It’s general knowledge that ranking highly on Google is a good thing. It drives traffic, improves authority by making it more accessible, and increases brand awareness. But what happens when ranking doesn’t improve the business?

 

One of our domains has six featured snippets in their top eight pages, as ranked by Ahrefs.com. Featured snippets are the gold standard of rankings. They get high volumes of traffic, are valuable, and mean the page is pretty well optimized. If you look at the data, the first page is valued at over $2,000.

Snippets and Bouncing

One of the struggles related to featured snippets is the high bounce rate. People look for answers, find them, and then move on. Of the six snippets, only one has a bounce rate lower than 80%. This is pretty terrible, considering the site as a whole has an average bounce rate of 15%. While bouncing users may be a sign of increased brand visibility, they are also not paying the bills.

 

Snippets and Conversions

So we’re currently looking at a sample size of six snippets. Only two of them resulted in more than one conversion in the past three months, and those two didn’t exactly blow anything out of the water. This isn’t boding well for the fiscal benefits of featured snippets.

 

Expand the Sample

So we were looking at one domain. Let’s expand that. I glanced at a few of the other domains under our watchful eye and found results that weren’t all too surprising. This is all anecdotal, and further study would be good, but let’s start with what we’ve got. 

 

Conversions

When looking at the correlation between snippets and conversions, there didn’t actually seem to be much of one. Pages with featured snippets converted similar if not fewer users than pages that performed at a similar level. This makes sense, as the users who utilize featured snippets are often looking for a quick answer and don’t necessarily want to hire a lawyer. Just because you’re looking for the penalties of a second offense DUI doesn’t mean you were arrested for a second offense DUI. 

 

New Users

Ok, conversions aren’t the best metric to look at. What about new users? If the theory tracks, pages with featured snippets should be head and shoulders above the rest of the pages as far as new users go. 

 

But that isn’t always the case either. Look at this domain’s Google Analytics sorted by new users (pages with snippets are green):

Of the top 25 pages for new users, only six of them were snippet-ized. Beyond that, the average bounce rate for those six pages is 74.62%, not exactly to die for. Again, these numbers remain relatively consistent across domains. 

 

Final Thoughts

Here’s the question: are snippets worthy of being the golden goose of SEO? To be fair, our domains are all legal, which don’t exactly serve well for converting for snippets. This is one of the reasons why we don’t aim for snippets as an official business goal. While we generally consider them beneficial, we don’t see them as an instant success. Leads should always be the defining metric of the success of a campaign.

There are some terms that are thrown around among SEOs that can be loosely understood through context clues, but are easy to confuse. A good example of one of these is featured snippets and their siblings, knowledge panels. We’re going to be talking about featured snippets today.

 

What are Featured Snippets?

Featured snippets show up at the top of the organic search results and quickly answer questions while linking to a site. 

This is different from a knowledge panel, which appears on the side of the search results. You’ve seen them if you’ve ever searched for an actor, writer, or city. 

 

Why are SEOs Obsessed with Featured Snippets?

As with everything SEO, featured snippets provide an opportunity for users to see their site as an authority and will increase organic traffic. When it comes to Google rankings, snippets count as a rank of zero; as good as it gets. As far as things SEOs obsess over, Google rankings are pretty high up there.

 

SEOs have recently been focused on snippets because Google has been going back and forth about whether to remove the website from the first page of organic search results. Until the recent uncertainty, if a page both ranked highly and got a featured snippet, they would appear twice in the search results. This increases the chances of driving traffic. If Google follows through on the change, the page will only rank once: for the snippet.

 

Obviously, ranking twice is doubly as great as ranking once, so the idea of Google de-duplicating the results aren’t making people very happy.

 

How to Get a Featured Snippet

Ready to go down a spiral? No one can guarantee to rank for a featured snippet. There are clearly ways to improve your chances, and things you can do that will make it incredibly unlikely for you to get the slot, but beyond that, it’s up to Google. If you want to learn more about the nitty-gritty technical side, I recommend Brodie Clark’s article on MozBlog on the featured snippet algorithm. 

 

For a reference on what our snippet page looks like, here it is:

If you want to know the basics on how to set up a page to be snippet-ized, here are a few simple steps:

1. Write informative content that is in demand. If you can answer a common question in an accessible way, that just might be snippet-material.
2. Format it for Google. Organize your page with bulleted lists and headers. This helps Google know exactly what’s on your page.
3. Follow Google’s best practices. There are some types of content that are banned from being in Snippets. There are pieces of content that include material that is:
   • Sexually explicit;
   • Hateful;
   • Violent;
   • Dangerous/harmful; and
   • Topics without public consensus
4. Improve your domain authority. One of the highest factors in Google’s ranking decisions is how trustworthy your site is. This means improving your link building networks and getting some referring sites with some authority.

 

While none of these things can guarantee a featured snippet, they all help your chances of getting one.