Featured Answers Are Definitely Worth It
In case you’re wondering whether pursuing a “featured answer” aka direct answer, featured snippet is worth it, I would say YES YES and YES.
Just over a month ago I told you about the featured answer we worked on for problogger. At the time of publishing the increase in traffic was around 25%. Just over a month on and the increase is 10 times that. A whopping 250%. A featured answer is so much better than a number one spot and I think I know why.
SEO Gets No.1 meh
Number 1 spot used to be the ultimate goal and although there was a not insignificant traffic increase of 767% featured answer traffic is so much better.
Understandably we were coming off a very low base and traffic to the page being measured before it went to no.1 was negligible.
A Featured Constant
As you can see the Google / Organic traffic to our no.1 ranking page increased gradually over time. Possibly it went to no.1 for other phrases we were not tracking. When the featured answer kicked in though it took things to another level. According to Search Console / Search Analytics, in the first week of March we had 54 phrases containing the word “money” that were no.1. In the first week of May we had over 160. The difference is the featured answer.
Same Content Different Results
So we know we had the no.1 spot for about 54 phrases but when we got the featured answer that increased to 160 different phrases. I have not yet checked them all but in many of the 160 phrases we still do not have the no.1 organic spot but we have the Featured Answer result. Interesting behaviour from Google. Whilst the ranking page is not good enough to be no.1 for many of these phrases it’s good enough to be the Featured Answer. Mmmm does that mean Google considers it’s OWN results incorrect?
Finding Featured Answers
I wish I had a virtual pig I could lend you to sniff out these truffles of search but I don’t. The next best thing is to go into your search analytics and filter queries for “how” and “what” . You should start to see a lot of questions. Then go and search some of those to find your answers. Let me know if you find one and need tips to rank for it.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
