What are featured snippets?<br />Featured snippets are selected search results that are featured on top of Google's organic results below the ads in a box.<br />Featured snippets aim at answering the user's question right away (hence their other well-known name, "answer boxes"). Being featured means getting additional brand exposure in search results.<br />Here are two studies confirming the claim:<br />Ben Goodsell reports that the click-through rate (CTR) on a featured page increased from two percent to eight percent once it's placed in an answer box, with revenue from organic traffic increasing by 677%.<br />Eric Enge highlights a 20–30% increase in traffic for ConfluentForms.com while they held the featured snippet for the query.<br />2. Types of featured snippets<br />There are three major types of featured snippets:<br />Paragraph (an answer is given in text). It can be a box with text inside or a box with both text and an image inside.<br />List (an answer is given in a form of a list)<br />Table (an answer is given in a table)<br />Here’s an example of paragraph snippet with an image:<br />According to Getstat, the most popular featured snippet is "paragraph" type:<br /><br />3. Featured snippets or answer boxes?<br />Since we're dealing with a pretty new phenomenon, the terminology is pretty loose. Many people (including myself) are inclined to refer to featured snippets as "answer boxes," obviously because there's an answer presented in a box.<br />While there's nothing wrong with this terminology, it creates a certain confusion because Google often gives a "quick answer" (a definition, an estimate, etc.) on top without linking to the source:<br />To avoid confusion, let's stick to the "featured snippet" term whenever there's a URL featured in the box, because these present an extra exposure to the linked site (hence they're important for content publishers):<br /><br />4. Do I have a chance to get featured?<br />According to research by Ahrefs, 99.58% of featured pages already rank in top 10 of Google. So if you are already ranking high for related search queries, you have very good chances to get featured.<br />On the other hand, Getstat claims that 70% of snippets came from sites outside of the first organic position. So it's required that the page is ranked in top 10, but it's not required to be #1 to be featured.<br />Unsurprisingly, the most featured site is Wikipedia.org. If there's Wikipedia featured for your search query, it may be extremely hard to beat that — but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try.<br />Finally, according to the analysis performed in a study, the following types of search queries get featured results most often:<br />DIY processes<br />Health<br />Financial<br />Mathematical<br />Requirements<br />Status<br />Transitional<br />Ahrefs' study expands the list of popular topics with their most frequently words that appear in featured snippets:<br />The following types of search queries usually don't have answer boxes:<br />Images and videos<br />Local<br />Shopping<br />To sum up the above studies:<br />You have chances to get featured for the terms your pages are already ranking in top 10. Thu
