How to Use Technical SEO to Optimize for Featured Snippets

What Are Featured Snippets?

Featured snippets are also known as Rank 0. They are featured at the top of the Google SERPs. It contains a brief answer to a user query. In this way, a user can get information without each and every webpage in the search results. 

So if people don’t visit the page, how does it help in SEO?

Well, the benefits of featured snippets for SEO are debatable. Although it minimizes the chance of a person clicking a link in the search results, site owners can leverage it through content modification. For example, you only answer a query briefly and write it in a way to persuade users to click the link.

The option may seem counterproductive for SEO, but it actually drives the majority of traffic to your website. However, getting your page featured in the featured snippets is not an easy task.

How Technical SEO Helps a Page Rank in Featured Snippets?

Google considers several factors before featuring your answer. This includes your content structure, quality of content, the quality of backlinks, etc. However, according to most SEO experts, a page that ranks higher in search rank to a specific query has more chance to rank higher.

For example, sites within rank 1-5 have higher chances of getting into featured snippets.

Therefore, we can establish the fact that search engine ranking is one of the keys persuading factors. This is where technical SEO comes to help.

Technical SEO helps you eliminate and fix all the errors hampering your page to rank. This includes fixing duplicate content issues, removing bad links, creating a solid site architecture, etc.

How to Use Technical SEO to Optimize Your Page For Featured Snippets?

Use Sitemap to Allow Google to Crawl And Index Your Page

As we discussed earlier, to get in featured snippets, your page must be at least ranked on the search engine results page. This is only possible when Googlebot can crawl, parse, and index your page.

An XML sitemap contains all the necessary pages within your website. It tells what pages are essential to crawl. It also helps google to crawl and index your site faster. Without a sitemap, Googlebot will crawl your site and search through all internal links. This often takes more time.

This is pretty helpful for sites with extensive archives of content pages that are not properly interlinked.

Fix On-site Duplicate Contents

Google treats all types of duplicate content the same. So, on-site identical contents are no different.

It usually happens when a unique URL is generated for each path.

For example −

http://www.xyz.com/article-1 URL can also generate https://www.xyz.com/article-1 and also http://www.xyz.com/article-1/

As you can see, the link is the same in each URL, but one link sometimes auto-generates multiple URLs. So, google treats each URL uniquely. As a result, it treats the content of other URLs as duplicates.

The answer is to use Canonical tags

You can place a canonical tag on a page to make it a master page. This way, google will only recognize one URL as master and ignore others.

Identify And Remove Spammy And Dead Links

Link building can help your page ranks higher and increase its chances to feature in the featured snippet. However, bad links and questionable link practices can push your chances down further.

If your page has a backlink from an irrelevant and bad link, you should remove it. Google rarely cares about the number of links your site has. It only cares about the quality and relevance of the links. Remember, one highly authoritative link is more potent than having 100 low-quality links.

When you have a successful website, it’s not easy to consistently manage the link profile. You cannot control who links your website. Sometimes, your site could have a backlink to a seedy website. As a result, your audiences may see questionable and unfiltered ads in their web browser.

This can create a bad reputation for your brand. As a result, Google will penalize your site, and your chances of getting in featured snippets will drastically decrease.

Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, and Monitor Backlinks help you identify these bad and dead links. These tools flags all the links that look suspicious and spammy.

You can remove a bad link by contacting the site owner. However, that’s a long process and can take days and weeks. Besides, it’s not always easy to find the site owner. Even then, it’s not sure whether they will remove the link.

Alternatively, you can use the Google ‘Disavow links’ tool to solve the link spam problem. You have to import a text file through the search console. You should include all the links you want Google to ignore. You can also ask Google to ignore all the links from a specific domain.

Fix Poor Navigation Structure

Google is all about user experience. If your user doesn’t stay long on your site due to bad navigation structure, it will affect your search engine rank. As a result, your chances of featuring in featured snippets will also decrease.

Poor engagement, crawl ability, and other technical issues indicate a site of low authority.

You can fix this issue with the following -

• Keeping the navigation consistent. Don’t change site structure unless it is essential for your business. A new navigation structure will only confuse your visitors. Instead, you can make minor and intelligent chances.

• Creating multiple sections, categories, and sub-categories can help structure your site.

• Adding clickable links to all navigation elements. This increases the engagement rate and reduces the bounce rate.

• Accurate navigation titles tell users what they are getting by clicking the link.

• Using an in-site search future improves your user experience. Use features that show related items/articles, compensate for misspellings, etc.

Conclusion

By keeping track of how Google crawls your website, using HTML markup to create a structure for the content on your web pages, and staying up-to-date with changes made by search engines like Google, you can help to increase the visibility of your content on the SERP and give it a better chance at appearing as a featured snippet. With patience and dedication, it's possible to ensure that your website is properly optimized for featured snippets and give yourself the opportunity to be seen above competitors who have not taken the same initiative. Technical SEO isn't something that happens overnight - it takes time to make sure everything is set up correctly - but with this information you now have an idea of where to start. Good luck!