This post was originally published on the STAT blog[1].
Featured snippets, a vehicle for voice search and the answers to our most pressing questions, have doubled on the SERPs — but not in the way we usually mean. This time, instead of appearing on two times the number of SERPS, two snippets are appearing on the same SERP. Hoo!
In all our years of obsessively stalking snippets, this is one of the first documented cases of them doing something a little different. And we are here for it.
While it’s still early days for the double-snippet SERP, we’re giving you everything we’ve got so far. And the bottom line is this: double the snippets mean double the opportunity.
Google's case for double-snippet SERPs
The first time we heard mention of more than one snippet per SERP was at the end of January in Google’s “reintroduction” to featured snippets[2].
Not yet launched, details on the feature were a little sparse. We learned that they’re “to help people better locate information” and “may also eventually help in cases where you can get contradictory information when asking about the same thing but in different ways.”
Thankfully, we only had to wait a month before Google released them into the wild and gave us a little more insight into their purpose.
Calling them “multifaceted” featured snippets (a definition we’re not entirely sure we’re down with), Google explained[3] that they’re currently serving “‘multi-intent’ queries, which are queries that have several potential intentions or purposes associated,” and will eventually expand to queries that need more than one piece of information to answer.
With that knowledge in our back pocket, let’s get to the good