How Featured Snippets Enable without Acquiring Backlinks

Featured snippets are the pieces of information that are displayed on top of the Google search results. The essential function of featured snippets is to provide short and relevant answers to user queries within a small sentence frame. Being at the topmost position of the list and having a company showcase its featured snippet creates effective brand exposure and increases traffic to websites without acquiring significant backlinks. 

In this article, I will comprehensively discuss the benefits of featured snippets and tell you why featured snippets are important. I will also discuss on acquiring backlinks that send authority signals to Google and match them with featured snippets. 

What are Featured Snippets?

Google featured snippets are small bits of information that usually appear at the top of the list of results on Google search. Featured snippets provide a short explanation or answer to the search query by extracting relevant and valuable information from top-ranking pages on the list.

SEO professionals can create content for featured snippets in the form of lists, short paragraphs, or tables containing essential information relevant to the search query.

Some Stats of Featured Snippets

According to a report by SEMRush and Brado, more than 160 million keywords on a desktop and 46.1 million keywords on a mobile device have been studied to establish the percentage of keywords that generated featured snippets. The results are as follows:

• 19% of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) had featured snippets
• 7.3% of SERPs had double featured snippets
• 50% of smartphone screens are covered by featured snippets
• 70% of snippets were short paragraphs of about 42 words
• 19.1% of snippets were lists of up to 6 items on average
• 6.3% of featured snippets were tables, five rows on average
• 4.6% are video featured snippets
• Industries with the most significant percentage of featured snippets were Travel, Computers and Electronics, Science, Arts and Entertainment

Types of Featured Snippets

The four major and significant types of featured snippets are paragraphs, lists, and tables. 

• Paragraphs: 

Paragraph featured snippets include a blurb of content pulled from the website. These snippets appear when users post questions on Google and have information that tries to answer the query.

• Lists: 

Numbered List

Bulleted List

The list featured snippets attempt to provide an answer in the form of a summarized list or through a series of steps. Lists usually break down information from paragraphs into byte-sized snippets that are easy to follow.

• Tables: 

Featured snippets also use tables to provide information in structured formats that makes it easy for users to read data from the SERPs directly. Information is split into rows and columns that provide a quick look before inviting the reader for more on the website.

• Videos: 

Featured snippets utilize videos to offer information in video formats that make it simpler for users to digest content.

How do Featured Snippets Work?

Google featured snippets from search results oftentimes show listings where the featured snippet comes before a link to a webpage and not after as per standard format. Results that are displayed in this manner are called featured snippets. Google displays featured snippets when its systems determine if this format will help users discover the information they are seeking more efficiently, from both the description about the webpage and the link to the page itself. 

Featured snippets are especially helpful for users on mobile and those searching by voice. While featured snippets usually contain only one listing, sometimes more may appear.

Benefits of Featured Snippets

Bloggers and online publishers aspire for Google featured snippets because of the host of benefits they offer. Here I list out a few benefits.

• Boosts Website Traffic:

  Featured snippets increase traffic to websites and increase organic conversions where customers take action after discovering the website through a search result. Featured snippets are one of the best ways for websites to get found and enjoy increased traffic.

• Increase Brand Awareness:

  Google spotlight via featured snippets can increase your company’s brand awareness, leveraging to increase the CRT (Click-through-rate) with quality website content. By showing specific companies in the search results, Google directly contributes to a company’s brand awareness by introducing it to new web visitors.

• Improve Website Authority:

  By attracting more visitors and driving up, the average time users spend on the website, featured snippets can also aid in link building, improving overall website authority. This, in turn, helps can trigger a rise in keyword rankings and online visibility of companies.

Why are Featured Snippets Important?

• Successful Sales Conversions:

  Aside from the reasons mentioned above, featured snippets are essential to any business looking to amplify traffic to their website and looking for successful conversions.

• Improved Keyword Rankings:

  Businesses and agencies often report a significant improvement in their keyword rankings after getting a featured snippet. This is because customers are easily able to find these businesses online and, provided that the website is well optimized, find what they’re looking for and covert. 

• Enable Brand Building: 

  Featured snippets are essential for both brand building and sales conversions. As I’ve discussed earlier, featured snippets increase brand awareness and visibility by attracting new visitors and contributing a lot to vital brand-building exercises.

How Featured Snippets Empowers without Acquiring Backlinks

If the content of your website is ranking on the first SERP for a query showing a featured snippet, then you’ve found the shortcut to the top position! To put it simply, the higher a piece of content ranks, the more likely it is to acquire a featured snippet. 

Getting to the first position on SERP is a considerably more manageable task than ranking the first on a keyword. However, if the keyword triggers a snippet, it becomes easier to obtain the first position – the shortcut to the top.

Do Backlink Signals Assists you Generate Featured Snippets?

For every search-based query, I’ve matched the backlink metrics of a precise “featured” page vs. median value amongst the other pages in the top ten organic results.

Here is what I have got for you:

In most of the cases, the backlink metrics of a “featured” URL come up on par with the rest of the pages right in the SERP. So Google most likely don’t feature “the strongest” page in the top ten results.

Note: I am not suggesting you to discount on all the backlink dynamics in one go. 

What are Precise Ranking Positions of Featured Snippets?

Here, merely 30.9 percent of featured snippets rank at extremely top positions. However, majority of them, consistently rank in the top 5.

How Do You Precisely Get Featured Snippets on Google?

While a professional SEO expert can help more with this, there are a few things you can do on your own to get Google featured snippets:

• The first thing about featured snippets is the content. Properly researched content with quality images, relevant information, and graphics and an appropriate number of keywords provide the best chance at being featured.
• Follow digital marketing requirements and optimize content accordingly.
• Include an FAQ section and ensure that the content is relevant to the questions asked online.
• Use applicable phrases and keywords right in your content, and make sure you provide answers to as many queries on your platform as possible in simple, readable text, adding screenshots and Infographics where applicable.

How to Optimize for the Featured Snippet?

• Provide detailed information about keywords and their rankings. Use the various available tools to ensure that important keywords find their way into your content.
• Format content according to the user’s intent.
• Be concise in the snippet section; make your content click-worthy and easily understandable.
• Include sources, research, and data to create the best content and organize the data into paragraphs, lists and tables as appropriate.
• Have an excellent landing page and show that your website has all the required information on the topic searched by users.

List of Words that Set Off and Activate Featured Snippets

Key Takeaways

Since Google introduced featured snippets in 2014, they remain one of the most prominent SERP changes in the last ten years. Well, what this article says to us is that once you are in the topmost results for a web page, putting additional efforts on building backlinks and authority signals don’t matter much for featured snippets rankings. 

While my guidelines mentioned in the article will help increase your chances of getting a featured snippet, I would recommend getting assistance from SEO professionals or an SEO agency to help you get a featured snippet more quickly and reap the benefits.