{"id":56214,"date":"2021-06-03T07:00:23","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T14:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/?p=56214"},"modified":"2021-06-01T12:48:22","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T19:48:22","slug":"featured-snippet-display-lengths-study-portent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/seo\/featured-snippet-display-lengths-study-portent.htm","title":{"rendered":"Study: Featured Snippet Length and Display Limits"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Optimizing for featured snippets is worthwhile for a lot of organic search marketers. Even though some recent research shows the featured snippet position has a lower click-through rate than the first classic snippet<\/a>, other research has featured snippets receiving 35% of all clicks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There seems to be a lot of variability in how well users click-through on featured snippets. I think the low CTR figure from Ahrefs is due to only using SERPs that didn’t have any ads. I think a keyword search that doesn’t result in ads means Google determined those users aren’t interested in clicking on anything and just wanted a quick answer.<\/p>\n

In my experience, capturing the featured snippet position is worth the effort. The featured snippet is the most prominent organic snippet, and I definitely see sudden increases in sessions when a client’s blog captures the spot. I think my target users click because the content of the featured snippet box suggests the answer they’re looking for is on the page.<\/p>\n

Obtaining the featured snippet position is tricky, though. In my previous article about how to get featured snippets<\/a>, I said that we might have to make multiple attempts and not go over the display limit when we’re writing our candidate snippets. I cited research from A.J. Ghergich and SEMRush<\/a> that said the optimal paragraph featured snippet length is “roughly 40 to 50 words, or around 300 characters.”<\/p>\n

The problem is that recommendation only works for paragraph snippets, not lists or tables. “Around 300 characters” is pretty loose; can we get more definite? When I looked at meta description lengths in snippets<\/a>, there was a pretty clear drop in frequency that indicated an upper bound. Would frequency charts for featured snippets clue us into that? (It turns out there are a few clear limits, like very few more than 320 characters for paragraph snippets<\/strong>.)<\/p>\n

I asked our SEO fellow and resident software engineer Matthew Henry<\/a> to help me do another data-driven research project to see if we could pull some insights out of scraped SERP data. Heroically, he sifted through Google’s bizarre HTML to identify featured snippets and compile their stats. This post shares what we uncovered about how Google treats featured snippet length and display limits.<\/p>\n

Methodology<\/h2>\n

We used the same list of 30,000 keywords taken from our existing and previous clients as we used in our earlier research about meta descriptions<\/a>. Once again, we used the full HTML SERP export feature of STAT Search Analytics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We weren’t able to parse Google’s mobile results, so the data in this article is for desktop featured snippets only. Of the 30,000 initial keywords, 7,854 of them had featured snippets that we included in this research. We don’t recommend using that figure for how often featured snippets appear. Overall featured snippet appearance rate has already changed<\/a> a few times this year and is better tracked over time like Mozcast<\/a> and RankRanger<\/a> do.<\/p>\n

We didn’t cover all of the various forms featured snippets can take, just what we thought were the most common: paragraphs, lists, and tables. We also looked at how the presence of images changed snippet length, so some results will be segmented by the appearance of zero, one, and a carousel of images. We were careful only to include what we thought were true featured snippets, and not Knowledge Graph features that use text excerpts.<\/p>\n

Paragraph Featured Snippets<\/h2>\n

Paragraph featured snippets are some of the most common and easy to target. They generally appear as a few sentences of text and can have one or more images present in the snippet.<\/p>\n

There are a few exotic forms, like a stack of two snippets or a carousel of snippets, but they are rarer, and we think their display limits are going to be pretty similar to the normal ones.<\/p>\n

Images in Snippets<\/h3>\n

Google likes to include images in featured snippets. Sometimes they will include images from a different website than the source text, but how often do they include images in the first place?<\/p>\n

Each type of paragraph snippet occurred fairly equally, with snippets without an image occurring slightly less often.<\/p>\n

If images show up in snippets so often, it’s a good idea to think about what kind of images would help support the content you’re writing for paragraph snippets and put them on the page.<\/p>\n

Number of Sentences<\/h3>\n

Paragraph snippets tend to have 2 to 3 sentences per snippet. There were very few snippets with 4 sentences, and none with 5. I don’t think it’s the case that Google wants to show 2 or 3 sentence snippets specifically, but content that long tends to fit into the available featured snippet space. It’s also rare to see single sentences that are 40 to 50 words long; they are hard to read, and users don’t react to them well.<\/p>\n

The lack of snippets with 5 sentences is curious. Maybe Google doesn’t consider more than 4, but it could be that brands don’t tend to write 5 short sentences.<\/p>\n

When segmented by image presence, paragraph snippets with no image are slightly more likely to be one sentence long. This might be due to single-sentence direct answer type snippets.<\/p>\n

We didn’t count “answer lines” like “1000” in the screenshot as a sentence, as it appears to be Google doing a little processing on the snippet text.<\/p>\n

Consecutive Sentences<\/h3>\n

Ever notice how some paragraph snippets have an ellipsis between sentences, like in the earlier screenshot for “why is the sky blue”? This is Google taking text from two parts of the page and sticking them together for the snippet. How many snippets are non-consecutive like this?<\/p>\n

Only about 13% of paragraph snippets use non-consecutive text, and image presence doesn’t look related. One interesting thing we found is that there were no snippets with three non-consecutive sentences. It seems like Google will only take text from up to two parts of the page for snippets.<\/p>\n

Anecdotally, Google does this because there isn’t suitable consecutive text to use. I expect these snippets to become less frequent over time as more SEOs attempt to replace them with tailored consecutive text.<\/p>\n

Word Count<\/h3>\n

The Ghergich & Co.\/SEMrush research<\/a> found that paragraph snippets tend to be around 40-50 words. We found a pretty similar result, but 55 words in a snippet was pretty likely too.<\/p>\n