How to Get a Google Featured Snippet

Episode 964: How to Get a Google Featured Snippet, with Fernando Angulo

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How to get a Google featured snippet? Listen to this podcast with Fernando Angulo on how to get a Google featured snippet.

How to get a Google featured snippet? This is a question that many business owners would like to get an answer to because having one will give you an edge on the search results page.

Fernando Angulo is the Head of Communications at SEMrush. He has been with SEMrush since the beginning of the company’s marketing efforts and has built its all-star marketing team. Being one of the most recognized faces of the brand, Fernando is speaking at 50+ top conferences worldwide each year. Fernando specializes in B2B search marketing, e-commerce, influencer marketing, and trained marketing teams of companies such as Expedia, T-mobile, Prestashop, and Bing.

What you will learn from this episode on how to get a Google featured snippet:

How Fernando started out at SEMrush when the team was small, and how the company has now grown to over a thousand people in multiple countries
How to get a Google featured snippet and drive massive traffic to your website
How SEMrush expanded beyond their two main tools (keyword search and analytics) as search engine optimization (SEO) has grown more complex
How SEMrush has recently achieved the new milestone of six million users from just 100,000 users
How the SEMrush platform grew and expanded to meet the increasingly diverse needs of the company’s growing customer base
How SEO has become more complicated to achieve as internet user expectations have changed, and how SEMrush addresses this complexity by focusing on the user
How 20% of your time should be devoted to creating helpful content and then the remaining 80% of your time should be spent featuring and promoting that content
How there are three main types of featured snippets in Google search results: paragraph, list and table featured snippets, and how to correctly structure each type
Fernando breaks down important key words that users often use and shares how these words indicate how you should structure your results
How to get a Google featured snippet that is tailored for voice search, and how to position your site to land the coveted featured snippet position
Why building a well-equipped marketing team requires equipping that team with the best technology and tools

Resources:

Website: www.semrush.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/fernandoangulo/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/semrush/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SEMrush
Twitter: @Fernando1Angulo
Twitter: @semrush
Learn how to get a Google featured snippet by reading this blog from SEMrush

Additional Resources:

Sell With Authority book written by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner
Predictive ROI Free Resource Library
Connect with Stephen Woessner on LinkedIn
Learn how to get a Google featured snippet by knowing how to create and structure your content first

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Full Episode Transcript

Get ready to find your recipe for success on how to get a Google featured snippet from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and scaled their business. In fact, my team at Predictive ROI, we’ve been talking about it now for several weeks, actually, I think it’s more like several months.

And how we’ve been doubling down on our free resources section on PredictiveROI.com. In fact, it’s really turned into a resource library. So you can download free practical and tactical guides for how to build your own authority sales machine. Everything from how to create your ideal client avatar, how to build out a value ladder, a sales funnel, how to make sure your content strategy aligns with the ten truths to what makes someone an authority within their niche.

Just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources and as always, everything you request. It’s all free and we will send it right to your inbox.

Before we welcome today’s very special guests, I want to share some additional context around why I asked Fernando Angulo to join us today. Fernando is the Head of Communications at SEMrush, which is one of the leading tools used for search engine optimization as well as Onward Nation evaluating performance.

So, you know, great place to track metrics. All the tools that you need essentially an all-in-one suite. Fernando has a depth of expertise in business-to-business search, marketing, e-commerce, influencer marketing. And these train teams at Expedia, T-Mobile, Bing and many, many other teams. Well, I was super excited when Fernando said yes to joining me here on Onward Nation because this is going to be an exceptional opportunity for us to get strategic as well as very practical and tactical, you know, that I like to do.

And we’re going to dive into really big, meaty topics when we think about lead gen, when we think about sales funnel, when we think about content and how to plant our flag of authority by being super helpful. Those are the types of topics that we’re going to cover in this conversation. So everything from like how to boost your findability, how to improve your rankings in organic search.

