What do you do after you win a featured snippet? And how do you educate your stakeholders on what they are? Jordan Silton walks us through it.


You’ve just snagged yourself a featured snippet. Now what? Well, you watch Jordan Silton of Apartments.com and CoStar Group walk through how to optimize, educate, and keep those coveted snippets.

Video transcription

My name is Jordan Silton, I’m the Director of SEO Marketing for CoStar Group and Apartments.com.

Featured snippets are really prominent in search right now. It’s a great time to dig in and figure out, not just “how do I earn a snippet,” but what does it mean once you get it?

I was really excited to look beyond the “how do I mark on my code” and into what other things apply to featured snippets in the dynamic results that are constantly changing in Google.

Who benefits from a featured snippet strategy

Any type of business can benefit from a featured snippet strategy. You probably want to use a tool and figure out how prevalent featured snippets are in your industry in order to evaluate if it’s meaningful or if it’s worthwhile to invest a lot of effort into them.

They are something that STAT tracks very well, and we were able to use a data-driven approach to measure our impact and see how things are evolving in the industry.

Optimizing for snippets

The first obstacle that we tried to overcome in our featured snippet strategy was when to actually get started in optimizing towards them. Featured snippets have now become extremely prevalent. But when we started tracking them, they were only one percent, two percent of search queries. We really had to figure out when it was going to be a meaningful time to start and optimize towards them.

Featured snippet education

After you get a featured snippet, you have to educate all the stakeholders throughout your organization about what that means and what the impact is to the organization and to the brand.

That meant a lot of communication with our sales team and marketers to make sure that, when we see a box at the top of Google results, that means “featured snippet” to them — and how that’s educated not just to our sales teams but also to our customers, our advertisers, and other partners with our organization.

Want more snippets?

Of course, you do! Good thing we have a plethora of research on featured snippets. Get your feet wet with our latest on Google’s newest snippet, or take a peek at the influence of voice search on featured snippets.