How to create Meta description (feature snippet) for rich results
Introduction
A featured snippet is a short piece of web content, which is extracted from a search results page to provide a direct answer to a user’s query. They are designed to give comprehensive and relevant data without having to visit a developed website.
A feature piece is often provided as a single response box with a maximum length of 40 to 50 words and may be in paragraph, list or table format.
If you want to improve your internet site, you need to improve your snippets and results. This article discusses several tips for improving each of these features.
What are the main parts of featured snippets?
The most common parts of snippets are:
- Paragraph snippets
- Table snippets
- Video snippets
Paragraph snippets consist of a short piece of text that provides a brief answer to question queries like “How“, “Who“, “Why“, “When“ “What”. It tends to be 40 – 60 words long on average.
Table snippet usually consists of rows and columns that display values such as prices, rates, years or other numerical data.
Video snippets usually occur for “How-to” search queries where the title of the video matches the typed search query.
Why featured snippets are important in SEO?
Featured snippets are important for SEO for several ways:
- They increase your visibility and authority. Being featured in the top “position zero” spot above the regular search results makes your content highly visible and signals to users that your site is an authoritative source on the topic.
- They help you outperform competitors. Appearing in the featured snippet puts your content ahead of your competitors in the search results.
- They indicate high-quality content. Google selects featured snippets from pages it deems to have the best, most relevant information to answer the search query. This suggests your content is of high quality.
- They can drive more conversions. Being at the top of search results gives you more opportunities to convert users into customers or leads.
How do I optimise for featured snippets?
- Firstly, it’s crucial to understand that you cannot convince Google to utilise your content for a snippet. The search engine decides which pages are acceptable and which aren’t.
- Second, the excerpts featured tend to dynamically differ, disappear and reappear over time depending on the numerous dynamic ranking signals and algorithms.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to improve the chances that your work will be used for highlighted snippets.
Conclusion
Custom snippets, including paragraph snippets, table snippets and video snippets, provide short, relevant answers quickly in search results, grabbing user attention and driving traffic to your website.
By successfully organizing your content, focusing on high-quality, relevant information and using technologies like schema markup, you can increase your chances of getting involved.
With the right strategy, featured snippets can not only increase click-through rates but also establish your site as an authoritative source, resulting in higher conversions and better performance than the competition.
