I recently finished a project where I was tasked to investigate why a site (that receives over one million organic visits per month) does not rank for any featured snippets.
This is obviously an alarming situation, since ~15% of all result pages, according to the MozCast[1], have a featured snippet as a SERP feature. The project was passed on to me by an industry friend. I’ve done a lot of research on featured snippets in the past. I rarely do once-off projects, but this one really caught my attention. I was determined to figure out what issue was impacting the site.
In this post, I detail my methodology for the project that I delivered, along with key takeaways for my client and others who might be faced with a similar situation. But before I dive deep into my analysis: this post does NOT have a fairy-tale ending. I wasn’t able to unclog a drain that resulted in thousands of new visitors.
I did, however, deliver massive amounts of closure for my client, allowing them to move on and invest resources into areas which will have a long-lasting impact.
Confirming suspicions with Big Data
Now, when my client first came to me, they had their own suspicions about what was happening. They had been advised by other consultants on what to do.
They had been told that the featured snippet issue was stemming from either:
1. An issue relating to conflicting structured data on the site
OR
2. An issue relating to messy HTML which was preventing the site from appearing within featured snippet results
I immediately shut down the first issue as a cause for featured snippets not appearing. I’ve written about this topic extensively in the past. Structured data (in the context of schema.org