Now that we’ve looked at the question “what is a snippet”, let’s touch on the different types of featured snippets you might come across. There are four distinct types of snippets:

• Paragraph or text snippets
• List snippets
• Table snippets
• Video snippets

The type of content that goes into forming a featured snippet will depend on the content present on the page. Text-based snippets tend to be picked first, followed by lists, tables, and then video snippets.

But it’s not just the type of snippet that can change, but its style of content as well. A text-based featured snippet might provide a very specific and concise answer in relation to a query or a briefer answer that is explained in full when you click on the snippet’s link.

A list snippet, on the other hand, could display an ordered or unordered list, depending on the list type, even hiding the top results of a list to get readers curious about what the top ranking results of a list are.

You’ll also usually get an image with your snippet, even if there’s no image on the site that accompanies it. Many snippets often contain a selection of collapsible arrow boxes containing further questions and snippets related to your query.

So, now that we know what snippets are, and why you need to make use of them, we need to talk about how to optimise for featured snippets. Optimising the content you want to be a featured snippet is a must, otherwise, Google will have no idea if you want the content to be a snippet at all.

Naturally, some content is more suited for snips than others, especially:

• Recipe content
• Best X content
• Vs content
• Make X content
• Definition content

But that’s not to say you can’t get a snippet if your content doesn’t fit into these categories. So long as the content in question is of good quality and correctly optimised, your odds of winning a featured snippet are high. Of course, there is no formula guaranteed to get you a featured snippet, but there are a few things you can do.

One thing to bear in mind before you actually begin to optimise your own content to become snippets is whether or not you’ll be competing for the spot with your competitors.

This is easily done using analytical tools, like SEMrush and Ahrefs, which show what keywords have snippets and any gaps in the market that you can exploit. You can also do the same thing by Googling around your content and seeing what snippets come up.

Odds are you’re going to find some space in which you can target an available snippet. Even if it’s not your main point of content, just garnering a snippet will help all aspects of your site. If you spot some low-hanging fruit, you should absolutely go for it.

Now, it is also possible to target the featured snippets of competitors, especially if you think you can make better content than them. However, this is not an advisable strategy in the long run. Once someone has a snippet, it can be hard to unseat them from that spot, so it’s generally much easier to go for unclaimed snippets instead.

Right, first things first, when it comes to featured snippet optimisation, you must target the relevant feature snippet keywords or phrases associated with the content you want to form the snippet so that Google picks it up.

Get yourself some keyword tools and start researching, looking specifically for longtail, question-based keywords that users are likely to use when searching. Make sure you pick something with low keyword difficulty, and if you can, throw in a few trigger words; the words often used in queries like how to, which is, etc…

You also want to think about optimising the entire page content for keywords. Again, this indicates to Google that the page has good information related to a user’s query, encouraging it to rank the page higher. Either way, work your main keyword phrase into the snippet title and text, so Google picks up on it.

While not as important as they used to be, Google still uses keywords to help in its ranking calculations. To learn more about keywords be sure to read our blog on the best software to conduct keyword research.

This is by far the biggest thing to bear in mind when it comes to optimising for featured snippets. You won’t get a snippet if the content you produce is of poor quality that doesn’t answer a user’s search query.

The content you make needs to be better than your competitor’s. That means good keyword density, solid internal and external linking structure, informative and well-researched information that meets the user’s needs, bulleted lists, and much more.

As a general rule of thumb, you want to include your keywords in the page title tag and any relevant headings, making sure to use headings in chronological size order for Google’s benefit and user readability.

With list snippets in particular, you want the keyword included in the list’s header, if possible, and followed by a succinct, bulleted list that gets the content across in a clear and concise manner.

You also want to stick to the recommended word count. Snippets tend not to be more than 40-250 characters or 40-50 words, depending on the featured snippet type. If you can, try to answer multiple related questions in one snippet, and should you have time, create a high-quality image to go with it.

Optimising content for SEO purposes is so important for any digital marketing strategy, so we highly recommend reading our beginner’s guide to writing SEO copy if you want to learn more about this topic.

Breadcrumb navigation

As you might have guessed by now, linking is a crucial part of technical SEO and site crawling in general. Besides making sure your internal and external linking structure is solid and functional, you also want to look at implementing breadcrumb navigation.

Breadcrumb navigation is a simple concept that allows users to easily return to the previous page they were on or right back to the homepage with a single click. It makes for an orderly site infrastructure as well as an additional layer of accessibility.