We’re going to really dig deep into the featured snippet and the multiple types of featured snippet, and then specifically how to format your content in order to rank well for feature snippets, how you can attract more of the right traffic into the top of your sales funnel. And then lastly, if there’s time, Fernando and I are going to dig into some of the more popular tools and some of the best metrics because there are a litany of metrics, whether you want to call them metrics, you want to call them KPIs, whether you want to call them, you know, some other sort of acronym.

It’s fine, but there’s a litany of them. And what are the best ones for you and your team to measure? So all of that said, without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Fernando.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Fernando Angulo’s Introduction

Hello, Stephen. Great to be here. Thank you for having me here today, my friend. Thank you very much for saying yes. And also thank you for dialing in all the way from Prague.

I really appreciate that. I mean, you are hopping a whole bunch of time zones to make this conversation happy. So, thank you for that. And before we dive into the conversation, please give our listeners, our Onward Nation business owners, some additional context here. Tell us a little bit more about your path, your journey, and then we’ll dive in.

Oh yes. Definitely. So I’ve been working for the last nine years. So the company is, right now 11 years on the market. And I was part of the very, very first team that started as a startup, as a, project that was growing a lot. So when I started working for SEMrush, we were around 17, 19 people.

Today we are about 1000 people in different countries and several offices. So we grew a lot. Right. Of course, the team that I was involved at the beginning was the sales team. I was a professional CRM manager. So it was working a lot with different, that the base is, to, create pipelines for salespeople.

My main platform is Salesforce. But I was working with. Sure, CRM with HubSpot, but Salesforce it was my main thing. When I started working for SEMrush, I found out that we have a good community. We have a lot of loyal people who really love to do SEO. That moment, we have two main features, two main toolsthat were the keyword research and the main analytics.

So you can explore what is happening with your competitors. But okay, those two tools were and still are really powerful for any SEO. So you can check what is happening to create your semantic core for your next project. And you can do several of the stuff. But we needed to think about how we can get more leads, how we can get more people attracted to this new wave of knowledge.

Because SEO at that moment was kind of easy to handle. You needed to have just the right keyword, few backlinks, but time has changed. Right now, today is really complicated. It becomes really technical, and it’s not enough just to work with SEO with keywords. Right? You need to work with several other processes, and you need to implement different strategies.

So we build that. At that moment, we have two main tools. Right now, we have about 45. At that moment when I started, we were around 100,000 users overall. Last week, we reached 6 million users. It’s like in a small country, right? Well, like the Czech Republic. Yeah, yeah. So people are aware about that if they want to have online visibility, they need to use tools.

And SEMrush is one of those tools that will help you to push your traffic. Wow. Holy bananas. Okay, first off, huge congratulations, Fernando. I mean, to grow from 17 employees to a thousand members on your team. I mean that is amazing. And it absolutely does not happen by accident. So congratulations. And then to be able to grow your user base from 100,000 users, which in and of itself is monstrous.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Engage Your Users

I mean that is amazing. But then, to be able to grow that to over 6 million is astonishing. Congratulate Asians. That is huge. Oh, and as difficult. Well, when we reached the first million, we said oh my God, that’s it. We did it. But then 2 million, then 3 million, then 4 million in less than three years.

So yeah. So something has happened really good. Okay. Great. So let’s actually go a little bit deeper there because I’m curious if you and your team found this to be the case, like was it harder to reach the first million? But then once you reach the first million, then maybe to go to 3 or 4 million was easier because you had the right systems, you had the right people, you had the right processes.

So is that how that played out for you and your team as well? Yes, because when you are starting something and you are facing the thing that, okay, we want to reach, let’s say 200,000 users, right? Those users, they need to be engaged. They need to be subscribers. They need to be active in the platform. So that’s crazy amount of resources that we didn’t have at that time.

So 70 people, most of them. I was the only marketeer at the time. So only one person then the social media, I was the salesperson again. So what else? I was a customer service person, so I was doing different roles. So, I was the unicorn employee at that moment. But of course, we understood that.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Scaling Your Business

Okay, this is working very well. Let’s have this customer success team. We need to have more marketeers. Oh, there are a lot of people who are speaking Italian, French. Let’s move the platform this localized for different languages. From there and there. Okay, we need to, but we need to grow.

