Featured Snippet

Finding an answer through search used to mean several clicks. You pressed the results from the top down, backed out when the answer wasn't there, and pressed the next one. Opening three pages to confirm one short fact was ordinary.

To shorten that, search engines began pulling the passage that answers the question and pinning it above the results. In effect a slot appeared above position one.

Pagedeck's blog held that slot once. An article on how to choose a sprint length sat at position three, and when one of its paragraphs landed in the snippet area, traffic more than doubled. The reverse happened too: another article had its whole answer captured in the snippet, so impressions rose while arrivals fell.

The search engine takes a passage that answers the question out of one of the higher-ranking pages and puts it at the top. Four things matter.

1. You have to be high already to be a candidate. Snippets are usually drawn from positions one through ten, so a page at twenty never lands there no matter how well it is written.
2. There are three shapes. A question about what something is gets a paragraph, a question about how to do something gets a numbered list, and a question comparing two things gets a table.
3. There is a known way to write for it. Use the question itself as a subhead and answer directly underneath in two or three sentences. How well a single paragraph stands alone as an answer is called answer extractability, and articles aiming at this slot are written to have it. A paragraph that needs surrounding context to make sense cannot be lifted out, so it drops from consideration.
4. The slot is not pure gain. When the snippet carries the whole answer, people read it and move on. For questions where knowing the answer creates a next step, clicks go up instead.

Nothing about this slot is guaranteed. The search engine swaps in a different page whenever it likes, and a page that would rather not appear can add a tag that keeps its text out.

"We took the featured snippet on this post. Traffic doubled."

The article landed in the snippet area and moved up the page.

"Let's use the question as a subhead and answer in three sentences underneath."

Write in a shape that is easy to lift out as a snippet.

"Impressions are up but clicks are down. The snippet finishes the answer."

Holding this slot can still reduce arrivals.

At Pagedeck, Ravi picks which articles aim for it. The test is whether the question ends with a single answer. Questions that end there only get read in the snippet, so he does not chase the slot for them and shapes only the ones where knowing the answer sends someone looking for the method. Mia watches the raw material: a paragraph containing numbers from the product cannot be copied elsewhere, so it holds the slot longer.