The Internet user launches a question, Google gives an answer. But not always does with search results in a standard format to use, but 19% of cases, according to a study by Stone Temple – also shows some kind of enriched element, like a piece drawn by the Knowledge Graph (Knowledge Graph) in the column on the right or a highlighted fragment.
What are Google Snippets?
A prominent fragment (or featured snippet ) from Google is a result that appears at the top and offers a summary of a direct response to the user’s query taken from the content of a web page, together with a link to the page itself, the title of this and its URL.
Getting the results of our web pages to be displayed as prominent fragments gives us, as we can see, great visibility : on the one hand, they stand out from the rest of the SERP entries, on the other, they tend to be placed at the top, just behind the payment results, so they are the best way to get the first position in organic terms.
In addition, and although some voices insist that showing a result in this way may induce the user not to click on it (after all, he has already achieved the answer he was seeking for his question), experiments carried out by Several SEO specialists show that the highlighted fragments have a higher traffic volume and CTR (click through rate ) compared to conventional results.
The difference in visits in your favor can be between 20 and 30%, says Rob Bucci, CEO of STAT, while Matthew Barby highlights in Hubspot that the rebound in the CTR can shoot up to 114%, and Mordan, CEO of Rochester SEO also emphasized around 40% increase in the CTR.
What to do to appear on Google as a highlighted fragment?
Google is very clear in its help section for webmasters: we can not take any direct action to make the search engine take our pages as a source to extract prominent fragments.
Not even resorting to marking structured data or becoming the king of backlinks is useful. Google is the one who decides when content is offering a direct answer to a question and, therefore, deserves to be highlighted.
However, the experiments of the SEO specialists mentioned above have been able to establish certain guidelines that, applied systematically and constantly, can bring us closer to our goal. In this regard, Bucci recommends carrying out actions such as the following:
- Locate those keywords that may constitute an opportunity for positioning.
- Create content in the question-answer format, or study how to adapt our current content to include definitions or interesting answers for the user. Of course, always without losing the naturalness.
- Provide our content with a clear structure, including subtitles, lists or tables, to help Google digest and understand it better.
- If we discover that Google is already using some of our pieces as highlighted fragments, we must continue to optimize them so that the appearance is even better.
For its part, Barby also advises reforming part of the contents of our website so that Google can identify them as answers. Some of the optimization techniques exposed by Barby would be:
- Enter the terms that the user uses to ask in the search in a header or header (h2, h3, h4, etc.)
- Write the direct answer to the question just below this heading, in a paragraph that has an extension of between 54 and 58 words.
- And include step-by-step instructions when appropriate, numbering each of the steps so that Google can pick up the start of each of the orders as a summary of the process explained.
In addition to optimizing your web pages with the view that they appear as a highlight in Google, in Súmate we suggest you also learn to use structured data as an SEO weapon. We show you how to do it in this practical ebook!
If our content appear in google snippet how much the CTR would be ?
It depends on what keyword volume it’s ranking. On an average a 40% increase.