If you have been unsuccessful getting a featured snippet for some of the how/why queries in your website’s market area, there is a new source popping up in featured snippets – YouTube.
What is especially unusual is this featured snippet is taken from result #7 on the page, with there being 5 text based search results, a recipe snippet result and a “in the news” section before the YouTube result chosen for the featured snippet. This was done with personalization off – I saw the YouTube result in #2 with personalized results on. Wikihow was #1 both times.
The snippet shown in the result is not taken from the video’s description, as one might assume. It is taken from the transcript of a video.
This does mean the latest trend of videos that simply play music with text on the video itself, especially popular as 30 second video recipes, wouldn’t be able to benefit from getting a YouTube related featured snippet since there is no voice transcript.
It is worth noting that for this particular query, Google chose to show the most literal definition as the featured snippet. It also has a “see results about” for both a television show and related book in the disambiguation box for that query.
So if you are having trouble getting a featured snippet for your brand, creating a YouTube video could be a way to do it – just make sure there is voice on the video, as the featured snippet text is taken from the transcript and not the video’s description.
Jennifer Slegg
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