What are Featured Snippets and Do I Need Them?

Featured Snippets (sometimes known as Answer Boxes) usually answer questions like Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How, but you don’t have to include all of these words in your search. These short, to-the-point answers show up at the top of the first page of Google search results.

Depending on the search query, a featured snippet may show up as a paragraph, a list or a table. The most common of these are paragraph snippets, representing about 82 percent of featured snippets. List snippets come up in about 10.8 percent of the results, followed by table snippets in 7.3 percent.

How do featured snippets benefit me?

You Enjoy Maximum Authority

With a featured snippet, it means that Google chose your page over others as the most useful one to relevant user queries.

You Win Big

You beat out the competition when Google chooses your site to be the quick answer to a specific question, the result is displayed above the organic results. You win out over the competition which might include a site that ranks #1 for a particular search result. 

You Experience Increased Traffic

Users like featured snippets as they provide quick answers to their questions and this benefits the chosen site with an increase in traffic, which could be upwards of 20-30 percent.

A recent study of 92,000 search queries for featured snippets revealed the types of search terms which most often return featured snippets:

  • financial
  • mathematical
  • time
  • transitional
  • status
  • requirements
  • health
  • DIY processes

Google tells us the best 5 ways to earn featured snippets are:

  1. Create content explicitly to answer questions. Provide inclusive answers.
  2. Know your readers’ questions.
  3. Create authentic, high-quality content.
  4. Provide the best possible answer.
  5. Use Q & A pages.