Youtube video transcript
It looks like Google are up to the old tricks this time they’re going after your featured snippets, stick around and watch the video. And I will give you my top tip for optimizing your posts for snippets so you can win them every time. Hello, YouTube, and a very special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil.
And welcome to my channel. This is the place where I document my journey while I’m trying to build an online income. If that’s something that you are interested in doing. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and also leave me a comment with any questions you might have. Okay. So today we’re talking about featured snippets.
What exactly is a featured snippet? Now you shouldn’t confuse this with a snippet that you might use in a plugin, like a Yoast or even a rich snippet. A snippet in Yost. A bit of a description of what your webpage is about and a rich snippet gives additional information such as for a product you might have a little bit of extra information about dimensions and things like this.
No, a feature snippet is a little bit different. This is what you will find at the very top of the sub or the search page where you put a query into Google and it’s something like Google. Goes into the post or the webpage to find, and they want to give that as the answer to the query. Now, personally, I don’t have a big beef with Google, not yet, but I do have to say that they are representing about.
76% of all my organic traffic, whereas Yahoo and other search engines like that are only about 11%. So I do need to pay attention to what they’re doing. So what exactly has happened with the feature snippet? Up until a couple weeks ago, if you were able to win the featured snippet, then you would get position zero, right at the top of the page, which is a great thing.
But you would. Get a ranking, perhaps from position one to 10, with the original page where the snippet was taken from. So that meant that you got two bites of the pie. However, now Google is changing things around instead of having 11 results on the page, there are only 10. So position zero has now become position one and that’s the feature snippet.
And instead of being able to have two pages ranked so including the feature snippet and the other page ranked on the same page on the same server, I should say. Now, if you win the feature snippet, your page will be positioned on the second page. And as we all know, if you wanna hide a body. Hide it on the second page of Google.
So what exactly is Google doing this? Probably it’s because they’re a business and they’re trying to make money. And the way that Google makes money is to keep people on Google. They don’t actually wanna send anyone to your blog or to your website. So they change things around and they are trying to keep the user on the sub.
So now when you look at a sub you’ll notice that position one is. A featured snippet. And then they put all the answers to the query above the video row and above the section where people also asked. So they’re trying to keep the user thereby giving them the answer. So what does that mean for us as the creator?
Are features snippets, a good thing or a bad thing? If you look at the figures according to back lingo, a position one post before this change would probably receive about 31% of the clicks. So you’d get a click through rate of about 31%. Whereas the featured snippet in the past would only get about 8%.
So that’s a bit of a problem, right? 31 compared to 8%, because that means traffic for us. If we’re getting 20% less click through rate, that’s 20% less traffic, right? Maybe things are not changing. And if you look at a site nowadays, they’re trying to sneak in the ads. They’re trying to sell the products to them.
And as users, we know that we don’t always want that. So perhaps organic searches will become more desirable and having position one, the feature snippet is going to be as advantageous as having the old position one. Which was the first organic first result. So is it actually worth having this snippet?
Would it be better to go for position two or position three? Because we all know that when we see the feature snippet, traditionally, we would go for the first result. But after listening to Jim and Ricky from income school, they made a very good point on their podcast for the Project 24 members.
And this is a course that I’ve signed up to, which. Gonna help you basically build an online income within 24 months. I can’t recommend it enough if you’re interested in finding out more check the link in the description. So Jim and Ricky were talking about this issue on their podcast and they were basically saying would you rather be.
In the snippet or would you rather be position 2, 3, 4, whatever it might be? Basically because Google is putting so much onto the C now with ads, with other ways to try and distract the user, grab their attention. It is much better for you to be right at the top than at the bottom.
So even though they’ve changed, Even though you are getting one fewer ranking on the Sur it’s within your interest to try and optimize four snippets. So how exactly should you optimize for a snippet? Remember, we’re trying to be helpful and we’re trying to answer queries. That’s what we are doing here.
We’re building organic traffic and being the most helpful resource that we can. So your snippet should be the most concise answer to the question now. Jim or Ricky in Project 24, they go through this, it’s all part of their post recipe and they could do a much better job than I can. But also, you can find this information online if you search for it.
But my tip is to make the snippet as concise as you can. And as obvious to Google as you can. So what I tend to do is I will write my post and at the top, cuz it should be at the top. I put the snippet in bold. I write my post, I get all my ideas on paper and then I go back and I write a summary. So the summary is the answer to the question.
So you want to try and avoid any sort of caveats. You want it to be quite to the point. you don’t want to be umming and ironing because Google is a machine. They want to see a definitive answer, really. And you’ve gotta make it obvious that this is the answer to the query. So beyond that, I’m sure you can find other information or if you’re in Project 24, you already know what I’m talking about, but this is the basic thing, a nice summary to the query, to the answer you’ve given and making it pretty.
At the top of your post. The other thing to remember is if you’re writing a post, that is not an answer to a question. The 10 best X for Y or whatever it might be, then make sure you optimize your headings, your H two tags, optimize them with key words to do with the query that you are writing about.
And that way they will be put in a snippet. So although feature snippets have changed, I possibly will change again in the future. You’ve gotta move the times and it’s absolutely worth taking the time to optimize your post for feature snippets. I do it all the time. And with all of my pages that are ranking, I would say about half, if not more, have the feature snippet, cuz I do this all the time.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. If you found this useful, also give me a light. It really helps me out. And also what are you doing at the moment to optimize your post for feature snippets? Leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you. Thanks for watching guys. I’ll see you next week.