30-second summary:
- YouTube is one of the most featured domains in Google.
- Unlike any other heavily featured sites, YouTube.com provides any brand an easy way to host a brand-owned asset for it to get featured.
- To capture more video-driven featured snippet opportunities, create a video version for each keyword-driven content asset you create.
- There are tools that make video creation quite scalable. Those include online video creators and Zoom.
- Regardless of how you create those videos, make sure there’s a meaningful (even search-optimized) voiceover as Google is using that (and the video transcripts) to generate featured snippets.
- Use traditional SEO practices to let Google discover and rank your videos. Like with regularly featured snippets, video featured snippets heavily depend on the organic rankings.
YouTube provides brands with all kinds of unique marketing opportunities, one of which is an ability to build extra organic visibility through both video carousels[1] and featured snippets.
Why YouTube?
According to Ahrefs, YouTube.com ranks in the top five organic searches for 139,830,455 queries. Of those, it is being featured for 1,177,203 queries (as of September 2020).
[Screenshot source: Ahrefs[2] as of September 2020]
This makes YouTube one of the most featured domains out there.
For comparison, en.wikipedia.org is being featured for 2,644,918 search queries (again, according to Ahrefs data).
Unlike Wikipedia, YouTube videos can be owned by brands. Anyone can create a YouTube video and get featured with it. This means the video creator holds full control over the message of the featured asset.
This is gold.
It is not easy to determine why YouTube is being featured so heavily:
- Are YouTube videos being featured because they tend to rank so high
- Or are YouTube videos being featured because Google has found