How to Get More Google Traffic with Snippet Bait SEO

in this video i'm going to show you how to get more google traffic using a new seo technique in fact this new technique has helped take one of my pages to 23 500 organic visitors per month i've also used this same technique to more than 10x my clicks within a week i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and in today's video i'm going to walk you

through the entire seo process step by step stay tuned the new strategy that i'm about to share with you is called snippet bait as you might have guessed this strategy is all about getting your content ranked in the featured snippet spot because featured snippets show up above the traditional first page results i've been putting a lot of emphasis and time on them over the last year or so which ultimately led me to develop this snippet bait

approach thanks largely to snippet bait i went from literally about five snippets to according to ahrefs ranking for over 200 featured snippets including some like this that bring in over 10 000 visitors per month now to be clear by the time you watch this video i may or may not still be ranking for that particular feature snippet there may not even be a featured snippet at all the idea here isn't that you're always going to get

in the featured snippet 100 of the time it's one of those things that because of google algorithm changes are always in flux but when you add snippet bait to your page you dramatically increase the odds that you'll rank as a featured snippet with that out of the way let's get right into the steps starting with step number zero rank on the first page of google when ahrefs analyzed two million featured snippets one thing stood out that

the content in a featured snippet comes from a first page result literally 99 of the time and i've noticed the same thing unless you're already on the first page google isn't going to use your content in the featured snippet that's because google wants to pull featured snippet content from pages that they trust in other words sites that are already ranking on the first page so if you're not already on the first page of google for a

given keyword there's pretty much a zero percent chance that you'll get in the featured snippet but if you're already on page one it's time for me to show you the first step which is to find featured snippet opportunities specifically you want to find keywords that you already rank on google's first page for and have a featured snippet at the top of the page for example i currently rank in the top 5 for how to get more

views on youtube and there's a featured snippet already there but as you can see another site not mine is ranking in the featured snippet this is a featured snippet opportunity that i could potentially use snippetbait to rank for and if you want to scale this process and make things a little bit easier you can use a tool like ahrefs or moz to find keywords that you rank for that also have a featured snippet in the results

then it's time for step number two identify the featured snippet type now that you've found a feature snippet opportunity it's time to identify the type of feature snippet that you're looking at that way you can create snippet bait for that specific type of featured snippet there are four main types of featured snippets that you want to keep an eye out for first up we have the definition box this is a snippet of text that's designed to

give searchers a direct concise definition or description for example when you search for no follow links in google there's a featured snippet at the top of the page the definition box tends to show up when people are searching for definition keywords like nofollow links content management system or omad diet these also sometimes show up for what is or what are keywords like what is the paleo diet the other common type of featured snippet is called the

table this is where google pulls data from a page and displays it as a table here's an example the third important feature snippet to keep an eye out for is the ordered list this is a list of items or steps presented in order and as you might expect google tends to use this type of feature snippet for keywords that need a set of steps or items in order you see these a lot for how-to keywords like

how to start a business google also uses order lists for lists that rank things in a specific order like this last up we have the unordered list this is google's way of presenting a list of items that don't need to be in any particular order for example if you search for link building tools you'll get a list of the best tools but they're not necessarily ranked from best to worst which leads us to our final step

step number three create your snippet bait so at this point you found a featured snippet opportunity and figured out the type of feature snippet that google's using now it's time to add snippet bait to your page so what is snippet b snippet bait is a snippet of content on your page that's specifically designed to rank as a featured snippet for example i've recently wanted to rank in the featured snippet for the keyword channel description so i

added this snippet bait to the top of the page which helped me grab the featured snippet spot in about a week now it's time for me to show you exactly how to create snippet bait for each type of featured snippet that you'll run into for definition snippets you want to provide google a short 40 to 60 word snippet of text that they can directly use in the featured snippet it also helps if you have something like

what is x directly above your definition here's an example of this type of setup on one of my pages and because i'm giving google a word for word definition they can use i got this snippet bait inside of the featured snippet spot within a few months hubspot takes this to the extreme they actually design little boxes in their content that look just like a featured snippet now i don't think you need to go this far but

it does show you how important formatting is specifically the closer your content looks to a featured snippet the more likely it is that google will use it the only other thing to keep in mind with definition snippets is that you want to make them sound really objective in other words don't include an opinion on the topic either way remember google doesn't want someone's opinion showing up as a definition in a featured snippet so even if you

have a strong feeling on that topic do your best to write the definition without any emotion in fact you want to write the definition like it's in a dictionary for example you can see that our definition for nofollow links sounds like it was pulled directly from webster's dictionary and if you want to rank for a table featured snippet you need to actually add a table to your page in other words google isn't going to grab data

from different parts of your page and make a table out of it instead they tend to scrape tables that already exist for example check out this table featured snippet well when you look at the source of that content you can see that it's literally the exact same table how you code these tables depends on how your site is set up and whether or not you use wordpress but in general as long as your html uses the

table tag to present the data in a table google should be able to easily read the data now for the ordered list featured snippet you need to set up your page so that specific steps or list of items are presented in a way that google can easily understand specifically you want to wrap every item or step in an h2 or h3 and present each item as a sub header to make the order of your items or

steps crystal clear or google you can even include text like step number one or one in each subheading here's an example the important thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to ordered lists consistency is key so if you present step number one as step number one do x don't make your second step just step two do y instead you wanna present your steps consistently like this or like this i personally prefer step number

one over one because it's a little bit easier for users to follow along but google can understand both for example this post lays out a nine step seo strategy each step in the process uses the exact same format step number one step number two etc and i also wrapped each step in an h2 tag now last up for unordered lists you also want to be consistent but you don't need to number anything in a specific order

for example we recently got the featured snippet spot for seo best practices and if you look at the page you can see that each best practice is wrapped in an h2 but the order isn't really important i could flip these around and it would be pretty much the exact same thing it's the same story with my list of link building tools these aren't ranked in any order but i use h2s in a consistent way to let

google easily figure out the list of tools that i'm talking about there you have it my three-step snippet bait formula for getting more traffic from google did you learn something new from today's video if so make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button below this video and if you want exclusive seo and traffic techniques that i only share with subscribers head over to backlinko.com and hop on the newsletter

it's free now i want to turn it over to you have you tried ranking in the featured snippet spot before if so how did it go i'd like to hear what you have to say so let me know by leaving a comment below right now i'm brian dean the yeah way to get back at me that way okay i got this snippet featured snippet spot before featured snippet spot