What are featured snippets?
Featured snippets are selected search results that are featured on top of Google's organic results below the ads in a box.
Featured snippets aim at answering the user's question right away (hence their other well-known name, "answer boxes"). Being featured means getting additional brand exposure in search results.
Here are two studies confirming the claim:
Ben Goodsell reports that the click-through rate (CTR) on a featured page increased from two percent to eight percent once it's placed in an answer box, with revenue from organic traffic increasing by 677%.
Eric Enge highlights a 20–30% increase in traffic for ConfluentForms.com while they held the featured snippet for the query.
2. Types of featured snippets
There are three major types of featured snippets:
Paragraph (an answer is given in text). It can be a box with text inside or a box with both text and an image inside.
List (an answer is given in a form of a list)
Table (an answer is given in a table)
Here’s an example of paragraph snippet with an image:
According to Getstat, the most popular featured snippet is "paragraph" type:
3. Featured snippets or answer boxes?
Since we're dealing with a pretty new phenomenon, the terminology is pretty loose. Many people (including myself) are inclined to refer to featured snippets as "answer boxes," obviously because there's an answer presented in a box.
While there's nothing wrong with this terminology, it creates a certain confusion because Google often gives a "quick answer" (a definition, an estimate, etc.) on top without linking to the source:
To avoid confusion, let's stick to the "featured snippet" term whenever there's a URL featured in the box, because these present an extra exposure to the linked site (hence they're important for content publishers):
4. Do I have a chance to get featured?
According to research by Ahrefs, 99.58% of featured pages already rank in top 10 of Google. So if you are already ranking high for related search queries, you have very good chances to get featured.
On the other hand, Getstat claims that 70% of snippets came from sites outside of the first organic position. So it's required that the page is ranked in top 10, but it's not required to be #1 to be featured.
Unsurprisingly, the most featured site is Wikipedia.org. If there's Wikipedia featured for your search query, it may be extremely hard to beat that — but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
Finally, according to the analysis performed in a study, the following types of search queries get featured results most often:
DIY processes
Health
Financial
Mathematical
Requirements
Status
Transitional
Ahrefs' study expands the list of popular topics with their most frequently words that appear in featured snippets:
The following types of search queries usually don't have answer boxes:
Images and videos
Local
Shopping
To sum up the above studies:
You have chances to get featured for the terms your pages are already ranking in top 10. Thu
