Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is the box Google puts above its normal results, holding a short answer copied straight from a page, with that page's title and link underneath. Most people just call it the answer box. It sits in the spot everyone used to fight over, so the odd part is that no amount of money will put you in it.

Google builds the box on its own, so there is no form to fill in and nobody to ask. It reads the pages already sitting on the first screen, then lifts out whatever passage answers the question most cleanly. So getting in comes down to two things, being on that first screen, and having the plain answer already written somewhere on your page.

Shape matters more than length, because Google needs a passage it can lift out whole. So write the question the way a customer says it, then answer it in two or three sentences of forty to fifty words. Keep that answer near the top, ahead of the background and the story. A dental page that opens with how long a first visit takes and what it costs beats one opening with the clinic's history.

The honest catch is that the box sometimes answers the question so completely that nobody clicks, and the visit you wanted never happens. Someone looking for your opening hours reads them there and goes back to work. The box is therefore worth chasing for some questions and not for others. A question answered in one line gives the visit away, while one that ends in a price, a choice or a booking keeps it.

The way through is to answer the question and still leave a reason to come. Give the number first, then say what changes it, because that second half is what brings the reader onto your page. Linkysoft picks that kind of question first on a digital marketing project, because whoever arrives afterwards still needs a quote or a comparison. It helps too if the page itself reads easily, which is what a well built website quietly gives you.

One last mistake comes up often enough to name. You can tell Google to keep your text out of the box with a small instruction in the page code, and almost nobody should. Losing the box usually loses the visit that came with it, and Linkysoft has never seen a client gain from that trade.