We need to hire more people. Okay, great. That is a great series of lessons, Fernando, about how you start adding those things incrementally and they compound over time. And then once you get more tools, more teammates and so forth, then being able to scale and grow after that becomes easier because you spend all of that time building the foundational work that was necessary.

Great lesson. Thank you, Fernando, for sharing sort of behind the curtain, if you will, about some scaling lessons from SEMrush. Before we get into some of the, you know, strategy and tactics on how to get a Google featured snippet, would really love to go a bit deeper into one of the things that you just mentioned, how SEO used to be simple, for example. And then and now it’s become a bit more challenging.

Like it used to revolve around how to find the right keywords. And you do some research, you put the keywords into the right fields and make sure that your stuff is Google-friendly stuff. Being content making sure that you’re serving up the right content in a very Google-friendly way, if you will. Well, now it’s become more complicated, and that’s what I’m learning from you.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Make Your Website User-Centric

So I would really love to get your perspective here, like high-level view, maybe a couple of things that in your view, like your point of view, some of those things that have changed. Right. So when you think about SEO becoming more complicated today than it was a few years ago, what are some of those things that come to mind?

Well, basically, the thing that has changed a lot is how the user, consumes the content that other people have. Let’s say you have an online private, they have an online project. The way that they’re consuming it has changed a lot. They want to have things faster. They want to trust all the websites that they are visiting.

They want to have more information in a really easy way. So, building big websites with walls of text just for search engines to run them. That’s something that it’s not working anymore. Thinking only about Google algorithms. Thinking about only about. Okay, I want to be the number one, right now, being the number one is not any more trending.

You need to have those beautiful feature snippets and to be in the so-called position zero. So that is the way that you need to be working. So right now, of course, your website needs to be fast and you need to work lot with markups with schema markups, with microformats for microformats. And of course, you need to think more about the user.

So we are, I believe we are now, in the user era and the, you know, user and the things that your team needs to be working in is user-centric way. So user first, what they want just give them faster than anybody else right now. It doesn’t matter that you are big.

It matters that you are the first one solving user’s problems. Yeah, I love that because it puts so much emphasis on the fact that if our listeners Onward Nation business owners are going to create great content, it’s got to be about how they can be even more helpful to their audience, how they can help them be better at their jobs every day, how they can help them solve problems, just like you mentioned.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Use The Right Format

So quick piece of context here, Onward. When Fernando mentioned the featured snippet, you’ve all seen that he mentioned it is position zero essentially in the search results. And sometimes there’s a photo or an icon or something. Maybe a little snippet of text with a link that’s pulled off your site. So it’s typically surrounded by a box. And so, you know, we kind of all get that right.

We’ve all seen the featured snippet in that position, you know, position zero in the search results, right? Right, Fernando. That’s where we’d find it, right? Right there. So amazing. For having those results these days, you don’t need to apply much effort. You need to have the right format. But of course, you need to be. For example, you need to be you need to have, for example, certain amount of external site citations like hyperlinks inside of that URL.

You need to have the right amount of words. Let’s say if we’re talking about digital marketing in the US, at least you need to have an average of a hundred words to rank that content. If you are writing something less, you’re just listening to your time. And the next big thing is you need to support all of that with promo mention.

This is something that we are applying a lot. This is our 20%, 80% rule. 20% of our time, we are creating content 80% of our time. We are promoting it because right now the competition is so high, you can create a beautiful piece of content that nobody’s going to find it. So 80% of your time, you are working on different promotional channels.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Types of Featured Snippet

Okay, so that’s fascinating. Let’s dig into the 20%, 80%. And then if we can circle back to how to get a Google featured snippet, that would be fantastic too. So when you say content creation, I think I’m tracking with you. There is like, yeah, how can we create content that is helpful in solving the problems that you mentioned a few minutes ago?

