How to win the featured snippet for a local question

What a featured snippet is

A featured snippet is the box Google places above the first organic result when it believes it can answer the question directly. The box holds a passage copied from one web page, with that page’s title and link under it. There are three common shapes. A paragraph snippet is a single block of text of 40 to 60 words. A list snippet is a numbered or bulleted list. A table snippet is a small table, used for prices and comparisons.

Google takes the passage from a page that already ranks well for the query, usually on the first page. It is not choosing the best site. It is choosing the best passage, and it looks for one that begins by answering the question and needs nothing around it to make sense. The page that holds the snippet also keeps its normal listing, so it is shown once, at the top.

The snippet is also what Google Assistant reads aloud, so winning it does double work. That side is covered on the voice search answers page.

What a lost featured snippet looks like on a physical therapy website

A physical therapy practice gets the same questions every day. Patients want to know whether they need a referral, how long rehab takes after a knee replacement, whether dry needling hurts, and what to wear to the first visit. Every one of those questions has a featured snippet on Google, and on most days it belongs to a national health publisher or a hospital system three states away.

The clinic’s own site usually has the answer somewhere. The referral rule sits in a paragraph on the New Patients page that opens with a sentence about insurance. The knee replacement timeline is in a blog post that takes three paragraphs to get to the number. The dry needling page describes the technique for 200 words before saying whether it hurts.

Google reads each of those pages and finds no single passage it can lift. So the snippet goes to a page that states the answer in its first sentence, even though that page knows nothing about Twin Falls, does not take the patient’s insurance, and cannot book them for Tuesday.

A worked example: a two-clinic practice in Twin Falls taking three snippets

Snake River Physical Therapy runs clinics in Twin Falls and Jerome and sees about 140 patient visits a week. Its site ranked on page one for the questions below, mostly between positions 3 and 7, and held none of the snippets.

The referral question is the one that matters most, because the person asking it has not booked anywhere yet. Here is how the New Patients page answered it before.

We accept most major insurance plans, and our front office staff will verify your benefits before your first visit. Idaho is a direct access state, which means that in many cases you may be able to begin physical therapy without first seeing a physician, although some insurance plans do have their own requirements, so please call us with any questions.

The fact is there, in the second sentence, wrapped in hedges. Here is the rewrite, placed under a new heading that repeats the question.

You do not need a referral to start physical therapy in Idaho. Idaho allows direct access, so you can book an evaluation at Snake River Physical Therapy in Twin Falls or Jerome without seeing a doctor first. Some insurance plans, including most Medicare Advantage plans, still require a referral to pay for treatment, and the front desk will tell you before your first visit whether yours does.

That passage is 64 words. The first sentence answers the question outright, the second says who and where, and the third handles the exception without undoing the answer. The knee replacement post got the same treatment, with the timeline moved to the first paragraph: most patients finish formal physical therapy 8 to 12 weeks after surgery, with two or three visits a week at the start. The dry needling page kept its old snippet holder, whose answer was already short and direct while the clinic page ranked seventh.

How to check your own featured snippets

1. List the questions patients ask at the front desk. Ten is enough to start.
2. In a private browser window, type each into Google exactly as a patient would. Note whether a box appears above the first result and whose site is named under it.
3. Open Google Search Console, choose Performance, and click the Queries tab. Filter to queries containing how or do. For each one, note your page and its average position. Snippet holders report as position 1.
4. For each question your site ranks on page one for but does not hold, open your page and find the passage that answers it. Count the words from where the answer starts to where it ends. If the answer is not in the first sentence of a paragraph, or the paragraph runs past 70 words, that is the reason.
5. Check the heading above that passage. If it does not contain the question or something close to it, Google has no signal that the passage is the answer.

Do the same check monthly. Snippets change hands often, and a page that lost one usually lost it to a rewrite, not to a bigger site.

What we do about featured snippets

You get a list of the question searches your site already ranks on page one for, with the current snippet holder named beside each one. Each of those questions then gets a direct passage on the right page, under a matching heading, with the facts checked against you before anything is written. Pages that rank too low to compete are flagged for the search work that comes first, since a service page that ranks is the ground a snippet stands on. Snippet wins and losses are reported every month by question. This is included in every Hazer search plan.

Questions people ask about AEO: how to win the featured snippet for a local question