff.

Research tools to use

So two primary tools to do all of this research within are Moz Keyword Explorer and SEMrush. Both have some caveats. Moz Keyword Explorer is great because you can do a bunch of keyword research and save them into lists. However, you can't do keyword research only viewing the keywords that have featured snippets. You can't do that. You have to do all the keyword research, put it into a list, and then we give you that data.

With SEMrush, it's pretty cool. You get to filter only by featured snippet keywords. So that, off the bat, is awesome.

However, once you get a keyword list put together in Keyword Explorer, not only do you get that information of whether or not there's a featured snippet, but right within your list of keywords, you have the ability to add your website and immediately see your rank for all of those particular keywords in your list, making this super, super easy.

I tried to do this with SEMrush. I know they have all of the features necessary to do so. However, it's just not as easy. You have to use a combination of their different tools within their tool. I hit a couple different limits within Keyword Analyzer, and then by the time I got to position tracking, I lost my search volume from Keyword Magic tool, which was super frustrating.

There might be a better, easier way to do that. Maybe their API are pulling some stuff a little bit differently. Feel free to comment down below. Maybe there's a better way than either of these. I don't know. You could also do it pretty manually too. You could use Google Keyword Planner and look some of this stuff up yourself.

But I hope you enjoyed this. Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all soon. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com