How To Optimize Featured Snippet to Rank On Position Zero

Getting your website pages ranked on Position One is excellent, but have you ever thought of ranking it on Position Zero? You would have seen snippets that appear even above the topmost ranking page when you search for some specific topic on search engines. These results are known as featured snippets. As they are ranked even above Position One, we call it Position Zero. How can you make your website rank on Position Zero? 

Though it’s not very simple, you can do it by keeping featured snippets in mind while doing keyword research and optimizing your pages. Simple improvements in your SEO strategy can help you rank your pages on position zero. Before making any changes to your strategy, you must have a thorough understanding of what features snippets are, why they are beneficial for your website, and how you can achieve them. 

What are Featured Snippets?

Featured snippets are the sections of the text of web pages that answer a specific question asked by the users. These appear on the SERPs, sometimes on top of the page, and include a link to the webpage under the highlighted content. As per Google, the search results sometimes show highlighted text or listings where the snippet describing a page appears above the page URL. The results shown in this way are called featured snippets. 

Featured snippets are not always ‘Position Zero’ results. These may be even below a few top-ranking pages in the form of ‘People Also Ask’ answers and other formats. Many people confuse ‘rich snippets’ with the featured snippets. However, the two are not the same. Rich snippets are just normal web pages that contain some additional details, such as star ratings, addresses, phone numbers, etc. 

Types of Features Snippets

There are five major types of featured snippets as listed below:

1. Paragraph Snippets or Extracts: These are the most common types of featured snippets that consist of single or multiple sentences providing a brief description of the information present on the webpage. In order to boost your click-through rate, it is advised to optimize most of your pages for paragraph snippets. As you can only give a hint of the topic with a paragraph, users will have to click on the page link in order to understand the entire topic properly.

2. List Snippets: Numbered list snippets are another popular type of featured snippets describing the steps of a process in the form of sequential points. Usually, these snippets provide answers to ‘How To’ questions, such as recipes, lists of bests in some specific category, things that rank in a particular order, and other procedures. 

3. Table Snippets: These are another type of featured snippets containing one or multiple data points for numerous entries. As the name suggests, these snippets are shown in the form of a table and provide very precise information about the topic. To show such snippets, Google gathers information from the HTML elements of a webpage and shows it in the form of a table for a better understanding of the users.

4. People Also Ask Snippets: These featured snippets are not ranked on ‘Position Zero’ unlike most other types listed above. These generally appear after a few top-ranking pages in the form of FAQs that reveal the answers to the questions related to genuine queries. 

5. Video Snippets: As the name suggests, these snippets appear in the form of videos instead of text. You might have come across instances when you search for something and the first result is a video instead of a webpage. These are YouTube videos that answer a query better than the web pages.

Steps to Achieve Position Zero Rankings

Below are the steps you can take to achieve position zero rankings:

1. Maintain The Pages That are Already Ranked at Position Zero

Regularly monitor the pages that are already ranked at Position Zero and keep an eye on your top-performing pages. You should keep track of pages that are gaining zero position rankings and also the ones that are losing them. When you track which pages have lost zero rankings, you can focus on retaining your previous rankings.

To ensure this, you will need to focus on basic SEO optimization of your pages, which includes best on-page practices, using concise URL paths, keyword density, sufficient word count, etc. Update the information on these pages regularly and try adding answers to related questions. 

2. Create Content for Featured Snippets

This step requires you to make a few changes to your current content creation strategy. If your pages are not ranking at position zero and you want them to rank, you will have to improve your keyword research and article structure. The following tips might be helpful:

• Generate content around question queries, i.e. content that answers ‘what,’ ‘why,’ ‘how,’ etc related to a particular topic. 

• Look for keyword queries that already show featured snippets and optimize your content for these keywords.

• Structure your articles in a Q&A format. You can add subheads in the form of questions. This improves your content’s relevancy for ‘People Also Ask’ or ‘People Also Search For’ snippets.

• Follow Google's best practices for content creation.

3. Use ‘Opt Out’ When Required

There are instances (though rare) when zero-ranking snippets underperform compared to the top-ranked pages. Or sometimes it’s just more important for you to bring users to your landing page rather than just occupying position zero. If this is the case, you don’t need to hesitate in opting out of the ‘featured snippet’ option. You can track conversions with and without ‘featured snippets’ and go for an option that seems to bring the desired results better.

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MadHawks, being a top digital marketing agency, provides the best SEO services. Our team analyzes your business details thoroughly to understand your requirements and opportunity areas. Based on this, the SEO professionals at MadHawks prepare the best strategy that works for your website. If you want to make your website pages rank higher and achieve position zero rankings, contact us today!

FAQs

1. What are the featured snippet formats?

Ans. Featured snippets are text excerpts from webpages that appear above the top-ranking pages when you search for a particular query on search engines.

2. What are the different types of featured snippets in SEO?

Ans. The five different types of featured snippets in SEO include paragraph snippets, sequential lists, table snippets, video snippets, and ‘People Also Ask’ snippets.

3. How long is a featured snippet?

Ans. The average length of paragraph snippets is roughly 40-50 words, i.e. around 300 characters. In the case of sequential snippets, a list snippet can have a maximum of 8 points.

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