You can easily spot breadcrumb navigation on other sites by looking for the pathway bars at the top of pages, but you can also implement it with clear buttons back to the home page or the page they just came from.

If you have a basic understanding of SEO, you’ll know that how Google reads your website is a key factor in how well a page will be crawled, indexed, and ranked on the SERP. We don’t have time to cover that in detail here so be sure to read our article on how search engines work if you want to understand crawling and indexing more.

Simply put, you quite literally need content in order for any page to rank in a search engine. Without content, the search engine will simply deem a page as uninformative and therefore not worth indexing for users.

With the right informative content combined with some SEO know-how, you’ll be able to get your pages ranking on Google, meaning more organic traffic, and more sales if you run an eCommerce site. And you want that organic traffic as it shows how good the quality of your work is.

So, what are these SEO elements that go into writing SEO copy?

All written content strategies begin with two things. Ideas and keyword research. These two factors work hand-in-hand to create content that will rank well on Google. You need to know what people are searching for so you can target these words, but you also need new ideas for original content.

Before going any deeper, let’s touch on what keywords actually are. On a surface level, they’re specific words or phrases used by search engine users when making a query to find information, and Google uses these to help pages rank where the relevant info appears.

In essence, they help Google to identify what search terms are most used by users and provide them with content that matches these terms. This means you want to include these words and phrases when writing SEO copy so that your page ranks.

For example, if you had the keyword ‘what is SEO content writing?’, you would want to include this keyword a few times in your copy so that you ‘rank’ for this phrase in a search.

There’s plenty to learn about finding and collecting keywords so be sure to read our beginner’s guide to keyword research.

Now, let’s touch on site structure. While not wholly related to writing SEO copy, good site structure is still necessary so Google, or any search engine for that matter, can crawl your site. Good content won’t do anything if Google can’t read the page.

When it comes to site layout and structure, it’s recommended that you opt for a pyramid shape. Start with the home page at the top, then categories, then subcategories, and so on and so forth.

Of course, if you already have a website built, or are more likely writing for one, then you have to get a little more creative. There are a few tricks you can use to help Google navigate a page, one of the most important being internal linking.

Internal linking is where you add a link to an important page you want to rank inside the copy on a page. Firstly, this makes it easier for content to be crawled as you’re providing the search engine with more links to follow, and if a page is linked to multiple times, it hints to Google how important it is for this content to be indexed.

This process is also known as linking from tail to head, and you should always be referring to pages you want to rank with links. However, these links need to make sense, and you should always try and link a page using anchor text, text that matches a page’s URL, in some capacity.

By linking to the pages you want Google to rank highest, you’ll create a bedrock for your ranking structure with authoritative pages that will rank because of the linking structure created.

While the previous two points we’ve covered are important, when it really comes down to it, the quality of your written content is what matters the most. Your copy needs to be attractive to read and make people want to stay on your website, while also appealing to Google.

But there’s more to it than that. You can’t simply write your copy with some keywords thrown in and expect it to start ranking immediately. It’s no good having an optimised piece if it reads badly.

You’ll need to consider ideas generation, keyword research, heading structure, readability, and final optimisation checks before your copy is ready to be published.

When it comes to SEO copy, you want to be creating original content. The last thing you want to do is plagiarise the work of others. Not only is this morally wrong and potentially illegal, but Google can also pick up on it and punish you by not indexing your page.

However, it’s important to note that, by original content, we don’t mean something completely brand new that no one has covered. Original content simply refers to content that is written differently from other content. So long as it’s written in your style with your take, Google will register it as original content.

But as important as original content is, it’ll count for nothing if people aren’t interested in reading it. So, before you start generating any original content, you need to start thought dumping and researching.

Take whatever it is your company does or that you want to write about and start writing down ideas for a topic or content. Once you’ve got a list, you can start researching related keywords to see how viable each topic is. Soon, you’ll have a varied list of keywords related to each topic and you can start writing.

With your keywords to hand, your next step should be researching your chosen topic in relation to the keywords you have. Unless you’re an expert on the topic in question, you’re going to need to research it so you can answer the reader’s queries and provide quality content.

Once you’ve thoroughly researched the topic, you then need to think about your heading structure. It’s not as simple as having a title and then vomiting your copy onto the page, you need to have some order.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post, you only want a single H1, and then as many H2s as you need to cover each section of your topic. You can then dot H3s throughout the page when you need to split up the topics beneath an H2.

