Role of Featured Snippets in Website Traffic Boost

How anybody gets noticed? The person has a unique personality and mannerisms, or when he is standing out in some special place where all eyes fall on him quickly. On a SERP, featured snippets are one such place.

Featured snippets 

Featured snippets are the positions on the results page that are just below the Sponsored Ads on a Search Engine Results Page. To get a position in the featured snippets, the website’s content has to be class apart and effectively contribute to value generation for the visitors. The web page content managers have to do their best job to get this position.

How featured snippets contribute to a website traffic boost

Some statistics first. Featured snippets contribute to about one-third share of all clicks.

This percentage shows how these places on SERP can help attract traffic to the page or website. Understandably, acquiring a place in these snippets, set the website apart from its competitors. The information searchers tend to click these links first. These places create the impression that the search engines have picked the most relevant answers to the top queries. So, visitors feel they are being served uniquely, and so, they tend to click on your featured snippet first, thinking it to be a time-saving proposition.

The other fact about the featured snippets is linked to their impact on click-through rate or CTR. Together with the knowledge panel SERP, the featured snippet yields a better click-through rate for the site. Visitors assume the page rankers are holding these positions to be the most authentic ones. They tend to stick to the position holders once the content display pattern and the opt-ins available match their browsing behavior or information-seeking requirements. 

How website owners can derive the best benefits from featured snippets

People will come to your website at least once when it is available in featured snippets. So, this position will do the job of driving traffic to your site. But, the path from here onwards is entirely the website’s responsibility. They need to be delightfully informative for the users. Some of the interesting tips to follow are:

1. Create exceptionally informative content. 
2. Produce well-researched content backed by facts. 
3. Create unique content that stands apart in quality as well as a way of approaching the topic. 
4. Give readers something to think about or act upon.
5. Most importantly, make the best and the most lucid use of keywords and search phrases so that you get the much-needed attention of search engine crawlers. A schema validator can be a wise element to ensure the phrase match catches only the most relevant content.

But, it is not all goody and optimistic about being at featured snippets. There are specific challenges too.

Read Also:- 5 Reasons Why Your Rich Snippets are not Showing search results

Challenges of appearing in Featured Snippets

Can you miss something if you don’t make a place in Featured Snippets? Yes, or No! For instance:

• A sizeable chunk of users leave the featured snippets and scroll down directly to the regular listings. Not all people are aware of Featured Snippets and the reason why they are at SERP. They find it something unfamiliar and think it to be just a promotional strategy.
• Reading “People also ask” boxes seem like an effort asking activity to some users. They feel why the search result has deviated from the topic. It sets them fearing that going through other questions related to the topic is simply a waste of time. So, unless excellent and in-depth reads interest them, they try to stay away from these boxes. A similar opinion is formed about the featured snippets.

It will undoubtedly be an achievement if you have made it to the featured snippets. So, once reached there, prepare content to focus on audiences and their expectations.