This activity would help to understand what to optimize so that your content gets featured in the snippets. But the larger question is how to optimize for featured snippets. These days, this activity is provided as part of the SEO services. However, here are a few ways that you can try out to optimize for featured snippets.
Google prefers to have snippets which feature within a paragraph. Research suggests a typical size to be around 45 words. Try answering the questions you got as part of the research within one paragraph. It does not mean that the article on your website is limited to one paragraph. You can break your article into meaningful subsections. Google prefers such long-form content and identifies that content that is relevant to the question to appear as featured snippets.
Google has a preference for lists, numbers, steps etc. As we have seen earlier, List Snippets is one of the common types of feature snippets. Hence it helps immensely to the cause that the information on your website is organized in the form of lists, numbers and tables. Laying down the facts can help get noticed by Google.
Analysis of Snippets shows that once a page gets listed as a featured snippet, it gets referred to multiple times for similar queries. Hence, it would be prudent to structure the article such that it can address a lot of similar questions. This would be a smarter approach to having a specific article for each of the questions. The key here lies in identifying similar questions.
For you to be able to combine the multiple related questions in one article, ensure that these queries are organized properly. This can also help in structuring your content well. You can have a generic keyword or a query as the theme or section of the article. A more specific search query becomes the title. Further specific queries can become subheadings. This structuring of the article based on keyword is productive as it can help connect the specific query to the related content in the article.
Another way of optimizing featured snippets would be by using images. Featured snippets with images are eye-catching and are a prominent part of the featured snippets. However, the control of which image that Google displays in the featured snippet is not in your hands. In this scenario, the best option is to ensure that all the images in your article are attractive as well as contextual.
It apparently does take a lot of research and planning to be able to optimize featured snippets. However, the results are not always guaranteed. This is based on multiple aspects including – your current rankings, the content and ranking of the competitor etc. As highlighted earlier, the inherent incentive of working on optimizing Featured snippets is to work on optimization of your website. The featured snippet is a goal that you can try achieving, but there are other things that you would gain on the way.
Overall it is an interesting journey to undertake, sort of as a mid-way audit of your website, which also presents you with a new goal and purpose.