Featured snippets are a great piece of real estate to own on search engine results pages (SERPs). There isn’t a decisive way to achieve a Featured Snippet – only Google really knows how you get there. However, in this article we’ll cover tips that can increase your chances of earning a featured snippet while improving your pages’ usability and rankability.
Why bother with snippets?
Position 0 is the coveted spot for all websites – this is the highest possible spot you can rank on Google without advertising. And if you have the opportunity for your page to sit at the top spot, you’d be silly not to try and get there. That’s where featured snippets come in. They’re great for your travel website, as you can rank above the first organic result.
Plus, according to ahrefs, 12.29% of keywords it tracks have a featured snippet – that’s approximately 14 million featured snippet opportunities. In this post we’re going to show you how you can optimise your destination content to achieve a featured snippet.
What featured snippets are there?
There are four types of featured snippets you can aim for and here are the ways you can optimise your content for them:
1. Paragraph featured snippets
Paragraph snippets are pulled through by Google from a website’s source page and typically try to answer a question, like above. Usually the search query is answered by looking at the snippet paragraph, but people can click through to more information, as what’s in the snippet isn’t everything that’s on the page.
How to optimise travel content for paragraph featured snippets
Paragraph snippets are great for these types of search queries:
- comparisons
- what is…?
- who is…?
- how is…?
- why is…?
With this in mind, you should keep your answers short, concise and straight after your H1. Furthermore, use the question itself for the H1, and use H2s that have keywords found in the question. For example, use the question ‘What language is spoken in the Maldives?’ as your H1. The snippet shows approximately 40-50 words, so aim for your answer (first paragraph) to be in this range. The rest of the content on your page should be further supporting information for the concise answer you’ve written in your first paragraph.
List featured snippets:
2. Bulleted list snippets
3. Numbered list snippets
List featured snippets comprise the next two on our list, in the form of bulleted list snippets and numbered list snippets. Naturally, as a travel brand, there’s more compatibility for travel content to aim for a bulleted list snippet (as shown above) as opposed to a numbered list featured snippet. This is because numbered list snippets tend to be more step-by-step guides to recipes, DIY jobs, and so on.
How to optimise travel content for list featured snippets?
As numbered lists aren’t going to be as prevalent in the travel industry, we’re going to focus on optimising travel content for a bulleted list featured snippet. As with paragraph featured snippets, use the question as your H1 and make sure that the first paragraph address the question at hand. Furthermore, arrange the rest of your content as a list by using
tags for the title of bullets to make it easier for Google to understand that your content is a list. For further information on HTML, click here.
3. Table featured snippet
The last type of featured snippet is a table featured snippet and simply consists of data being shown in the SERP in a table, resulting in easily digestible information. An example can be seen above.
How to optimise travel content for table featured snippets?
Like the previous two, use the question or search query as your H1 and show the data you want in the snippet straight after the H1. Furthermore, display your data in a table on your page itself, as this will make it easier for your user to read and makes it easier for Google to understand that it’s a table – use the
