Once you've identified where the opportunity to nab a featured snippet lies, how do you go about targeting it? Part One of our "Featured Snippet Opportunities" series focused on how to discover places where you may be able to win a snippet, but today we're focusing on how to actually make changes that'll help you do that. 

This video is a great lead up to Britney's MozCon 2019 talk: Featured Snippets: Essentials to Know & How to Target.

Give a warm, Mozzy welcome to Britney as she shares pro tips and examples of how we've been able to snag our own snippets using her methodology.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Today, we are going over targeting featured snippets, Part 2 of our featured snippets series. Super excited to dive into this.

What's a featured snippet?

For those of you that need a little brush-up, what's a featured snippet? Let's say you do a search for something like, "Are pigs smarter than dogs?" You're going to see an answer box that says, "Pigs outperform three-year old human children on cognitive tests and are smarter than any domestic animal. Animal experts consider them more trainable than cats or dogs." How cool is that? But you'll likely see these answer boxes for all sorts of things. So something to sort of keep an eye on. How do you become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities?

Last time, we talked about finding keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. There are a couple ways to do that. We talk about it in the first video. Something I do want to mention, in doing some of that the last couple weeks, is that Ahrefs can help you discover your featured snippet opportunities. I had no idea that was possible. Really cool, go check them out. If you don't have Ahrefs and maybe you have Moz or SEMrush, don't worry, you can do the same sort of thing with a Vlookup.

So I know this looks a little crazy for those of you that aren't familiar. Super easy. It basically allows you to combine two sets of data to show you where some of those opportunities are. So happy to link to some of those resources down below or make a follow-up video on how to do just that.

1. Identify

All right. So step one is identifying these opportunities. You want to find the keywords that you're on page one for that also have this answer box. You want to weigh the competitive search volume against qualified traffic. Initially, you might want to just go after search volume. I highly suggest you sort of reconsider and evaluate where might the qualified traffic come from and start to go after those.

2. Understand

From there, you really just want to understand the intent, more so even beyond this table that I have suggested for you. To be totally honest, I'm doing all of this with you. It's been a struggle, and it's been fun, but sometimes this isn't very helpful. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times I'm not even looking at some of this stuff when I'm comparing the current featured snippet page and the page that we currently rank on page one for. I'll tell you what I mean in a second.

3. Target

So we have an example of how I've been able to already steal one. Hopefully, it helps you. How do you target your keywords that have the featured snippet?

• Simplifying and cleaning up your pages does wonders. Google wants to provide a very simple, cohesive, quick answer for searchers and for voice searches. So definitely try to mold the content in a way that's easy to consume.
• Summaries do well. Whether they're at the top of the page or at the bottom, they tend to do very, very well.
• Competitive markup, if you see a current featured snippet that is marked up in a particular way, you can do so to be a little bit more competitive.
• Provide unique info
• Dig deeper, go that extra mile, provide something else. Provide that value.

How To Target Featured Snippet Examples

What are some examples? So these are just some examples that I personally have been running into and I've been working on cleaning up.

• Roman numerals. I am trying to target a list result, and the page we currently rank on number one for has Roman numerals. Maybe it's a big deal, maybe it's not. I just changed them to numbers to see what's going to happen. I'll keep you posted.
• Fix broken links. But I'm also just going through our page and cleaning it. We have a lot of older content. I'm fixing broken links. I have the Check My Links tool. It's a Chrome add-on plugin that I just click and it tells me what's a 404 or what I might need to update.
• Fixing spelling errors or any grammatical errors that may have slipped through editors' eyes. I use Grammarly. I have the free version. It works really well, super easy. I've even found some super old posts that have the double or triple spacing after a period. It drives me crazy, but cleaning some of that stuff up.
• Deleting extra markup. You might see some additional breaks, not necessarily like that ampersand. But you know what I mean in WordPress where it's that weird little thing for that break in the space, you can clean those out. Some extra, empty header markup, feel free to delete those. You're just cleaning and simplifying and improving your page.

One interesting thing that I've come across recently was for the keyword "MozRank." Our page is beautifully written, perfectly optimized. It has all the things in place to be that featured snippet, but it's not. That is when I fell back and I started to rely on some of this data. I saw that the current featured snippet page has all these links.

So I started to look into what are some easy backlinks I might be able to grab for that page. I came across Quora that had a question about MozRank, and I noticed that — this is a side tip — you can suggest edits to Quora now, which is amazing. So I suggested a link to our Moz page, and within the notes I said, "Hello, so and so. I found this great resource on MozRank. It completely confirms your wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Britney."

I don't know if that's going to work. I know it's a nofollow. I hope it can send some qualified traffic. I'll keep you posted on that. But kind of a fun tip to be aware of.

How we nabbed the "find backlinks" featured snippet

All right. How did I nab the featured snippet "find backlinks"? This surprised me, because I hardly changed much at all, and we were able to steal that featured snippet quite easily. We were currently in the fourth position, and this was the old post that was in the fourth position. These are the updates I made that are now in the featured snippet.

Clean up the title

So we go from the title "How to Find Your Competitor's Backlinks Next Level" to "How to Find Backlinks." I'm just simplifying, cleaning it up.

Clean up the H2s

The first H2, "How to Check the Backlinks of a Site." Clean it up, "How to Find Backlinks?" That's it. I don't change step one. These are all in H3s. I leave them in the H3s. I'm just tweaking text a little bit here and there.

Simplify and clarify your explanations/remove redundancies

I changed "Enter your competitor's domain URL" — it felt a little duplicate — to "Enter your competitor's URL." Let's see. "Export results into CSV," what kind of results? I changed that to "export backlink data into CSV." "Compile CSV results from all competitors," what kind of results? "Compile backlink CSV results from all competitors."

So you can look through this. All I'm doing is simplifying and adding backlinks to clarify some of it, and we were able to nab that.

So hopefully that example helps. I'm going to continue to sort of drudge through a bunch of these with you. I look forward to any of your comments, any of your efforts down below in the comments. Definitely looking forward to Part 3 and to chatting with you all soon.

Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all soon. See you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com