Finding featured snippets in the search results for sites you own can be a challenge of trial and error for random search queries you think your site should not only rank for, but show a featured snippet for. But there is a smart way to try and find them for your own site.

In yesterday’s Google Webmaster Hangout, John Mueller talked about featured snippets in the Google search results, and he said that he believed a particular site in question did have some featured snippets showing in the Google search results.  But the question was raised on how to find them, without having to randomly test search queries.

Mueller said one easy way to find search snippets for a site is to use Search Analytics in Google Search Console.

Look at your search queries and look for the keywords “how” or “why”.  These are often the type of searches that trigger a featured snippet.

Look for longer question-type queries and oftentimes if you try those out, you’ll see that we are showing some kind of quick answer or snippet type thing for those types of queries.  That’s one way you can try and find these.

You can download the Search Analytics, but if you use your browser’s find function, there is a box next to each search query that will automatically open up a link to the first page of the search results for each query, so you can easily check to see if any of them did trigger a featured snippet.

It is also an easy way to find some of the featured snippets your competitors might have, and then try and take them over.

Mueller does say that not all queries are going to show them.

But it’s not something that we show for all types of queries, so if someone is just searching for generic keyword type queries, usually we wouldn’t show this kind of bigger snippet.

But if you are struggling to see if you have featured snippets, this is definitely a smart way to find some of the searches that might be showing featured snippets for your site – or your competitors.

Google is still looking to add information about featured snippets into Google Search Console, according to Gary Illyes when he spoke at Pubcon earlier this month.  However, while Illyes didn’t give a specific timeline, he did say it was still “quarters away.”