One of the best ways to find snippets that you can optimize content for is to think like your audience.<br />What questions are people actually trying to find answers for?<br />For instance, put yourself in the shoes of someone who is new to marketing and may not understand some common terms.<br />There are a whole lot of terms and acronyms in the marketing world that can be intimidating and confusing to people who aren’t familiar with them.<br />Do a short search, such as “What is a CTA in marketing?”<br />For this search query, there’s a featured snippet in the form of a paragraph.<br />For the term you look for, the snippet might contain a list or a series of steps. And who knows — the featured content might already be yours.<br />If it isn’t, check out ideas under the “People also ask” section.<br /> <br />These are questions related to the search you already entered. To look at snippets for each search query, just expand the phrase by clicking the arrows on the right.<br /><br />Then, you can read through the full snippet for each related question.<br />This is a quick way to identify competitors and content ideas in one easy step. Now, you can steal their snippet with a bit of time and effort.<br />You can also identify some questions by using a site like Answer the Public.<br />Tip #3: Find content ideas on Answer the Public<br />Since questions are most likely to bring up featured snippets, you’ve got to answer how, what, when, where, why, or who.<br />The best place to find out the types of questions people might be asking about a particular topic is Answer the Public.<br />Let’s say you want to learn more about apple pie.<br />Just type it in and you’ll receive tons of suggestions for questions related to the topic that you can answer with your content.<br />Then, pick which angle you want to take. If you want to answer questions that address the “what,” just focus on that section.<br />Then, pick a question to answer from that group. It’s that simple!<br />Keep in mind that you may want to do some keyword research before you do this to make sure the words you’re searching are SEO friendly.<br />Tip #4: Do keyword research<br />It’s time for some good old keyword research.<br />You should already be doing it. But you can optimize your keyword research to help you get featured snippets, too.<br />It’s a good idea to use a tool or two to find out if a search query will bring up featured results or not.<br />I like Serpstat because it allows me to easily see which keywords bring up featured snippets on the results page.<br /> <br />Now that’s pretty neat, right?<br />Just type in a domain, keyword, or link, and hover over each result to see if featured snippets come up for each.<br />This is awesome for uncovering which featured snippets your competitors are currently ranking for.<br />Plus, if you already rank high for a particular keyword, it’s worth finding out if Google currently brings up featured snippets for those keywords.<br />If they do, try to rank for it by identifying (and answering) the questions that people have about that topic.<br />
