Featured Snippets: How Much Do You Really Know About Them?

Currently, there are three types of featured snippets that appear in Google search results: paragraphs, lists and tables. Carousel results are entirely separate from featured snippets.



Paragraph featured snippet:





List featured snippet:





Table featured snippet:





 

Featured snippets are not necessarily pulled from the top organic result. In fact, according to STAT's recent whitepaper, "Rise to the Top with Featured Snippets" (registration required), "the majority of snippets come from websites that don’t even rank number one organically."

In their July 2016 follow-up study on featured snippets, STAT found that Wikipedia owns 15% of all snippets with images (slide 17). Images are present in over a third of Wikipedia's featured snippets.

Structured data markup is not required to obtain a featured snippet -- in fact, the website with the most featured snippets (Wikipedia) doesn't use this kind of markup at all! However, many SEOs believe that markup from schema.org, when applied correctly, can increase your chances of getting a featured snippet.

According to Google, featured snippets are not part of the Knowledge Graph. A featured snippet is considered "a normal search result, emphasized with special layout."

It should be common sense to that anything that lowers your CTR is bad for your website traffic!

This is true now, but it didn’t used to be the case. In STAT’s first study (January 2016), there were no occurrences of featured snippets surfacing for subjective queries. Six months later, in their July 2016 study refresh, subjective queries were the biggest gainer, triggering a featured snippet 18% of the time.

The STAT Featured Snippets Whitepaper (registration required) notes, "We did ... spot bolded answers and bolded titles alongside paragraphs, tables, and lists, and occasionally these posts would include additional titles or text. This occurred in 2.1 percent of the snippets that we observed."

You can also see bolded answers in the search result for "how does SEO work" below:

According to Ahref's 2017 featured snippets study, long-tail keywords (which naturally have lower search volume) were far more likely to trigger a featured snippet result than more popular, highly searched keywords.

To prevent your page content from being displayed as a featured snippet in search results, Google recommends using the <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet" /> tag on the page.

Unfortunately, as Google's Gary Illyes confirmed recently at SMX Advanced 2017, Google is not actively working to bring data about featured snippets into Google Search Console. Perhaps one day!

According to Ahrefs' featured snippets study, "only 30.9% of featured snippets rank at the very top."

As Barry Schwartz reported earlier this year, featured snippets often contain images sourced from a different website than the text -- much to the chagrin of webmasters.

In some cases, Google can look at your page content and create a list featured snippet when appropriate. For example, this featured snippet, which appears for the query, "top sneakers 2017," is pulled from the page's h3 tags.

According to STAT's research (registration required), "Local pack results and featured snippets never appear on the same SERP in our data set."

You can always click images shown in featured snippets. However, doing so will take you to a larger version of the image -- not to the webpage containing the snippet text!

According to Ahrefs data for ~112 million keywords, around 14 million -- or 12.29% -- returned featured snippet results.

According to Ahrefs' 2017 study, featured snippets do appear to reduce the overall number of clicks on search results -- which isn't too surprising, since many users are getting the answers they need without having to click.

According to a "Ahrefs’ Study Of 2 Million Featured Snippets," released in May 2017, a featured snippet in "position zero" (the top of the page, above the first organic listing) only receives ~8.6% of clicks on average; meanwhile, the top organic listing receives ~19.6% of clicks on average.