Featured Snippets Volatility
Featured Snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google search results – Position 0 if you like. They’re designed to quickly answer a searcher’s query and have been at the forefront of marketer’s minds of late. After all, if your content shows in featured snippets, it maximises brand visibility and showcases you as a go-to source of knowledge.
Recently, however, featured snippets disappearing has caused quite a stir. This is because at the start of the year, many disappeared and then returned, bringing up a whole bunch of questions about snippet visibility. While the world’s biggest search engine has remained largely quiet about the issue, Google’s John Mueller has recently discussed snippet volatility, putting the reason down to ‘normal’ organic changes in search.
When asked if it was deliberate from Google’s side to reduce the number of featured snippets showing, he said: “I don’t know… The featured snippets and rich results in general, those kinds of things can fluctuate over time. And I know the teams are always working on those features and trying to fine-tune the triggering.
“So when we would show them or when we wouldn’t show them, sometimes the triggering changes over time that we just kind of reduce the threshold overall or that we change the focus a little bit and say like less here and more here. Sometimes that happens across geographies or languages. But these kinds of changes from our side are essentially normal organic changes in search, how they can always happen.”
He also said that a technical issue was not the reason for losing featured snippets, stating: “It’s definitely not the case that we say well, like there’s some technical requirement that’s missing on these pages therefore we dropped it. It’s more that we need to refine which types of results we show over time.”
Mueller also made it clear that Google is all about improving the relevancy of their search engine results pages. He said: “Usually we don’t think of it as much as we want to reduce the number of times we want to show a feature. But rather, we want to improve the targeting and the relevance of when we show the feature. And sometimes that does mean overall it’s like fewer. But it might be that they’re fewer here and there’s a little bit more here.
“That’s something that just happens over time. They’re always trying to find a better balance of what to show in search and improve that.”
As a brand, the best thing you can do is respond to the evolution of what users are looking for. Many want quick fixes. This means creating content that answers direct questions. Formatting your pages in a Q&A style makes it easy for Google to see the relevancy of your pages and more likely for your content to rank in snippets.
Contact Whitefish Marketing today for a tailored content marketing strategy for your brand. This includes local SEO, keyword optimisation, PPC and more.
