SaaS companies thrive on digital outreach which implies that their success relies greatly on their SERP ranking for which hundreds of companies are in a constant battle. According to SmartInsights, “the first organic search result in Google has an average click-through rate of 28.5% which drops dramatically to 15% and 11% for the second and third result”, it’s obvious that it’s a “Winner Takes A lot” situation if not “Winner Takes All.”
There is constant fierce competition between rivals to make it to the top rankings and although a magic button that miraculously takes you to the top spot would be great, unfortunately, you can win this rank battle in the world of Google by Abracadabra…
It takes creativity, dedication, and persistence to achieve this honor. Nevertheless, the top 3 spots aren’t the only way to rule the search engine results. There is, however, a secret passage that can help you outrank the top SERPs and help you to summit zero position. Featured Snippet.
Upon searching for anything in Google, you might have come across a block that contains the exact solution to your query, well, that’s a Featured Snippet.
Also referred to as SERP position zero, these snippets can help you enhance your search engine rankings by taking up most of the space in a search result. For instance, if you searched for “How to start with SEO,” Google answers your question with a snippet that contains information about your question and places this link above all of the other links on the search results.
Whether you’re ranking high or not, you will always have a chance to rank for featured snippets.
Being a SaaS website, you must have a “How to” section. It’s similar to the FAQ section. Developing a section devoted to addressing and answering questions will help you increase the traffic to your site and also might get you a chance to feature in the #0 position. For a “How to” section, you can try combining a couple of questions (closely related to each other) into one query and answer accordingly.
Use Answer the public to find relevant questions and then try to answer them.
“Answer The Public” will display several results for your query like:
Questions are most likely to bring up featured snippets, so you can try and answer how, what, when, where, etc.
So make sure you use them in your content.
Also, make sure that you do some keyword research before you start with the content part to make sure the words you’re searching for are SEO-friendly.
You’re already familiar with the 3 major types of snippets, the only thing you need to decide is What type of snippet do you want to rank for? Once you’re clear on that you can structure your content accordingly. Here’s how you can format your content for a snippet:
A thorough competitor analysis can reveal a lot of important details. For this, you can use SEMrush where you can check the featured snippets of your competitors in the “Featured Snippet” option under the “Organic Research” section. With this, you can also optimize your content for the same words and topics.
Using High-quality Images and Videos
Since it’s scientifically proven that people remember 20% of what they read and 80% of what they see, leveraging this fact can help you keep the ball in your court. Using good quality images and videos can play a key role in ranking for position #0.
Apart from researching keywords and finding relevant questions “Answer The Public”, the “People Also Ask” section usually beneath the featured snippet can also help you a lot.
When working on a blog post, try to answer as many questions as you can.
For SaaS companies, it’s not just about driving traffic, but also about being experts in your market niche to the extent that whenever your potential customer faces any issue, they know they can rely on your content.
Top rankings are essential for the success of SaaS companies and if you want to drive traffic and be the Wikipedia of your market, ranking in featured snippets is a great opportunity, even if you weren’t able to rank for position #1.
Pushkar Sinha
