Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are snippets of information, usually about a paragraph long, taken from a web page and displayed at the top of a Google search result. Before they Featured Snippets were called, they were often referred to as Google Answers because they generally have the format of an answer to a direct or implied question posed as a search query to Google. There is debate in the search community about the relative value of a Featured Snippets - while you are working with a Featured Snippet land at the top of the search results, which is good for awareness, it can lead to users not clicking further because they find what they are looking for directly in the search result without clicking. However, this has not always been the case.

In the early days of Featured Snippets they often meant an additional placement in the search results - the web page was Featured Snippet and linked from the traditional blue links in the result. Now count Featured Snippets as position 1, and that is usually the only place a web page ranks in this search result - there is no more duplication. When there were still duplicates, some studies have shown that this increases the Click-through rate of a search result increased by 20 %. When Google eliminated the additional entries, the CTR back to a normal or even lower level.

For this reason the Featured Snippet-strategy in SEO match your most important KPI - if that's what the Traffic is, it may be better to look directly under the Featured Snippet to rank or Featured Snippets to have partial answers, but still entice users to click through. However, if brand positioning, awareness and familiarity are important, it's a good strategy to have as many Featured Snippets as possible.