Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is the box Google puts above the normal results. It shows a short answer taken straight from a page, with the title and the link underneath. Most people call it the answer box. It sits where everyone used to fight to be first, and you cannot buy your way into it.

Google builds the box on its own. There is no form to fill in and nobody to ask. It reads the pages already ranking on the first screen, finds a passage that answers the question cleanly, and lifts it. So getting in has two parts. Be on that first screen, and have the plain answer written somewhere on the page.

Shape matters more than length. Write the question the way a customer says it, then answer it in the next two or three sentences, in about forty to fifty words. Put that answer near the top, before the background and the story. A dental page that opens with how long a first visit takes and what it costs will beat one that opens with the history of the clinic.

Now the honest catch. The box sometimes answers the question so well that nobody clicks. Someone who wanted your opening hours reads them there and goes back to work. That is a real loss. So the box is worth chasing for some questions and not for others. A question with a one-line answer gives the visit away. A question 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, then say what changes it. Linkysoft starts with that kind of question on a digital marketing project, because the reader who arrives afterwards still needs a quote or a comparison. It also helps when the page itself is easy to read, which is one thing a well built website quietly does for you.

One last mistake people make. You can tell Google to keep your text out of the box with a small instruction in the page code. 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.