Google has been actively rolling out featured snippets for a wide variety of search queries because they want to serve quicker answers to people.
Many SEO professionals are absolutely excited about this new opportunity because featured snippets give a chance for low-ranking pages to get to the top of search results with almost zero effort.
Why Should We Care About Snippets?
Featured snippets show up for many of the terms and queries your customers will search for.
- Mobile search has overtaken desktop search, and we expect voice queries to dominate mobile search (71% of featured snippet-triggering queries lead to dominating voice search, from a limited sample of 1,000 queries) – both Bing and Google felt comfortable quoting that voice searches may become 50% of all mobile searches by 2020.
- If you don’t have an effective strategy to capture how customers are changing the way they search, you will fail to attract them.
How many queries show a featured snippet?
There have been several studies trying to answer this question. One notable study (Ahrefs’ Study Of 2 Million Featured Snippets: 10 Important Takeaways) provides significant insights into how snippets may be chosen.
On average, between 10% and 15% of queries trigger featured snippets at this point. But it’s all dependent on the type of query:
- More than 50% of question-type queries trigger featured snippets.
- Around 30% of comparison-type queries trigger featured snippets.
Google keeps tweaking the algorithm on a regular basis, so featured snippets are still volatile. As Google gets better at identifying the best answers to queries, these numbers are going to change.
By optimising for featured snippets, you also improve your overall on-page SEO:
- Researching featured snippets’ opportunities lets you discover more queries to optimise for.
- Researching competitors’ featured snippets lets you find more content opportunities.
- Creating content to get featured makes your site more useful for the user, which brings higher rankings and better conversions.
Do featured snippets drive more clicks?
Featured snippets are styled differently from the rest of the search results. They occupy more real estate, and they clearly catch the eye.
So they should attract a lot of clicks, right?
Not quite!
When there’s a featured snippet at the #1 position, it only gets ~8.6% of clicks (on average), while the page that ranks right below it will get ~19.6% of clicks (on average).
How does it compare to a regular #1 ranking page with no featured snippet above it? That page will get ~26% of all clicks.
In other words, it looks like the featured snippet is stealing clicks from the #1 ranking result.