Optimising for Featured Snippets on Golfsupport's Blog
The Brief
In March 2019, we decided to start getting smart about earning featured snippets. We were getting them for clients beforehand but hadn’t really mastered a technique to secure them. We wanted to try and use our content marketing to get that coveted “position 0” spot. Featured snippets not only increase your website's traffic (an obvious benefit), but can increase a website's authority and brand awareness. We obviously wanted to improve on all of this for our clients, and so got to work.
Our Strategy
The team went over our most successful blog posts for clients, especially ones that had featured snippets, and looked at why they did as well as they did. We then tried to replicate this with the content we were writing for clients- especially those with such high domain authority, like Golfsupport.
We also came across some methodologies on how to essentially ‘steal’ featured snippets. In short, we took some of our best-performing blog posts for Golfsupport (those ranking in top 10 positions). We preceded to narrow our list down to a handful whose keywords had a featured snippet already owned by someone else.
All we had to do then was go back into our posts and modify them, using the tactics we thought would help us overtake the current featured snippet. We would restructure the posts (ensuring answers came directly after questions) and also looked at what the current snippet holder was doing right. Did they answer using a list? A table? We would replicate and improve on this.
The Results
Our featured snippet stealing is a work in progress- but is going well for a number of clients, such as Golfsupport. So far, in a few months, we have gained 9 featured snippets for key terms. What’s more, we have now got 62 SERP features for our client as a result of our re-optimisation of old blog posts- including things such as image packs and site links.
This has of course improved the visibility of Golfsupport’s content, but also their site traffic. The graphs featured on this page show the impact on clicks and impressions from the SERP after gaining featured snippets.
"Anything that increases our visibility on the SERP is great for business. Reboot thought of a clever way to bring in traffic and help us provide useful information to potential customers."
