Featured snippets, which Google launched in 2014, are among the most significant SERP modifications over the previous ten years. Featured snippets affected quite a few things for both users and SEOs.
Shortcut to the top organic position
You may "win" the featured snippet and quickly go to the top spot if your content is showing up on the first SERP for a search query that displays one. Let's dissect this.
According to our research, top-ten pages are where highlighted snippets are located. Additionally, the great majority of pages with highlighted snippets are within the top five.
In conclusion, your content's chance of being featured snippet increases with its position in the search results.
Being on the first SERP is a more attainable objective than being the top position for a term. But the top place becomes a little bit more approachable if that term results in a highlighted snippet.
Fewer clicks… sometimes
The page with the highlighted snippet used to appear anywhere on the first SERP in the traditional "blue link" search results. However, Google launched highlighted snippet deduplication in January 2020.
You no longer receive that "regular" search result after your page is promoted to the highlighted snippet.
Some individuals believe that highlighted snippets lessen clicks on the search results in addition to the minor traffic losses from back then. After all, why would you click on a result if the solution to the inquiry is already on the SERP?
Although this is the true for certain inquiries, it is by no means the case for all of them. Whether Google can answer satisfactorily in the snippet depends on their ability to do so.
See the highlighted snippet for the following query, for instance:
For the majority of individuals, the solution is obvious. And because of this, there is only an average 19% probability that a click will occur from a search for this query.
Now take a look at the snippet for “how does the stock market work”:
The majority of searchers will undoubtedly want to know more because it just provides a rudimentary answer to the query.
Because of this, 82% of searches for this topic on average end in a click.
The lesson learned from this is that it's generally not a smart idea to target keywords with a low CPS.
Consider this while using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer to investigate keywords.
Featured snippets as superb branding opportunities
Featured snippets are the first search results that users view if there are no search adverts, clicks included. They are especially more noticeable on mobile devices, because they are sometimes the only thing users see at first:
This is a strong justification for highlighted snippets.
Undoubtedly one of the most significant SEO KPIs is raising your share of voice on the SERPs. This is due to the fact that long-term growth has been shown to be primarily driven by brand building.
Your brand will become more closely connected with being an industry leader the more frequently it appears on SERPs for pertinent themes.
You can opt out of featured snippets (don’t do that, though)
Following the SERP deduplication, Cyrus Shepard took the lead in testing opting out of highlighted snippets and found that it resulted in a 12% traffic reduction.
However, Google provides a number of alternatives for you to opt out of highlighted snippets if you still want to. Be mindful that both nosnippet robots meta tag techniques prevent your material from showing up in standard "blue link" snippets. I advise against utilizing those as Google would then only utilize the title tag and meta description that you hard-coded.
Therefore, using the max-snippet robots meta tag is the best strategy to stop your website from showing up in featured snippets. The maximum character count that Google will display in the text snippets is specified by this tag.
Additionally, you may adjust the character restriction to the typical maximum length of descriptions because highlighted snippet explanations are lengthier than those in standard snippet descriptions. It's around 160 characters, then.
To remove a page from the highlighted snippets, just add the following code into the page's <head> section:
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:170">The advantages of utilizing this strategy still exceed the drawbacks of adopting the more constrained ones, even if it cannot guarantee not appearing in shorter highlighted snippets.
Recommendation
If you're considering opting out, it's a good idea to first see where your page would rank for the term if you didn't have the featured snippet.Here's an example of a featured snippet that we control:
If we appended “&num=9” to the URL, preferably in Incognito mode, we can see where we’d rank if we weren’t in the snippet:
In this scenario, depending on the page that would take over the featured snippet (you'll learn how to handle that too), we would either be in the second or third place if we choose to opt out.
Opting out and being in lower places might reduce your traffic. You've been made aware.
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