But once the content is created, we should be about 20% of our time. We then need to spend the other 80% of our time promoting it. So that’s new. I’ve not heard that before. So what are you talking about there? That sounds really compelling. Yes. Well, I want to go a little bit into details of how to get a Google featured snippet so we can build the structure for the promotion.

So, for having those feature snippets and there are three main types of features, which are the paragraph feature snippet, the list feature snippets, and the table feature snippet. So there are three basic types of feature. The snippets and the keywords that are actually activating those feature snippets are also really well-known. So if you want to have the paragraph feature snippet, for example, you need to use question keywords.

For example, you can use any other question that is out there for having the paragraph feature snippet. For earning the list feature snippet, you need to use basically the keywords that are starting with the how-to. So with the how to, how to create a bank account, how to change on a bicycle, how to explain digital marketing to a child, whatever how to is, you can have that feature snippet in the form of a list.

And the last portion of, and the last type of how to get a Google featured snippet, which are the tables. You can activate them with comparison feature, with comparison keywords. So words like compare, comparison actually, there are other triggers there for example, versus that acts also as a comparison keyword. So iPhone versus Samsung whatever is the model.

But the main, the most important comparison trigger here are the price keywords. So pricing, when people are searching for this kind of search keywords. For example, price of oil in Texas, they’re going to receive a table and there is going to be the price in different states, the United States with additional information.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Using Keywords into A Funnel

So you can build your whole strategy just using these keywords. But that’s not it. You need to also use all these keywords into a funnel. And the funnel is very, very simple when you are creating content. For example, let’s say, to try to sell a house, right. You are working on real estate to have those beautiful feature snippets in a paragraph, you need to use, of course, question keywords.

And you are immediately working with the awareness stage of the funnel. So, where to find house for kids or what is the best location for renting apartment? So whatever the question is, you can have that featured snippet. So does the top of the funnel, which is the awareness with the second one. With the consideration of stage of the funnel.

So here’s the interesting thing. You can use their how to keywords, but also you can use a preposition keywords. So any preposition like for example, with without such all those prepositions are working really well for the consideration. Part of the funnel, which is for example, you are now aware about what is the best location to buy a family house.

Right. But the next following question will be house with two rooms and 180m² for example. Or apartment with a pool or whatever. You are not using any more questions, but you are using prepositions which are giving you more details, and your intent there is to consider if you want to have more information.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Building Brand Awareness

And the last stage, of course, which is the decision stage there. You need to use the comparison keywords. For example, house in the street X versus apartment in the street Z. You are comparing two products to services and you will receive a beautiful table as a featured snippet. This type of strategy is now implemented by most of financial institutions, insurer, insurance companies, electrical companies, and of course, the ones that are implementing this right now, a lot are online educational institutes as well.

Any online education platform are implementing this a lot. Why is that? Because their main goal is not to receive any more traffic. They say, okay, we have 100,000 people per month visiting our site. What are we having with that? We want to build brand awareness. So if you have that first result, you will say, okay, these guys are so good.

They have the featured snippet, they have the list, or they have the table, which is my favorite. So you are building more brand awareness and actually so back in the United States, I believe it’s the Citizen’s Bank, that their main goal, their SEO team are working not for traffic but for feature snippets with the most popular keywords.

So, when they are offering their SEO services, they say, okay, we’re going to go with the most important search queries. And we’re going to build featured snippets results with that. And that’s their main KPI is something really fascinating because maybe people are not going to click on that result, but people are going to remember that result in the future.

And the most amazing part here with the feature snippets. That’s the reason I’m talking a lot about this is because they are the foundation for voice search. Right now I will say nothing bad will happen with your website if you don’t have a voice search already. Right. But, if you want to invest in the future, let’s say in some.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: The Voice Search Feature

We held this research last year, and we found out that 70% of all voice search results are coming from feature snippets, which is fantastic. So you need to learn how to get a Google featured snippet and you will have immediately your voice search result enabled. Okay. So here again, let me make sure that I’m tracking with you. I think I am, but with the voice search in the feature snippet being part of the voice search results, meaning that whatever artificial intelligence device that somebody is using whether that’s Google Assistant, Siri, whatever that the AI device is going to read that.

