Today, I’m here to talk to you a little bit about featured snippets and how you can go about finding and optimizing your website to get that position, Zero featured snippet ranking. So what are we gonna cover today? The first thing that I’m gonna talk about is the different types of featured snippets that are out there because there are different things and there are different ways to optimize for each different type of snippet.
It’s important to know what type of snippets exists so that you can then figure out how to optimize specifically for that type. And to write my cv gonna show you my step-by-step process for finding opportunities. So find keywords where a snippet exists but you may not necessarily be in that snippet. I’m gonna show you how to do that. And then I’m also gonna break down how to optimize for featured snippets based on the different types that I’m gonna break down here for you.
Lists, Paragraphs, And Tables
Those are gonna be the three most common. You also have things like video snippets and stuff like that. But if you don’t do videos, it’s a little bit irrelevant. So lists, paragraphs, and tables are gonna be three that just about anybody with a content site can optimize for. So lists snippets. These are gonna be the snippets that you see in buyer’s guides. And step-by-step how to post super, super common, especially with affiliate SEO I see them all time.
You’ve got paragraph snippets actually the most common across the entire internet. So not just relevant to affiliates, but you know across the board, they’re the most common. Can you see these with question-and-answer-type posts? And the last is going to be table snippets. They’re a little bit less common but I do see them from time to time on buyer’s guides and specifically price queries. So people looking for pricing on different types of products.
Lists Snippets
If you’ve been doing affiliate SEO for any amount of time you’ve seen them before, the best headphones are under $300. That’s a query ran underneath that. You see Google has scraped data from headphonesty.com to come up with a list of the best headphones under $300. So you can see in that example it’s an actual numbered list. You can also have bolted list of a very similar process for how to optimize that.
Just looks a little bit different on Google. And paragraph snippets, you also surely see news before. Essentially it is just one or two sentences of Google answering a query. You see them all over the place and table snippets are a little bit less common. Again, I see them a lot with people looking for prices on stuff. So in this example, how much does a weight bench cost? The snippet has pulled up a chart of high-end entry-level, mid-range, and you know different prices for that same with like kayaks. So different prices are based on the type of kayaks.
Finding The Best Opportunities
You wanna make sure that you’re only going after targets that have potential because just because you rank for a keyword on page one, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to actually get that snippet. So you wanna make sure that you’re only looking at stuff where you actually stand a chance at getting the snippet? So the way that I do this is using Ahrefs and a filter.
You go into Ahrefs and you go into site Explorer and you look at the organic keywords. And then once you’re on that page you’re gonna select SERP features and featured snippets. And then you’re gonna isolate only keywords that you’re ranking in the top five for. And as part of that, you also wanna notice when Ahrefs last updated that data sometimes, like they can take a month or so to update.
You’re Not Looking At Outdated Data
You wanna make sure that you’re not looking at outdated data. And on that note, you always wanna check this certain manually because again, Ahrefs may not update as frequently as we want. So make sure that you check the cert manually to verify that the snippet exists and verify that you’re not in it and you should be.
If you wanna get more ideas for content down the road you can also throw competitors into Ahrefs and do this same sort of filter because it’s not gonna necessarily show you snippets that you can get right away but it’s gonna show you snippets or opportunities for you to write new content that you can get snippets for down the road. So I’ve got an example website here. It’s not my website, but it’s one that was in one of the screenshots earlier headphonesty.com.
Headphonesty.Com
I went ahead and put them into Ahrefs and I’m looking at the site explore here. So I’m gonna go over here to the site and click on organic keywords. So this list is all of the organic keywords that this website ranks for. So we wanna go ahead and isolate the ones with featured snippets. And this is not necessarily headphonesty has this snippet. This just means that that keyword is triggering some sort of snippets.
Then we wanna isolate only up to position five. So this is gonna show us anything we’re ranking the first second, third, fourth, or fifth for. Now if you cruise down this list you’ll notice these little, this little quotes. That means that the website that we put into the tool is actually ranking in the snippet. So for the purposes of this, you can kind of cruise pass all that.
Feature Snippet Exists
You wanna go to keywords where there actually aren’t these quotes because this means that a featured snippet exists, but you’re not in it. So these are where the opportunities start. So in this example, what headset does Ninja use? So we wanna make sure that we Google this so Ninja is a streamer, as far as I know.
