Google's featured snippets provide a convenient and useful way to give an answer to your search query. Learn how these snippets are created, how they work, and more.
This blog post is all about how Google's featured snippets work. Featured snippets are these boxes of info that show up in the search results when someone searches for a question or something people commonly google. Basically, Google tries to predict what you are going to type and tells you what they think is the answer so you don't have to spend time hunting through different websites trying to find an answer.
Google's featured snippets work by automatically pulling a relevant question from search queries and putting it into an answer box. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense because Google's whole existence is to answer questions that people ask. If you are interested in showing up in the featured snippets, then understanding why these snippets appear for certain keywords and not others will be extremely helpful for your SEO.
Featured snippets are not just a cool thing that some people get to see while other don't. Instead, they show up for specific keywords, which means that there is value in knowing what pulls these specific snippets up when someone searches for a given keyword. A few years ago, it was difficult to figure out why some keywords showed up in featured snippets and other ones didn't. But recently, Google has made google snippets so that you can see how your content is ranked for different keywords and use this knowledge to increase your ranking.
Google keeps a list of the terms that are most often used in your corpus (the number of websites that link to you) and then uses these terms to determine the best snippet for each of these terms. This means that Google actually uses your content to determine what is the best question that you can answer for a given keyword.
Let's say you are writing content about diabetes. If Google sees that most of your corpus is about diabetes, then it knows you are trying to help people with their questions about this disease. If someone searches for how to treat diabetes, then Google will display your content in the featured snippet because they know you have great information on that subject.
This might seem like a disadvantage to those who don't have a lot of good content on their site, but the good news is that it requires very little effort to get google search snippets on your site. You might have even noticed that the featured snippets have appeared on your site because you updated a page with new content and Google decided to show it in a featured search snippet.
The easiest way to see what your content looks like in the featured snippet box is to go to any of your pages, add "?" at the end of your keyword, and click search. For example: keyword? . Then hover over any of the links that come up. That will show you how Google shows your content in the featured snippet box.
You can also use the My Sites feature to see what your content looks like. Simply go to Google's homepage and click on the magnifying glass on any of your websites. You can then choose to "View on my site" and you'll get a full view of all the pages that have been indexed by Google (including featured snippets).
By looking at these two ways you can see how your content is being indexed, it will be easier for you to find bad links and delete them from your site. If a link looks like it is not being indexed, then this is a very good reason for you to review that page and make sure it isn't too technical or otherwise non-user-friendly.
If you want to learn how to get featured snippets, then you can use these strategies:
Create good content. The more interesting and helpful your content is the more it will rank for that keyword. If Google sees that your content is valuable, then it will show up in the featured snippet box.
Create a lot of pages with good content. Don't be greedy and try to load all of your new pages at once;instead, create several pages and add them over time. This will allow Google to have time to list all of your pages and rank them accordingly.