Five mistakes teams make with featured snippets

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit featured snippets.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Direct answers near the top of a page get pulled into results
• Lists and tables are pulled more often than prose
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Winning the snippet can outperform the top blue link. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

A reasonable first step

In practice

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about featured snippets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Winning the snippet can outperform the top blue link — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.