Appearing directly above all organic search results, Featured Snippets are a highly coveted and elusive opportunity to generate visibility and traffic for finance brands. So eye catching, the Featured Snippet is often referred to as ‘position zero’, sitting above the fabled ‘position one’ that SEO traditionally targets. Here we look into the value of Featured Snippets for finance brands and how your brand can win the sought-after real estate.
Should finance brands care about Featured Snippets?
Featured Snippets are enhanced organic search results that can take the form of paragraphs, lists or tables, all of which point through to the relevant ranking website. But are they important for finance brands? According to an insightful infographic produced by SEO tool, Searchmetrics, the answer is a resounding yes.
Key takeaways include:
- Featured Snippets show up most frequently in the health and finance industries. 18% of health and 27% of finance keywords return a Featured Snippet so there is a huge opportunity for finance brands to optimise.
- Finance websites get an average of 2,622 clicks to their websites from Featured Snippets per month.
- If you set up an AdWords campaign for finance keywords that return a Featured Snippet, then the average Cost-per-Click would be $5.17. This is a higher CPC than in other industries analysed and shows there’s much greater potential to save costs by pursuing a Featured Snippets spot.
- Aside from key informational sites like Wikipedia and Investopedia, brands such as Nerdwallet and Wells Fargo are excelling at Featured Snippets, winning 4.7% and 2.8% of total Featured Snippets respectively.
How to optimise finance content for Featured Snippets
- Find out where your snippet opportunities lie
A great place to start is to review the relevant keyphrases that are likely to have Featured Snippets you can optimise for. You can do this in a number of ways:
– Do a lot of Googling and get to know the landscape!
– Look at your existing top keywords in analytics and review if they, or related keyphrases, have Featured Snippets.
– Use a tool like SerpStat to highlight keyphrases that do and don’t have a Featured Snippet.
- Know your Schema
Great for both Featured Snippet optimisation AND voice search, getting comfortable with marking up your site’s content with schema will only become increasingly important in the coming years for finance brands. - Keep your answers clear and concise
According to analysis by E-consultancy, Featured Snippets are short and sweet with the optimum number of words sitting between 45 and 53. Although this varies significantly between industries, it’s worth remembering that your reader wants a clear and concise answer; and this is what Google wants to reflect. Remember to also use clear headings and subheadings to help break up your content.
- Get your SEO basics right
According to an Ahrefs study, it is 99.58% positive that Google only shows Featured Snippets for pages that already rank in the top 10. So don’t expect to get that position zero if you’re not already working on your SEO basics. Our 7 SEO best practice tips are a good place to start to ensure you have established the right foundations.
The search engine results pages are a constantly changing landscape, but Featured Snippets in all their variations look set to stay. Optimising your finance content for Featured Snippets could help future proof and grow your brand, so it’s worth experimenting to see what results you can achieve.
Need help in your hunt for position zero? We can help your finance brand establish a best-practice SEO strategy that will help your brand get found, get in touch.
To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.
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- How finance marketers can use schema to boost SEO
- Where to start with technical SEO
- The SEO tools every finance marketer needs
Image credit: E-Consultancy
