Have you noticed it’s getting harder and harder to build referral traffic from Google?
And it’s not just that the competition has got tougher (which it certainly has!).
It’s also that Google has moved past its ten blue links and its organic search results are no longer generating as much traffic they used to.
How do you adapt? This article teaches you to optimize your content to one of Google’s more recent changes: featured snippets.
What are featured snippets?
Featured snippets are selected search results that are featured on top of Google’s organic results below the ads in a box.
Featured snippets aim at answering the user’s question right away (hence their other well-known name, “answer boxes”). Being featured means getting additional brand exposure in search results.
Here are two studies confirming the claim:
- Ben Goodsell reports that the click-through rate (CTR) on a featured page increased from two percent to eight percent once it’s placed in an answer box, with revenue from organic traffic increasing by 677%.
- Eric Enge highlights a 20–30% increase in traffic for ConfluentForms.com while they held the featured snippet for the query.
Types of featured snippets
There are three major types of featured snippets:
- Paragraph (an answer is given in text). It can be a box with text inside or a box with both text and an image inside.
- List (an answer is given in a form of a list)
- Table (an answer is given in a table)
Here’s an example of paragraph snippet with an image:
