Boostability Webinar on Featured Snippets

On September 11, Mike Marsh, Boostability’s SEO manager, co-hosted a webinar about featured snippets. Mike leads the SEO campaigns for Boostability as an entity, helping guide the content team to create materials deemed important by clients, consumers, and search engines alike. He was joined by Brady Amerson, who leads the implementation team in their Orem office. Brady’s team specializes in implementing content and technical solutions to enhance the user experience, search engine crawlability and page rank for Boostability’s client’s websites.

Here’s a quick rundown of the most important points Mike and Brady covered. But as is the case with experts, they said it better. Click here to listen to the full webinar.

(Position) Zero to Hero

Marsh and Amerson began with an overview of Position Zero, a feature that Google has implemented to show information directly in the search results. It is often provided in the form of a Featured Snippet, but there are a few other options. 

Rich Results

A result that includes styling, images, and other features. Examples of content types with rich results include book , recipe, and product. Examples of features include breadcrumb and review snippets.

Featured Snippets

Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page, not after as with our standard format. Results displayed this way are called “featured snippets.”

Some of the most common formats are paragraph, list and video.

Carousel

Rich results that display in a sequential list or gallery. Most often, the carousel features articles from a single site (known as a host carousel). The carousel can also feature a variety of publishers, like Top stories (or videos). 

This feature works best when used in combination with one of the following features: Article, Recipe, Course, Restaurant, Movie.

Article

News, sports, or blog article displayed with Top Stories carousel and rich result features, such as headline text and larger-than-thumbnail images.

Local Business Listing

Business details displayed in the Google Knowledge Graph, including open hours, ratings, and directions.

What’s the deal with Schema markup?

Schema markup connects the dots between keywords, helping search engines deliver results that answers questions faster and more completely. Featured snippets launched out of this innovative programming, helping users find direct answers to questions and information that actually matters, while weeding out the stuff that doesn’t.

Being At the Mercy of Google

At the end of the day, it’s up to Google to decide which content pieces get featured as rich snippets. But there are a few things you can do to make it more likely. Here’s a handy flowchart to get you started.

But can this hurt my SEO?

Featured snippets can sometimes lead to a downturn in click through rates. If the snippet answers the question a user is looking for, they might not click through to the full article. But it’s important to remember that clicks aren’t the endgame. Brand recognition and ranking higher than competitors are valuable additions to SEO campaigns.

Now what?

Boostability is the leading white label SEO company world-wide. We’re here to guide you through every step of the process, from choosing keywords to getting featured in the rich snippets. You can listen to the full webinar here, or contact a Partner Success Team member to learn more about our white label SEO program!