Google’s featured snippets started as an experiment : Ask people outside your immediate reach

Move away from your target audience and ask random people what questions they have on a specific topic and what would be their concerns. Looking out of the box can always give a fresh perspective.

MyBlogU (disclaimer: I am the founder) is a great way to do that. Just post a new project in the ” Brainstorm” section and ask members to contribute their thoughts.

Seed Keywords: Ask your friends and followers

Seed Keywords is a simple tool that allows you to discover related keywords with help from your friends and followers. Simply create a search scenario, share it on social media, and ask your followers to type in the keywords they would use to solve it.

Try not to be too leading with your search scenario. Avoid guiding people to the search phrase you think they should be using.

Here’s an example of a scenario:

And here are the suggestions from real people:

Obviously, you can also create similar surveys with tools like WP Forms or Google Forms.

Organize questions and keywords

I use spreadsheets to organize questions and keyword phrases I discover (see more on this below). Some of these questions may become a whole piece of content, while others will be subsections of broader articles:

• I don’t try to analyze search volume to decide whether any of those questions deserve to be covered in a separate article or a subsection. (Based on the Ahrefs research and my own observations, there is no direct correlation between the popularity of the term and whether it will trigger a featured snippet).

• Instead, I use my best judgment (based on my niche knowledge and research) as to how much I will be able to tell to answer each particular question. If it’s a lot, I’ll probably turn it into a separate article and use keyword research to identify subsections of the future piece.

Optimizing for featured snippets

Start with on-page SEO

There is no magic button or special markup which will make sure your site gets featured. Of course, it’s a good idea to start with non-specific SEO best practices, simply because being featured is only possible when you rank high for the query.

Randy Milanovic did a good overview of tactics of making your content findable. Eric Brantner over at Coschedule has put together a very useful SEO checklist, and of course never forget to go through Moz’s SEO guide.

That being said, the best way to get featured is to provide a better answer. Here are a few actionable tips:

1. Aim at answering each question concisely

My own observation of answer boxes has led me to think that Google prefers to feature an answer which was given within one paragraph.

An older study by AJ Ghergich cites that the average length of a paragraph snippet is 45 words (the maximum is 97 words), so let it be your guideline as to how long each answer should be in order to get featured.

This doesn’t mean your articles need to be one paragraph long. On the contrary, these days Google seems to give preference to long-form content (also known as ” cornerstone content,” which is obviously a better way to describe it because it’s not just about length) that’s broken into logical subsections and features attention-grabbing images. 

Even if you don’t believe that cornerstone content receives any special treatment in SERPs, focusing on long articles will help you to cover more related questions within one piece (more on that below).

All you need to do is to adjust your blogging style just a bit:

• Ask the question in your article (that may be a subheading)

• Immediately follow the question with a one-paragraph answer

• Elaborate further in the article

This tactic may also result in higher user retention because it makes any article better structured and thus a much easier read. To quote AJ Ghergich,

When you use data to fuel topic ideation, content creation becomes more about resources and less about brainstorming.

2. Be factual and organize well

Google loves numbers, steps and lists. We’ve seen this again and again: More often than not, answer boxes will list the actual ingredients, number of steps, time to cook, year and city of birth, etc.

Use Google’s guide on writing meta descriptions to get a good idea what kind of summaries and answers they are looking to generate snippets (including featured snippets).

Google loves well-structured, factual, and number-driven content.

There’s no specific markup to structure your content. Google seems to pick up <table>, <ol>, and <ul> well and doesn’t need any other pointers. Using H2 and H3 subheadings will make your content easier to understand for both Google and your readers.

3. Make sure one article answers many related questions

Google is very good at determining synonymic and closely related questions, so should be you. There’s no point in creating a separate page answering each specific question.

Creating one solid article addressing many related questions is a much smarter strategy if you aim at getting featured in answer boxes. This leads us to the next tactic:

4. Organize your questions properly

To combine many closely related questions in one article, you need to organize your queries properly. This will also help you structure your content well.

I have a multi-level keyword organization strategy that can be applied here as well:

• A generic keyword makes a section or a category of the blog

• A more specific search query becomes the title of the article

• Even more specific queries determine the subheadings of the article and thus define its structure

  • There will be multiple queries that are so closely related that they will all go under a single subheading

For example:

Serpstat helps me a lot when it comes to both discovering an article idea and then breaking it into subtopics. Check out its ” Questions” section. It will provide hundreds of questions containing your core term and then generate a tag cloud of other popular terms that come up in those questions:

Clicking any word in the tag cloud will filter results down to those questions that only have that word in them. These are subsections for your article.

Here’s another good guide on identifying your keyword modifiers (groups) and using those to structure your content.

Here’s a good example of how related questions can help you structure the article:

5. Make sure to use eye-grabbing images

Paragraph featured snippets with images are ridiculously eye-catching, even more so than regular featured snippets. Honestly, I wasn’t able to identify how to add an image so that it’s featured. I tried naming it differently and I tried marking it as “featured” in the WordPress editor. Google seems to pick up a random image from the page without me being able to point it to a better version.

That being said, the only way to influence that is to make sure ALL your in-article images are eye-catching, branded, and annotated well, so that no matter which one Google ends up featuring, it will look nice. 

• Here’s a great selection of WordPress plugins that will allow you to easily visualize your content (put together graphs, tables, charts, etc.) while working on a piece.

• There are lots of image editing apps and tools to create original images

• Finally, there are ways to watermark your images (to brand them better) or even to create a free logo in case you don’t have one yet.

Optimizing and branding your images well is crucial for featured snippet optimization because images are often included in featured boxes, and in many cases those images come from different domains.

Clicking images within featured images enlarges that image inviting the user to go to the linked site. In other words, this can be a traffic-building opportunity for non-featured sites.

Google is pulling these images from Google Images search results, so image optimization is important for driving traffic from featured snippets.

Also don’t forget to update and re-upload the images (on WordPress). WordPress adds dates to image URLs, so even if you update an article with newer information the images can be considered kind of old.

Monitor your progress

You are already monitoring your organic positions, and featured snippets are tracked as #1 position these days.

For your most important keywords, you may want to set up closer monitoring to be alerted when Google changes anything:

How about structured markup?

Many people would suggest using Schema.org (simply because it’s been a “thing” to recommend adding schema for anything and everything) but the aforementioned Ahrefs study shows that there’s no correlation between featured results and structured markup.

Conclusion

It takes a lot of research and planning and you cannot be sure when you’ll see the results (especially if you don’t have too many top 10 rankings just yet) but think about this way: Being featured in Google search results is your incentive to work harder on your content. You’ll achieve other important goals on your way there:

• You’ll discover hundreds of new content ideas (and thus will rank for a wider variety of various long-tail keywords)

• You’ll learn to research each topic more thoroughly (and thus will build more incoming links because people tend to link to in-depth articles)

• You’ll learn to structure your articles better (and thus achieve a lower bounce rate because it will be easier to read your articles)

Update: We have released a featured snippet optimization tool. With it, you can see exactly what your featured snippet opportunities are and what it may take to grab each of them (based on where the featured page ranks organically, where your page ranks and what type of featured snippet to optimize for.)