How to Optimize Your Content for Google's Featured Snippet Box

在过去的几年中，Google一直在完善其向用户显示结果的方式。特别是，Google一直在增加它显示查询的特色片段数量。这实际上将有机结果推进了页面。那么这对SEO意味着什么？

Well, that's what I set out to explore. Naturally, ranking in the Featured Snippet itself remedies the problem of positioning, but is this strategy something worth doing? What是a Featured Snippet, anyway? And more importantly, what do you have to do to appear there?

For example, the Featured Snippet below displays the direct instructions pulled from the tasteofhome.com web page.

There are no ads for this query, so the Featured Snippet shown in the answer box is above position 1 of the SERPs for "how to make bread." The directions are shown in four steps before the user has to click a single link.

段落

段落-formatted answer to the searcher's query. This is the most common type of Featured Snippet, encompassing 50% of all snippet results (Moz 2019).

List

项目符号或编号列表searche答案r's query (typically shows up for more process-driven, step-by-step, and list queries). This is the next most common type of Featured Snippet, encompassing 37% of snippet results (Moz).

列表摘要可以采用编号或项目符号列表的形式。

桌子

Answer to the searcher's query involving data or other information presented in a table format.

视频

嵌入在页面上的视频结果旨在以视觉/听觉格式回答搜索者的查询。

Accordion

回答搜索者的查询，并提供了搜索者可以选择扩展以了解更多信息的其他信息。

丰富的答案

Short call-out in which the answer to the searcher's query is featured in bold along with additional information.

这些通常是针对具有事实，基于指标的答案的问题：

In addition, dictionary definitions are common rich answers:

Tool or Calculator

以交互式工具的形式回答搜索者的查询，该工具可以输出特定于用户的答案。

Tools can appear for very high-level and concrete queries. Examples of tools that Google shows are calculators, conversions, time zones, weather, game scores, and more.

您为什么要关心特色片段？

One of the first conclusions that a lot of people involved with SEO jumped to was that Featured Snippets would have a hugely negative impact on the amount of people that actually click through to the pages within the results. This actually hasn't been the case. In fact, it's dramaticallyincreased the click-through rate(CTR) of results ranking within it.

From a sample of just under 5,000 queries, I found that the CTR to the HubSpot website for high volume keywordsincreased by over 114%，即使我们排名第1（如下示例中，在特色片段下方）。

因此，为您举个例子，假设您在Google第一页上排名第一（摘要下方的第一篇文章），以获取一个搜索10,000次的关键字。从我收集的数据来看，您可能会期望大约1,700次访问，而与3,700的访问相比，您可能会看到是否登陆特色片段点 - 这只是一个关键字。

Here's another interesting piece of data that illustrates how valuable it can be to rank in the Featured Snippet within Google:

Again, to decipher this graph, here's a brief overview:

• The x-axis relates to themonthly search volumefor the search queries measured.
• Y轴显示了Google内部排名HubSpot URL的点击率（CTR）（即，在搜索结果页面中查询的搜索结果页面中，有多少人点击了我们的搜索结果与其余结果）。
• The blue line plots the CTR from the SERPs for HubSpot URLs when wedo notappear in the Featured Snippet, broken down by query search volume (x-axis).
• The orange line plots the CTR from the SERPs for HubSpot URLs when wedoappear in the Featured Snippet, broken down by query search volume (x-axis).

总的来说，当我们出现在特色片段中时，我们会获得更多点击我们的内容，但是随着查询的搜索量增加，这变得越来越重要。

对于高流量关键字，在特色片段中排名average increase in CTR of over 114%, and that's even if we're ranking #1 on page one.

现在您知道，特色片段的收购是一种值得的SEO策略，当您尝试赢得自己的位置时，您应该记住一些事情。

If you're looking to learn more about how to optimize your content for Featured Snippets, HubSpot Research has a full research report:HubSpot赢得Google的特色片段的指南Hubspot Academy有一个free SEO course.

Featured Snippets have been a bit of a mystery for a lot of people involved with SEO, as it hasn't been that easy to determine what influences getting your content to appear within them. Here's what we know for sure:

1. Target question-based queries.

Stone Temple foundthat from 850,000 question-based queries, 19% of them had a Featured Snippet.

2.您不一定需要使用架构。

There's been a lot of conflicting advice out there about markup for snippets, including the idea thatschema.orgdata was the reason behind Google displaying this data. However, considering that more than 80% of the websites I've looked at that rank within the Featured Snippet don't use any kind of Schema.org markup data, it's safe to say that this isn't the case.

Not only that but Gary Illyes, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has said outright that structured datahas nothing to do在特色片段中排名。

3. Organize the structure of your pages with headings and paragraph tags.

除了标记外，清晰的页面结构似乎很重要，并且与所讨论的关键字的语义相关。

页面上应该有一个区域，其中搜索查询出现在标题中（H2，H3，H4等）。您要出现在特色片段中的内容应放在标题下方的A

标签中。

4. For non question-based keywords, take a definition-style approach.

For shorter, less question-orientated keywords that display a Featured Snippet (e.g. "Inbound Sales"), it's much more likely that Google will pull through a paragraph of text. Google tends to prefer 'answers' that begin logically as an answer would.

5.适用时，包括解决问题或回答问题的步骤。

Some answers require a more in-depth explanation, often involving a step-by-step process. Page structure is incredibly important here. Each step should be structured appropriately in a list format or represented on the page as heading (h3) tags.

6. The content should be between 54-58 words long.

For the paragraph-style answers (not the steps), content that's between 54-58 words long tends to perform the best.

I extracted all of the content from within the Featured Snippets that I sampled. I did this to identify any trends in the content being displayed in order to better understand what Google is looking for.

如您所见，总共54-58个单词之间的内容似乎最频繁地出现。

7.不要排除国际方法。

8.不必担心特色片段的反向链接。

During my analysis of 4,713 HubSpot queries for Featured Snippets, I uncovered something unusual, shown in the chart below.

请允许我解释该图表的证明：

• The numbers (1–5) in the y-axis relate to the position on page one that a HubSpot URL ranks for a given query.
• For each position HubSpot ranks for, there is a bar that shows how often we appear in the Featured Snippet (blue) and how often we don't (orange).

So, for keywords that we rank #1 for on page one in Google SERPs, we only appear in the Featured Snippet 18% of the time. Contrastingly, we appear in the Featured Snippet 28% of the time when we rank #5. Strange, right?

好吧，这对我们说的是，一旦您进入了第一页的前5名结果，building backlinksand other authority signals matter much less for ranking in the Featured Snippet.

In fact, I've seen lots of occasions where relatively unknown websites with much less SEO authority than HubSpot have ranked above us, possibly due to more intentional use of page structure and other best practices described above.

My advice for anyone looking to increase their visibility within the Featured Snippet box is to first run a quick audit of the keywords that you're ranking for within your current SEO campaign and how many of them are question-based queries. Once you've got this list, you can drill down on where you're currently ranking, how well your content is structured, and then devise a plan to reoptimize your content based on the advice I've given above.

编者按:这篇文章最初发表in July 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.