Community Discussion: Are You Optimizing Your Brand's Content for Featured Snippets?
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My latest post on the Moz Blog, Featured Snippets: A Dead-Simple Tactic for Making, explores how to keep Featured Snippets once you have them. I'm curious to know how many brands are actively working to get in the answer box, and for those who are, what's been the results?
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Hi Ronell!
First, I want to say that I love this topic and your blog post was extremely insightful. Featured snippets were a hot topic at SMX this year, I have been mesmerized by them ever since. I do think they definitely play a vital role in a company's SEO efforts!
Currently, we haven't made it a huge priority to get our content featured within one of the answer boxes, but I have a feeling that this will be changing in the coming months as featured snippets become more and more popular. By focusing on getting featured in these snippets, you're essentially snagging the #0 rank on a SERP—which is obviously where any company would want to be!
Thanks for the reminder that this should be a priority!
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We're in a very niche industry (noise measurement instruments) and so it may be easier to get into the #0 answer box as it's unlikely that someone would stumble across us. Our customers are usually looking for some specific information and so we're positioning ourselves with more educational content such as terminology guides and reference information.
However, it's been a double edged sword for us. There is a lot of traffic coming from the article, and some others that we appear in, but it's proved very difficult to get any traction or conversion from those visitors. We've run an number of A/B tests, different CTA's and downloads and we're still trying to work out what would be best.
So although it's great to have a #0 slot, which we didn't plan for, a lot of our effort for 2017 is going to be based on conversion and getting visitors to become more than just a stat on our analytics page, especially for those coming from the #0 position.
We are going after more of these as "what are" or "how do I" questions are clearly the best way for us to get a #0 as and have a content plan for this. But, as I've said above, the key task is conversion of those visitors into something useful.
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Getting in the Answer Box has become more of a focus for me and my company in recent months, and one I'm really pushing for in 2017. I've done some work with our content team to help them understand what sorts of queries might have a greater chance to nab a #0 spot, as well as exploring what formats seem to work best in our niche. I haven't yet started down the road of experimenting with markup or other technical tactics, but would like to at some point.
We've managed to nearly double the queries we are ranking for in the last few months, from 60ish in August to just over 100 now. The search volume isn't particularly high for these terms, but it's exciting to be able to see if we can replicate these results elsewhere, with more impact.
Great topic, and timely for me and my efforts in the upcoming year!
R.
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