Google’s New Featured Snippet Rule And What It Means For Your Site

WorldExecutivesDigest.com | Google’s New Featured Snippet Rule and What It Means For Your Site | Google has confirmed that pages that get the featured snippet will not longer have a spot further down in the page one results. It never really made much sense to give the featured snippet to a page at position 3 or lower, but Google has its reasons.

Now, when your page gets the Featured Snippet, your actual position in the results will be on page two or not at all.

Is it worth getting the Featured Snippet now? People wonder if their click through rate will be impacted. Here are a few things to consider when planning your SEO strategy going forward. 

What is the Featured Snippet?

Above the first result in a Google search, is a small summary of an answer a user asked in the search bar. It was basically a snapshot of the page from the results.

People loved getting the Featured Snippet as it was a signal that Google thought the result showed some authority. Others didn’t like getting it because they felt there was little reason to click since their question was essentially answered.

The reality was that it could increase CTR by up to 30% when getting it. 

Nobody was really sure how to get it but it seemed that the more concise the response to a question that the article was about had something to do with it.

What if you lose the Featured Snippet?

Before the new rules, if you lost the Featured Snippet, your position still didn’t really change. You were on page one somewhere and then the Featured Snippet up top. 

With the deduplication effect, in essence not having another result besides the snippet, what does that mean when you lose the snippet? After all, it is not a permanent thing to have it.

Google assures us that when the snippet goes to another page, the original position of the result would return. To get the featured snippet a page had to be on page one anyway. With that in mind it makes sense that it should still be there unless the page rank is dropping for other reasons. 

Two Featured Snippets

Another new feature that has been showing up lately is that sometimes there are two featured snippets above the results. 

These are from two different pages that may answer the question differently or at least add more information to give a better picture of what the answer would be.

The fear of what would happen when there are two featured snippets is that when losing one, your result might end up on page two.

This is a concern as people saw that it was actually happening. As usual, Google is a little cagey when it comes to answering if this is a possibility. It seems that by deduplicating results on the first page can send a result to the second in the case of two featured snippets.

There is only so much real estate so adding another result will push some of the lower results onto page two.

Lost Traffic from the Featured Snippet Update?

As with any Google update some people lose a lot of traffic (and some gain a lot). It you are unfortunate enough to be on the losing side you need to asses what alternative options are available.

Pay Per Click Advertising

It may feel horrible handing money to the company who just took away your traffic. However, Google Ads (formerly adwords) is a way to regain a % of the exact audience you just lost.

This is the ads you see above organic search results and advertisers are charged only when a user clicks it. This is a costly form of advertising, but it ensures you are targeting the exact same audience that would have been converting for you previously.

You can try this yourself, but it can get costly quickly so it’s best to hire an agency.

Partnership Marketing

This type of marketing and traffic generation is a way of using other connections in the same or similar niches to drive commercial traffic.

Think for example of someone who has a blog that attracts visitors very relevant to your line of business. Using partnership marketing you would team up together to get them to refer traffic to you, and in return you would give them a % of any sales back.

That is a very basic overview, but check out this resource from Streamline Marketing which gives you much more detail on affiliate and partnership marketing.

Social Media Marketing

This is probably the lowest direct ROI of the alternative traffic sources we have mentioned here. However, that doesn’t mean it should be discounted as the power of brand awareness is huge in online marketing.

You might not convert visitors as highly from social media, but it puts them into the very top of your sales funnel. Awareness is the first stage in any buying decision, and if you can produce engaging or helpful content to introduce your brand to (one day) potential customers it’s a great first step.