Reintroduction

Google’s Guide to Featured Snippets

Google provide a new, revised guide to Featured Snippets

On 30th January, Google provided a new, revised guide to Featured Snippets that gives search engineers a comprehensive handbook to this SERP component. If you’re not sure what Featured Snippets are, they’re often seen as the answer boxes that appear at the top of the page – short, quick answers to search questions lifted from selected web pages.

Featured Snippets can can be an excellent addition to any SEO strategy and provide an effective means of attracting search traffic. It’s not uncommon for these answer boxes to contain content from results below position 1, giving lower ranking websites another option when taking on high authority competitors.

In their article, Google outline the specific details around what Feature Snippets are and how users can interact with them across multiple devices. Useful information, such as how Featured Snippets work with Voice Search, is welcome information for SEOs looking to help their clients rank better in these emerging platforms.

Google also provide more information on the newly launched video snippet, which they explain is part of the Featured Snippets component. Titled in SERPs as a “suggested clip”, these specialised results provide users with a video results directly on the results page.

There are known issues with Featured Snippets returning incorrect or incomplete answers. Ultimately, this is something that will likely be the subject of continuous development for some time, while Google developers experiment with the best ways to deliver these quick, relevant results.

Our own research and trials have been very successful in this area already and this guide has helped confirm many elements our team had discovered. We’ve found Featured Snippets are a brilliant addition to the results page in most circumstances but sometimes discourage users from visiting the webpage containing the answer (which can be self-defeating). Needless to say we’ll be watching developments in this area very closely!

If you’d like more information on Featured Snippets or any other marketing query, then please get in touch with our team.

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