Real Estate SEO: How Do I Get Shown in Google's Featured Snippets?

Google is constantly changing and evolving, trying to make visitors' experience more user-friendly and allow them get the answers they need sooner. That's why Google snippets rolled out a featured snippet option.

So, what does it mean exactly for real estate agents? Let's find out.

What Is a Featured Snippet on Google?

A featured snippet is a selected search result that appears at the top of the search results in a different format box. Featured snippets, also known as a position zero, aim to give visitors a short answer straight away. Types of featured snippets include:

• Tables
• Steps
• Definitions
• Lists

Example:

How Does a Featured Snippet Work?

Featured snippets are automatically chosen by Google while crawling a web search listing. Different parts of the text are extracted from your article in order to be placed as a small 40-60 word text above the first position on Google, hence the name "position zero."

What Are the Types of Featured Snippets?

• Tables – In the case of tables, Google is pulling data from the search listing and highlighting it in the form of table. If your data is too big according to the featured snippets standards, Google will hide a part of data under the "More" button.
• Steps – As the name suggests, this featured snippet type contains a list of steps. Usually, it answers the question "How to...?" It is presented in an ordered format.
• Definitions – This feature snippet contains a concise definition of the search query. The definition type of featured snipped gives a short but a straightforward answer to the searchers' question. Most commonly, this kind of featured snippet answers the question "what."
• Lists – List featured snippets usually contain an unordered number of suggestions and items. Usually, it is presented in a bulleted list format.
• OneBox Results – OneBox results are inline answers or tools in search results. For example, boxes that showcase time or weather forecasts will be considered as a OneBox result.

How to Optimize Featured Snippets?

Depending on the featured snippet type and the topic you're writing about, there are different ways of optimizing featured snippets.

Let's say you're writing about how to buy a house as a first-time buyer. You either will need to optimize your page for the step- or list-type featured snippets, depending on the direction your article takes.

As experienced SEO specialists suggest, the first thing you should do is to do your research. And by researching, we mean checking other similar content pieces with keywords you want to rank for, as well the "People also ask" section.

What Is a Featured Snippet?

As we already mentioned, featured snippets are somewhat of a phenomenon, a dark horse in the SEO world. Without higher rankings, featured snippets can appear above the first position and a lot of times get a big chunk of traffic for so called no-click searches. What might be a great experience for casual internet surfers in terms of instantly getting the answer for the question they're searching for, doesn't exactly translate positively for the content creators, unfortunately.

As experts showcase, with Google's attempt to give an instant answer through the featured snippet, they see a drop in traffic and most probably this issue will only become bigger and bigger.

And even though you can opt out of featured snippets, as some studies showcased, it leads again to the loss of organic traffic across the whole website.

So opting out of the featured snippets might not be a good idea. But, in any case, you should test it on your own website and see it for yourself.

To opt out of the featured snippets, you can use a nosnippet tag that looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">

Another way is to limit characters for the snippet. This way, if the text has a lower number of characters, featured snippets won't be shown for your page.

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:40″>

To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.