What is your SEO objective? Most marketers see the SEO activity to bring the website on the top of the Search Engine Result Page. The optimized result for SEOed website is the first position on first SERP. Well, not exactly! The optimum result in the search engine is the 0th position or featured snippet or ‘position 0’.
What is Featured Snippet of Position ‘0’ in Search Engine?
When the user writes a query in Google’s search box, Google might show the special result in a block on the top of the first position of search engine result page. The featured snippet shows the question asked in the search query, a summary of the answer from the webpage, page title and URL, and the link to the page. A featured snippet comes in the variety of types. Here are some of the most common:
1. The list type of featured snippet normally shows the process in the steps mentioning the numbers. Check below example.
2. The another type of featured snippet is paragraph type.
3. The third type of featured snippet is table type. You can markup your content with <table> tag.
From where does featured snippet come?
Google bot extracts the summary from the website programmatically which is the part of its algorithm. When the search query asks the question, Google programmatically searches the answer from the websites and detect the websites which answer the user’s query. As per Google, you can not mark your webpage as featured snippet. But there are few ways you can optimize your webpage to come in the featured snippet.
But if you want to opt out from the featured snippet, you can. Write a tag <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet"> on your page and it will remove all the snippets on your page.
How can you optimize your webpage to get the featured snippet on Google?
- Identify some basic questions your audience mostly looks for the answer on the web and include those questions in your web content.
- Write the questions on your webpage along with the answer.
- Use paragraph, table or steps/points/bullets to make it easier for Google bot to detect your answer.
How to find the keywords which can generate the Position 0?
To answer this questions, some old fashioned way of keyword searching helps.
- High volume search keywords work the best.
- Use long-tail keywords. 6 words long keywords are the best.
- Include the words like “how”, “what”, “who”, “where”, “why” etc. which Google bot will always look forward to generating the featured snippet. Also, you can use words like “does”, “cause”, “do you” etc. to impress the Google bot.
- Write your answer in a clean and short manner. The answer length of 4o to 55 words is ideal.
- Use the question with H1 or H2 heading tags if possible.
- Write the answer paragraph in <p> tag.
- Place the paragraph directly below the question.
- You can use the <ol> tags (an ordered list) for your answers.
You can use the suggestion given by the Google directly. The “People also ask” section suggests many questions which you can include on your web page to generate the Position 0. See the below example.
You have another great tool to get the questions related to your industry or product which most of the users search on Google. The website answerthepublic.com uses Google suggest API and it gives you the list of all the questions related to your keyword which most of the people uses to search on Google. Though this website does not show the list of queries from India. Below is the example for keyword ‘digital marketing’ in USA.
So basically you are doing all the hard work to generate more business and hence to bring your website on the top of the SERP. This becomes easy if you are using structured markup in your website along with above-given suggestions. The digital marketing with this type of optimized page gives overall better results. Give a reason for the search engine to help you in getting your objective.