Not only will this make your content much more scannable and readable, something we’ll touch on in a moment, but it gives you a chance to put your keywords front and centre for Google to look at. Questions and lengthy keywords are the perfect choice for putting in headers.

With everything written and ready to be published, the last thing to discuss is to ensure your SEO copy is properly optimised.

First, while we’ve mentioned including keywords a lot in this article, you should not be trying to stuff in as many as possible. This is known as keyword stuffing and Google can see when you’re doing it. It won’t index the page if you do this, and it generally makes the content difficult to read.

Always put written quality ahead of optimisation so your content doesn’t read like trash. As we said right at the start, your keywords should be woven into your SEO copy, not the other way around.

When you’re thinking about where to put your keywords, limit yourself to using each one 2-3 times, depending on your copy’s length, to avoid overloading the content. And speaking of length.

Research has suggested that long-form content does really well on Google. Gone are the days of short 300-word pieces. Instead, you should aim for things like blog articles to be a minimum of 1,000 words.

Of course, this will differ if it’s a home page or a product page, which might be closer to 400 words, so use your intuition to estimate the number of keywords you should be using on a page.

Crawling is pretty much as it sounds and involves a search engine literally wading through all the content on the web to find out whether or not it’s valuable for users.

They do this by using bots, also called spiders. When one of these bots comes across a URL, they download these pages, scan the content, and then use the links on the page to find more pages. This repeats until they’ve crawled a site for a set period of time, at which point it will get queued for Google indexing.

Typically, these URLs are found using something called backlinks, referral links from another site, links from a prior URL on their own webpage, and sitemaps that list all the important webpages that Google should be indexing. You can even submit individual URLs for crawling in Google using the Google Search Console.

This link-hopping and locating is crucial as it’s the quickest way for these bots to find new content and add it to the index. If a page isn’t added to the index, then it won’t appear in the SERP.

One important thing to note about crawling is that pages will not necessarily be crawled in order of discovery. Instead, a bot will queue them for crawling based on factors such as:

• The intent and quality of the page URL.
• How old the page is.
• How often the page has changed.

Fortunately, this means that a site’s main pages are often targeted for a crawl, helping to get the key parts of a site out there and ensuring the rest of the site is then indexed for users to view.

The rate at which Google, or any search engine for that matter, will crawl a site is based on various factors. Typically, sites that see a lot more traffic will be crawled more regularly than less well-known sites. This is to ensure the quality of these well-used sites is maintained.

Crawls could occur every few days, or potentially every few weeks, it all depends on how important the search engine values the page in question. Naturally, this means you want to make the information on your site as valuable to a user as possible.

The final step in the search engine process, and the most important one for users, is knowing how and why Google, and all search engines for that matter, rank results in the order that they do.

In truth, it’s difficult to say exactly what goes into deciding page rankings, and that’s for one key reason. The search engine algorithm.

While a search engine might know exactly what information to pull from the index thanks to the algorithm, how does it choose which to display to you? After all, there are trillions of results in Google alone.

As mentioned above, the algorithm will take into account the intent of the query. Generally speaking, there are four types of query intent, each one denoting what the user means when they Google something:

• Informative – Usually a question relating to a topic you’re interested in.
• Navigational – A query that lets you navigate between more specific information on the topic you’re interested in.
• Commercial – Results often relating the comparison of products within your query.
• Transactional – A highly specific query that allows you to quickly find what you want to buy.

Thanks to Google understanding all of these query types, the search engine can quickly gather content that will match your search terms.

As for ranking this information, this is where the second side of the algorithm comes in. Ranking factors.

For a page to rank highly, it must meet several factors that the algorithm deems relevant. There are thought to be well over 200 for Google, but several to bear in mind include:

• Backlinks.
• Content relevance.
• Content freshness.
• Content quality.
• Content authority.
• Page speed.
• Mobile-friendliness

Backlinks are right at the top when it comes to determining the quality of a site, and therefore how high it ranks. Both quantity and quality of links play a role here, but quality is always prioritised over quantity.

Those sites with a few backlinks from powerful and reputable sources will be ranked much higher, as it shows other well-known sites are referencing the page.

Through this, a site receives a better domain and URL rating and page authority.

Of course, these links have to be relevant to the content as well. A bad backlink won’t help a page. For example, a carpet shampoo site being linked to a cryptocurrency site would be deemed irrelevant by a search engine.