Right. So, if your content is featured in the featured snippet, then your content is going to be read as the search result. So, what a great way to have your content audibly read to the user, right? That’s correct. There is another thing right there because we compare the most popular brands. For example, they say Twitter, Quora, and if you ask, for example, what are the top most profitable companies in the US you’re going to receive from the Google Assistant.

I’m not gonna mention the phrase you’re gonna receive the reply. So the most profitable companies in the US and you will receive the list. You check that with the result. Oh, that’s the featured snippet list. So you have the result for that. But the assistant is mentioning the name of the company only if it’s a popular brand.

If it’s something like, for example, my website dot com and nobody knows what it is, but you have that result. So the assistant is going to be reading the entire domain. So according to my website dot com this is and so on. So for brands, this is a great opportunity to be on the minds and hearts of the users for the rest of the company.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This is a great opportunity for creating that brand awareness. Yeah I love this a lot. So I’m curious about a couple more things about the featured snippet. First, click through rates. And although I understand that, you know, some companies are not necessarily using click through rate as their main KPI, I would love to get some insight from you on that.

And maybe some things that you and your team are seeing. And the second, I’ve heard differing theories on where keywords need to be seated in the content in order to score, essentially score a feature snippet. So first let’s talk through click through rates. I mean, I’ve seen numbers from different studies that, you know, if a piece of content is ranked number one in Google, that piece of content might get anywhere from 37 to 41% of whatever the click thrus might be.

But I’ve never seen any of that data as it relates to feature snippets. Essentially the position zero. So what’s the best guess on click through rate? Like how do we estimate that? Or does it even matter if, I mean, if you score the featured snippet position? Because feature snippets tend to be a little bit more about awareness than necessarily click through rate.

Well, actually, to get that feature snippet position, there is a probability, a high probability if you are in the top five positions with the main keyword. So you can go reformat, repurpose the content that you have built. For example, the least the table having in your mind that okay I have I am with this keyword in the top five rankings right.

If you are number one, that’s not necessarily the best probability because most of the results that we saw, for example, that has been taken from Wikipedia, we video was in the for most of the featured snippets of their since the beginning of the feature snippet. I think three years ago.

But if you are a company, let’s say again, my lovely company, Salesforce, if you are writing something like companies, top companies in Canada. Right, which has nothing to do with Salesforce, it’s basically you can have that result from Wikipedia. But one year ago, people from Salesforce, they took that position just because they were experimenting.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: Know The Proper Format

You need to have basic clear that keyword in the top five ranks. And then you need to have the proper format. And that proper format is something that you can easily understand with machine learning and when you know how to get a Google featured snippet. We did have the numbers. For example, for the paragraph feature snippet, you need to have an average of 46 words, which means that, okay, that’s really easy to understand.

For the table, you need to have at least more than eight items. If you have more than eight items, it is even better because Google is going to truncate that result and you will receive that bottom that says, see more items and people will need to go there, with the table words, the same thing, but three columns and two lines.

So build more columns. So Google is going to be truncated does result. So for doing that there you need to have at least your main keywords in the top five rankings. This is really, really awesome. So I know that we just have a few minutes left, Fernando. So before we go and finish out topic on how to get a Google featured snippet, let’s talk a little bit about metrics.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: The 3 Most Important Metrics

In your opinion, what are the most important metrics that a business owner and their team need to be paying attention to? There’s obviously a lot of them. So in your opinion, what are the most important ones? Yeah. For any business this day, I believe the number one is new users. There we go with, still is traffic for most of the businesses – organic traffic.

I will say the third one, which is the cost per lead customer acquisition, I will say. So those three are the most important ones in my opinion. Great. That is super, super helpful. Let’s also touch on tools. SEMrush provides a suite of 45 tools. Amazing. And perhaps there are others.

