Determine Next Level Featured Snippet Opportunities
A great opportunity to improve traffic and awareness to your site is provided by featured snippets. Much has already been said about this SERP feature, yet there is still much to be said:
In a Whiteboard Friday podcast, Crystal Carter discussed how to improve existing material for featured snippets (complete with a useful flow chart!). which is quite instructive. Seriously, take a look.
So what may I possibly contribute to this discussion? Let’s see how SimpSocial Pro can assist you in finding possibilities to acquire (or steal) featured snippets inside your current toolbox. You may then use the unending knowledge of people like Crystal and Britney to take your material to new levels (and improve its SERP characteristics).
The Featured Snippets Recap
To refresh our memories before we get started, let’s briefly discuss what featured snippets are. A SERP feature known as a featured snippet attempts to respond to a question by utilising a webpage’s snippet. Google may try to respond to a searcher’s request by extracting a chunk of the site’s content for direct display in the results.
Featured snippets are distinguishable by the presence of a source link at the bottom of the feature. They can be presented in a variety of styles, such as paragraphs, lists of numbers, bulleted lists, and more. These features should not be confused with answer features, which usually lack a source link and have a somewhat different layout.
After reviewing what featured snippets are, let’s go on to discuss how to use SimpSocial Pro to find possibilities to obtain them.
SimpSocial Pro campaigns
You can utilize the various data views and tools provided by SimpSocial Pro Campaigns to look for highlighted snippet chances. We’ll start by looking at the part under “Rankings Overview.”
Rankings
You can view and follow your tracked site’s rankings for all of your tracked keywords in the main Rankings tab. Anywhere your site has been awarded a featured snippet, it will be recorded as having a rank of #1 and a pair of scissors-shaped featured snippet icons next to it.
Pro tip: I chose to designate these keywords as “featured snippet” in the screenshot above so I can monitor them and see if I lose a featured snippet as a result of a competitor passing me or Google adjusting the SERP for those keywords so that a snippet is no longer included.
We can start to identify possibilities to take advantage of some of this valuable SERP real estate by switching to the Competition tab of our rankings section. The scissors icon will be present for each keyword for which the #1 ranking has resulted in a featured snippet, just as we observed on the Rankings page. In order to determine where our competitors are gaining those SERP characteristics and where we are in relation to them, we can arrange our tracked terms by the ranks of our competitors. By providing me with a side-by-side comparison, can assist me in identifying featured pieces that are close at hand.
Any term where we already have a top-ten position and a featured snippet is available presents an opportunity for me to restructure and improve our material in order to secure that feature.
Featured SERPs
Let’s extend our focus a little more now that we’ve found prospects tied especially to your competition. Additional information on highlighted snippet options outside of competitor rankings can be found in the SERP Features section of your campaign.
The tool will record both how many of your tracked keywords have a highlighted snippet in the SERP and how many of those your site has acquired in this stage of your campaign.
This may present a fantastic chance to look into and find featured snippet prospects outside of the ranks of your rivals. To find terms that incorporate this SERP feature, we may filter by featured snippet. From there, we can find keywords where our site is not currently highlighted. An icon for a grey-featured snippet serves as a sign for this. We might see a button to enlarge the Insights column for keywords for which our site is currently ranked but not in the featured snippet.
By opening up this drawer, we can see the actual URL and the website from which the current featured snippet is being taken. Then, we can make use of this data to find opportunities for original content. Can we possibly answer the question more effectively? What formatting and markup is being used in the post for the current snippet? How can we improve the quality of my own content?
Pro tip: Your Campaign’s SERP features section may also be exported to CSV. When a SERP feature is present but your site is not included, the export will display TRUE to reflect this. Your website will be marked as Included if it is shown in the SERP.
Keyword Finder
Now that we’ve looked at how to utilize SimpSocial Pro Campaigns to find and track featured snippet chances, let’s take a closer look at some ways that Keyword Explorer may be used to complement that data. The Keyword Explorer tool is a priceless addition to your toolbox, whether you’re conducting keyword research for a new client, trying to find featured snippet opportunities for your website, or seeking for content ideas.
Let’s first go over a method that can be used to find potential highlighted snippet prospects. In her Whiteboard Friday episode titled “Featured Snippets: What to Know & How to Target,” Britney Muller also discussed this workflow.
