Tuesday Tidbit: What the heck's a featured snippet in Google, do I want one, and how do I get one?

Welcome to pre-turkey Tuesday! Before digging into that 1,000 calorie meal with your favorite people around you, let's chat Google, shall we?

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Featured snippets: What are they? 

You may have noticed as of late that you can search something in Google and it'll bring up the answer right there at the top of the search results, resulting in you, well, not having to do much searching to find your answer. 

For instance, let's say you want to know where Santa comes from, so you type in "where does santa claus come from." Here are your results:

As you can see, Google has found your answer for you, without you having to do any clicking on any results. While this is great for you, the searcher, you the marketer is cringing, right? Because Google is stealing our clicks! You might click through on that featured result to learn more, but odds are you've found your answer and you're now moving on to researching why your cat is afraid of cucumbers.

So, why would you want your website content pulled into one of these snippets? Won't that reduce clicks to your site?

Not necessarily! Of course, every situation and query is different, but I want to show you what I've experienced with this firsthand. Last year around Christmastime, one of ArcStone's clients had a piece of their content pulled into a featured snippet. As of this writing, they still hold the snippet. Let's look at entrances on the page that was featured:

First of all, just ignore that anomaly of low traffic in June - that's not related to what we're talking about. See at the beginning when their answer to a question started climbing up in search engine visibility? Then WHAM, it happened - featured snippet. The traffic has since leveled out, but it maintains steady levels of people clicking through to see more from that feature snippet result.

Would there be a higher amount of traffic if the result was simply number one in results, without being a featured snippet? We can guess at it, but it's hard to know. However, there are clearly some pros to having a featured snippet taken from your website.

How to get a featured snippet

Your best chance of getting a featured snippet is to:

1. Research search results. Come up with a couple questions you could answer and search them yourself. What other answers are out there? Does it look like the query gets enough searches? Are there other words you should be doing?

2. If you've determined that those results are where you belong, clearly (and without much fluff) answer a question that you're an industry expert for. This could be in the form of a how-to, a definition, or an explanation. Not only is this going to be fantastic content for your site, but it'll also have the best chance of becoming a featured snippet.

3. After you've written the content, it's time to optimize and share the heck out of that page. Do some link building outreach - ask for a link where it makes sense. Tweet it at industry influencers. For more on optimizing and sharing for optimal featured snippet possibilities, read this article on Search Engine Land. This is an extremely important step, so I highly recommend you read the article!

4. Wait. If you're going to achieve featured snippet success, it definitely won't happen in a day. You can see from my example above how our client's result spent a couple months climbing up rankings and being at the top before it became a featured snippet. If it's been a couple months and your result is nowhere to be seen, go back to step 3.

I'd recommend going for a couple different featured snippets, in order to increase your odds. As you know, some industries and queries are much more competitive than others, and if you're going for a question that's already been answered well and recently, you're going to need more luck than someone in a less popular industry would need.

It's still up in the air as to whether the data points to click-throughs increasing or flatlining due to having a featured snippet, but in my opinion, having your site/brand up there in that spot in front of all the eyeballs is worth it, even if it means people simply looking for that answer don't click through.