Are there other tools? Business owners in their team should consider? Or is SEMrush an all in one package that provides essentially an all-in-one suite? Oh yes. Actually, that’s our main goal because we as users, right now in our marketing team, for example, we have more than 100 people. In order to create a campaign in social media with advertising, doing remarketing, we need to have so many passwords for different tools.

And sometimes we need to share that information. It’s not working. The lack of security listing, information from. So there’s so many risks that are doing these tasks that are really useful. Every day, we are doing basically the same thing with the metrics, with the monitoring. Just checking, tracking, what is happening in there.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: More SEMrush Features

So it’s basically the same tasks that we’re doing. So what we were thinking is, okay, we want to have one tool, but not with small tools that nobody really cares about. We want to have powerful tools. If we are doing SEO, we want to be the best SEO tool. If we are doing the content marketing, we want to be the best content marketing tool.

But actually, we are doing like 100 different experiments every month. Some of them are successful. Most of them, they are failing. But that’s the case with experiments, right? Right. And we are working with different strategies right now. We are not only working for Google results, we are working in the direction. We’re going to Amazon.

We have another project that is called celery. Celery.com. It’s a new product project on SEMrush, powered by SEMrush data and with similar teams. That is meant to be competitive intelligence. Powerful tools for sellers on Amazon right now. It’s completely free for everybody. If you have your products on Amazon, you can go there and do A/B testing with your headers and with your images and with the descriptions of your products and have all the knowledge about, okay, people are interested in this or not.

Take your decisions on that. But we’re going to build, we’re going to be building more market and intelligence there. So that’s going to be something really big. We are also working a lot with artificial intelligence. And let’s say most of the companies, they want to have leads, right? They don’t want to run really heavy marketing campaigns to attract people.

They want to have leads. So, we built this tool that is called Traffic Jet that is powered by artificial intelligence. You just put there the number of leads that you want to have. We guarantee that they’re really with high quality because our engine is going to be doing promotion on any paid platform.

They’re going to be creating the images, the messages, the text, doing all the targeting configuration there. And they’re just going to be selecting the right amount of money that you want to have. So you have your calculator I want to receive, for example, 100 quality rates. And you’re going to put the money that you aim to invest there.

So, yeah, we’re experimenting a lot and we have several other projects. Really awesome. Fernando. And even though you and your team, you guys have been able to build and scale and reach 6 million users, what I love is hearing from you about how you continue to double down, how you’re not stopping there, right? You continue to do more experiments, add new tools, new products, new testing.

And I love that because that’s how you get better and that you guys are not stopping and you’re continue to invent and expand and grow and add more value to your user base. That is exceptional.

How to Get a Google Featured Snippet: How to Connect with Fernando

So before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, I know we’ve already covered a lot on how to get a Google featured snippet, but do you have any final advice, any final recommendations you want to leave us with?

And then please do tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you. Fernando. Oh yes, final words. If you want to build a really, well-equipped marketing team, you need to use the best tools out there. You need to have the best strategies. Actually, when I’m doing my speeches because I do a lot of conferences.

I’m not talking about SEMrush tools, but I’m talking about the philosophy behind SEMrush. The structure, the way that we are working, the workflows, the internal structure of our company. So if you want to learn more about how SEMrush is going in, this fantastic industry, just visit us, check our blog, check our YouTube channel. If you want to connect with me, please find me Twitter, LinkedIn, Fernando Angulo. Thanks so much, Fernando.

And Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and relisten to Fernando’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do because he gave you the recipe, he gave you the blueprint, he gave you the metrics, he mentioned the tools, and then he knitted all of that together so that you can take these huge golden nuggets, take them and apply them and accelerate your results.

And, Fernando, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I am grateful, my friend, that you said yes. You took time out of your schedule. You hopped seven different time zones in order to make this happen so that you can share your insights and wisdom with Onward Nation so they can move their businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, Fernando. Thank you Stephen. It was a fantastic time for me as well.

This episode is complete on how to get a Google featured snippet, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

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