What to ask your agency about featured snippets
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on featured snippets, these questions are worth asking early.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Direct answers near the top of a page get pulled into results. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Winning the snippet can outperform the top blue link. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
How to tell if yours is fine
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
- Lists and tables are pulled more often than prose — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.