- [Glen] Finding featured snippets to target for your site.
Featured snippets are something that
a lot of website owners fight for.
Not only do they gather more results page real estate,
but they help push down competing websites
in search results, as well.
So, for example, as I'm recording this,
if you search for 'most recent Google update',
you will see Detailed, my featured snippet for this query.
Takes up a bit more space than a normal listing
and I have pushed down the competition.
While this is a featured snippet,
there are quite a few variations.
So they don't just come in one standard size or style.
So in this video, I'm going to show you
how to find featured snippets that you already own,
that you already have in search results,
that show up in terms that you're ranking for,
that you might be able to target,
and I'm gonna show you how to find featured snippets
that you can target with future content that you publish.
Now due to the scale of the web
and this being able to apply to any niche,
I'm going to show you how to do this
using a premium tool called Ahrefs.
However, this also works in a tool called SEMRush
if you already have an account there
or prefer their toolset.
And what's really nice about SEMRush is that
they actually give free accounts for limited testing.
So you can't test that many queries
and you can't use all of their features,
but it is nice of them to do that.
And Ahrefs aren't too far behind.
They offer a seven day trial for seven dollars
as I record this, so it's not going to break the bank
if you just want to play around for this specific one thing.
Though if you are on a budget, which I totally understand,
or you're just curious, you could manually search
for some of your top key phrases.
Go look in Google search console.
What are you already ranking for?
Go search for those top queries.
Are featured snippets showing up for your website
or other websites?
We have another video on how to obtain featured snippets.
But for now, let's look at how to find opportunities
that you can be ranking for.
First up, I am inside SEMRush.
I am logged in to an account.
But this is not a paid account.
This is a free account.
You can see they are trying to ask me to upgrade
to actually have a premium account.
And what's nice is that I can actually see some stats
about any website that I put in.
I can see their organic traffic,
how much they rely on paid traffic,
some of the top keywords that they're ranking for,
some of their biggest competitors in search results.
It's quite nice.
But, keep in mind, I think the number is 10 searches.
If I do 10 searches, they will ask me to upgrade.
I'll come back tomorrow and play around with it again.
So they give you cool access to some data,
but that's not what we're focused on in this video.
We are going to use their keyword analytics.
So what I've done here, is I've already searched
for a pretty broad term related to the industry
I care about, social media.
And then what you can do is you can click on
the 'advanced filters' tab.
That wouldn't have normally shown you.
Click on 'advanced filters',
go over here to 'SERP Features',
and then you can click the check mark
next to 'Featured Snippet'.
So if I click that check mark,
click 'Apply Filters', these are the queries that,
when SEMRush crawled Google search results,
they found featured snippets for these queries.
So they've got 6000 queries in here,
average keyword difficulty of 72 percent,
and as you can see, just verifying again,
I don't have a paid account.
They do limit what you can see,
but it's certainly better than nothing.
It is nice of them to do this and put this out there
so you can start getting an idea of what, in your industry,
has featured snippets.
So in theory, if I Google 'social media apps'.
Social media apps.
I should see a featured snippet, as I do.
Medium.com have one here.
And we can try one more.
What else do we have?
Social media calendar, let's give that a try.
I didn't see a featured snippet for that one.
Let's try one more.
Social media quotes.
And then that one does have one showing up.
So it's not perfect, but you can get some pretty cool
insights from using the free version of this tool.
I'm gonna dive into Ahrefs right now.
It's the tool I prefer.
It's the tool I'm used to.
But, like I said, you can have fun with SEMRush, as well.
So what you can do here to start with,
you can actually put in your own website
and see if you rank for any featured snippets.
So let's just say I was the owner
of crypto currency blog, CoinDesk.
We can put in their website.
We go over here on the left to 'Organic keywords'.
So we have two things we can see here.
First of all, on 'SERP features',
we can see any keywords that CoinDesk are ranking for
that have a featured snippet in them.
So let's apply that.
In theory, if I go to these search results,
they will have featured snippets.
And what Ahrefs does, which is pretty nice,
they actually show you which ones CoinDesk owns.
But if you just want to see the ones CoinDesk has
or your website has, you can change the option here,
'Only linking to target'.
Apply that again.
So now if this was your website,
you can see all of the featured snippets
that you likely have in search results.
And you can also do this for competitors
if there's someone you're really fighting against
in search results.
You can see what featured snippets they have
and know what you want to target and fight for
with your own website and your own content.
So it's really nice.
You can put in any website.
It isn't free like SEMRush, but it is seven dollars
for a seven day trial and pretty useful, as well.
Another feature of Ahrefs is their keywords explorer.
So we can dive into that.
And we can put in any phrase here.
So let's go to social media again.
Let's just stay on topic or on trend
from the last website.
And them I'm gonna go over to phrase match.
So any keywords or any key phrases that must have
the word 'social media' in them.
And again, we can go to 'SERP features',
click on 'Featured snippet'
and then it will show us the key phrases
that, when Ahrefs last checked, they had featured snippets
on Google search results.
And you can see how recently they've been
checking those search results.
Then you can break things down even further.
You can use their keyword difficulty section.
It's not perfect, but it is a pretty decent metric
as to how hard it might be to rank for something.
It's on a scale from one to 100.
So the higher the number, the more difficult
they assume it will be to rank for something.
We can change that to max: 20.
So key phrases that should be less difficult.
And we've got social media quotes,
is YouTube social media.
It's funny, they actually have the exact same ones.
Is YouTube social media, social media quotes,
social media etiquette, social media services, and so on.
And we can even change the word counts.
If you really want long phrases that
you might want to target that might have less competition,
we've changed the setting here that it must
have a minimum of four words.
Let's see how far we can go.
Are there any with seven words?
There are.
You can get really specific.
So if I Google 'how to become a social media manager',
we can see that the Capterra blog has a featured snippet
for this query.
And it takes up quite a lot of sub real estate
as you can see.
You don't really get to see even the second organic result.
These take up a lot of space in search results
so it is really nice to own them,
it is nice to target them.
And we have a video on some tips on how to acquire these.
But the first step is to know what to look for,
what you want to rank for,
what you can take over for competitors,
or what search results you're already ranking in,
where someone else has the featured snippet
that you can compete for, as well.
So I hope you find this one pretty cool.