Featured snippets[1], also known as “position zero” placements on Google, have been receiving their fair share of glory and blame lately.
While some big corporations like Forbes[2] went ahead and questioned if Google is stealing traffic with the featured snippet, content creators like me have found it easy to get more traffic, thanks to being able to rank small sites on a featured snippet.
This post will give you a brief idea on how you can rank a page on Google’s featured snippet — without building any links to that page.
Understand the types
There are three major types of featured snippets that you can go for. As most of our clients are bloggers, we tend to go for either the paragraph snippets or the list snippets. Table snippet is another popular one that you can target.
Here’s a quick graph from Ahrefs about the snippet type and their percentages.
Targeting the right keywords
Once you finalize the type of snippet that you would want to go for, it is time to dig deep into your keyword research[3] to find keywords that suit your blog and match the requirements for the type of snippet that you are going after.
If you are going for a paragraph snippet, you will have to find keywords that are primarily related to these types:
If you are trying to rank for a numeric list (numbered list or bullet points), the idea would be to structure your content in a way so that it offers step by step guides to someone. As per our experience, Google only shows a numeric list on featured snippet when the