Even if you know nothing about SEO, it’s highly likely you’ll have come across featured snippets before whilst searching on Google. Featured snippets are excerpts from websites selected by Google that best answer a search query. For example, as seen by the screenshot below, I entered a simple search query asking “can I travel to space?”
Firstly, you’ll see the featured snippet presented from iexplore which answers my question right away without having to enter any website.
In fact, these results are often referred to as organic zero as they feature after the paid ads at the top of the SERPs results. This was introduced by Google in 2014 in an effort to provide useful information to answer search queries much quicker.
Featured snippets are pretty good if you have a good content strategy to target consumer queries related to your business. However, they also prevent some users visiting a website altogether once their query is resolved.
Following this featured snippet, you can also see a “people also ask” box which provides other queries users have searched for that is related to my initial question. Now in terms of SEO, you may have optimised your website to detail everything about travelling to space. But will it show above or be included in the featured snippets?
The better content strategy you have, the more likely Google will select information from your website to present to the user in position zero. In fact, the majority of featured snippets retrieve their content from one of the top 10 positions in SERPs.
So is it worth targeting featured snippets? If you want to feature above the organic results then yes it is definitely worth optimising your content to be selected for a featured snippet. However, if you provide the user with all the information they need in the snippet, they may be unlikely to seek out more information on your website.
[Updated 07/09/20]