Yeah, we have verified that there’s this snippet and we verify that we’re not in the snippet. So this is an opportunity for us to rank in this spot. So in this particular case, it is a paragraph snippet and ginfinityesports is ranking and headphonesty is number one. So this is definitely something with potential. So since we would go through this list and pick out all of these keywords where the quote isn’t there and that’s gonna show you all of the opportunities that you have to get into the snippets.
Optimizing For List Snippets
These are gonna be really, really important with affiliate SEO specifically because you’re gonna see these a lot on buyer’s guides. So this is gonna be money keyword type of stuff with dropped advising for. The first step is figuring out where you are in the queue. So just because Google only shows one snippet that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s only one that they’re considering.
There’s actually a keyboard command that you can throw straight into Google that’s going to show you who is ranking first for the snippet. If you put that keyboard command in it essentially shows you what the SERP looks like without them in it. So if somebody else is second in line you’re gonna see who’s second in line and third line, et cetera, for that snippet.
What’s Triggering The Snippet
The next thing is figuring out what’s triggering the snippet. So specifically for lists, I like to look at, you know whether or not this list is near an H-tag, is it actually a bulleted or numbered list, or is it just, you know, header tags and how are the target keywords being used? Like, are they in header tags? Is it in a sentence? Is it in the list specifically? And then you wanna replicate what your competition is doing, but just do it a little bit better.
Then after you do that, you just wanna re-index it and check if it is a positive, neutral, or negative result. So after you have verified that it’s the index you can essentially use that Q command. I’m gonna show you to see if you’ve moved up in the queue for the snippet. And you wanna repeat this process until you get it. So to be honest, finding snippets it’s a guessing check sort of thing.
Finding Snippets
There isn’t an exact science to doing it. You just have to look at the clues that Google gives you and adjust and see where you land. So I’m gonna show you exactly what I mean here. The first thing I’m gonna show you is what I meant about the cue. So I have this keyword here from earlier, best headphones under 300. So headphonesty is ranking for them for that keyword.
Let’s say we’re not headphonesty we’re somebody else we wanna see where we are in the queue. So what you can do is you can put a minus sign And put the domain name of the website that you want to take out. And this is gonna show you what the circle looks like if that website didn’t exist. So in this case, there’s only one potential snippet.
Find The Best Potential Snippet
Sometimes you’ll see someone else come up. Sometimes you won’t. So if you don’t see anybody else come up that means that nobody else is even being considered. So when you’re doing your research, that actually only gives you one competitor that you need to look up. So when I actually see this snippet here, I see this intro content here and I see a numbered list and an image.
These are the things that I’m gonna look for on the page to see kind of what’s going on to dissect what we need to do to get the snippet. So the first thing I’m gonna do is copy this just to figure out where it is on the page. This is the page we’re looking at. So Google is pulling this little sentence here. And if you notice it’s in between two H-tags. You wanna see what H-tags those are?
Create Headings
This is actually H1. So these guys have more than one H1 on a page. That’s generally not good but they’re still getting the snippet. So they’ve got an H1 here. They’ve got a sentence that Google really likes. They pulled that directly into the SERP and then they’ve got, I’m assuming H2. So best case scenario you in this case would want to use your keywords and an H2 tag.
Also Read: A Link Building Team’s Workflow in Action
I’m not gonna tell you to put two H1 on the page and have a little sentence here that essentially it’s repeating the query. So here are our top picks for the best noise-canceling headphones under 300. So here’s what we pick to answer this query. And then right underneath that what’s interesting about this? This is a list snippet, but there’s no list on the page.
Header Tags Are Just Numbered
These header tags are just numbered. So what I would do here is recreate this number you know same here, list out the products make sure there’s a number in front of them, and see what else I’ve been looking at here. Yeah, that’s where I would start just with those header tags and playing around with keyword insertion there. And then again, you would re-index it.
If you have moved up into the queue at all, ’cause in this particular keyword there was just one potential for the snippets. If you optimize for it you’re either gonna see yourself, or jump into this snippet. You’re gonna see yourself jumping to the number two slot or you’re gonna see no change. So if it’s no change, just keep what you did and keep tweaking until you get what you want.