1. In Keyword Explorer, click Explore by Site and input your URL.
You can enter a root domain, subdomain, subfolder, or precise page to see the keywords you are already ranking for from the Keyword Explorer > Explore by Site menu. If you are conducting research for a particular area of your business or component of your website, the subdomain and subfolder choices might be quite useful. For instance, you might want to collect featured snippets for the subfolder of your blog.
2. Sort your outcomes by rank
You can choose to view the Ranking Keywords after inputting your URL and clicking Analyze. To see only the keywords for which you are ranking on the first page (positions 1–10), filter this list by ranking.
3. Include key phrases in a keyword list
We now have a list of keywords with the potential to appear in featured snippets. Let’s delve a bit more deeply. Knowing which keywords you are number one for can be very beneficial, but it may not provide your site many new prospects. It may be worthwhile to add those to a campaign to track and analyze over time. Due to Google’s deduplication of featured snippet results in the SERP, if your site is listed in the featured snippet, it is shown as position #1 in the SERP. If a site has earned the featured snippet, the same URL will not be listed in the other SERP results. In order to add them to a Keyword List in Keyword Explorer, let’s find and choose the keywords for which our site is ranked 2 to 10.
Pro tip: Exporting your Ranking Keywords to CSV can be useful if your site is ranking for a lot of different keywords. Then, you may use filters and sorting based on rank and search traffic to find your best possibilities and add them by copying and pasting to a keyword list.
4. Look for keywords with opportunities for featured snippets.
Let’s further refine it now that we have a list of probable keywords. To see only the terms that have a featured snippet in the SERP, we can filter our keyword list by SERP Feature.
Then, we can use these keywords to add them to a campaign, conduct additional research on them, or check out the content that is already displayed in the SERP to find out how to make our own content better.
Pro tip: You can export the data from the Rank Check tool to CSV to examine which page on your site is currently showing up on the first page of the SERP for these keywords.
Search by Keyword
The next step is a workflow that will guide us in finding fresh possibilities and potential content suggestions for featured snippet inclusion. Once more, we’ll use Keyword Explorer, but this time we’ll use the Explore by Keyword area.
1. In term Explorer, select Explore by Keyword and input your seed term.
We have the option to enter a seed keyword or phrase and explore the SERP, keyword metrics, and keyword suggestions under Keyword Explorer > Explore by Keyword. For the purpose of this example, let’s look for featured snippets and content ideas for a blog article about handmade ice cream.
2. Select “Keyword ideas”
Following the entry of “homemade ice cream” and the click of Analyze, we can click on Keyword Suggestions to view a list of other keyword suggestions along with their monthly volume and relevance.
3. Use the “are questions” filter to discover keyword recommendations.
Given that featured snippets are frequently added to SERPs when Google tries to directly respond to a query, we will need to know what people are searching for when we write a blog post about handmade ice cream. We may restrict the keyword recommendations in Keyword recommendations to only show those that are queries.
In an effort to identify potential content ideas, we can use filtering to discover what questions are being asked and how frequently.
4. Choose keywords and include them in a keyword list.
The checkboxes on the left allow us to select subjects and inquiries that may be pertinent to our new blog and put them to a Keyword List for further examination.
5. Look for keyword opportunities with Featured Snippets
The last step in our previous workflow will be revisited, and we’ll filter our keyword list by SERP Feature to display only the terms that have a featured snippet in the SERP.
We now have a list of questions and topic suggestions for our next post on homemade ice cream. Along with the format and markup for our posts, this can aid to inform our content. For instance, we might choose to outline a step-by-step guide for making ice cream at home. Or, we might provide a vanilla ice cream recipe. The greatest ingredients to utilize while building an ice cream case to boost our flavors, or we could even make an entire essay about them. Regardless of what we choose to publish, we can now use our brand-new list of topics to use the featured snippet optimization techniques and strategies provided by Crystal Carter and Britney Muller.
Conclusion
Featured snippets aren’t going away any time soon; in fact, it seems like there are more and more different types of them appearing. Finding possibilities to improve current material or produce new information for inclusion in them might raise your site’s exposure (and possibly its traffic). Now that you’re prepared, I hope you’ll go investigate those opportunities using the SimpSocial Tools. You’ll be able to succeed if you have these useful workflows in your toolset!
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