The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2021

I recently decided to make ranking for Featured Snippets a priority.

And it helped us go from a handful of Featured Snippets rankings to over 390.

Here’s the step-by-step process that I used.

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1. Find Featured Snippet opportunities

Like most things in SEO, the first step is keyword research^[1].

Keywords that you already rank for.

AND

Keywords that have a Featured Snippet.

Why is it important to focus on keywords that you rank for already?

99.58% of all Featured Snippets^[2] are from pages that rank on the first page for that term.

So if you don’t already rank in the top 10, you have zero chance of ranking in the Featured Snippet spot.

How do you find Featured Snippet Opportunities?

Ahrefs “Organic Keywords” report.

It shows you keywords that you rank for… that also have a Featured Snippet:

4,512 keywords? Looks like I have some work to do 🙂

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2. Add “Snippet Bait” to Your Page

“Snippet Bait” is a 40-60 word block of content specifically designed to rank in the Featured Snippet spot.

Why 40-60 words?

Well, SEMrush analyzed nearly 7 million Featured Snippets^[3]. And they found that the most Featured Snippets are 40-60 words long.

For example:

I wrote short Snippet Bait definitions for every page of The Content Marketing Hub^[4].

And these helped my content rank in the Featured Snippet spot for lots of definition keywords.

HubSpot^[5] takes Snippet Bait to another level.

They add little boxes to their posts that actually look like Featured Snippets:

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3. Format your content for other types of Featured Snippets

Snippet Bait works best for so-called “Paragraph Snippets”, like this:

Even though paragraph snippets make up 81.9% of all Featured Snippets…

…they’re not the only one.

If you want to rank for List Snippets…

Use H2 or H3 subheaders for every item on your list.

(You can manually check you HTML to see if this is set up correctly)

Google will pull those subheaders from your content… and include them in the Featured Snippet:

If you want to rank in Table Snippets…

You need to create a table that Google can easily pull data from.

For example, the content from this Table Snippet…

…is pulled directly from a well-formatted table.

Which leads us to our next topic…

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