Featured Snippet for Local Website

Fredericksburg, Virginia recently launched their Civil Rights Trail.  While the landing page did rank as the first organic search result for “fredericksburg civil rights trail”, they noticed that another organization held the Google Featured Snippet spot which put it above the official trail page.

After reviewing the landing page and the featured snippet page, we determined that the landing page needed some specific on-page content optimizations to compete for the featured snippet space.

What is the Featured Snippet and Why is it Important?

The “Featured Snippet” is a specific area that appears on the Google search results page for some queries.  It appears above the organic results.  Depending on the query, the featured snippet may provide enough information to the visitor so that they do not need to proceed to the full page.  For queries that can’t be adequately answered with a short snippet of text, the placement of the featured snippet means that your page will likely get more clicks than the top organic results.

On-Page Optimizations

1. The Page Title   

The original page title did not include the location.  Google was displaying a modified version of the title so we just made that the new title, which does include the location.

2. The Meta Description    

The meta description was good but it did include an unfortunate misspelling of the word “Trail”.  We fixed the typo and adjusted the text to be a little more compelling.

3. A Short Summary

The page content was missing a short summary that provides an overview of what the trail includes.  These summaries can be used as featured snippet text so it’s important to include this text.  It also improves the overall readability and makes the content more helpful to the reader.

4. Overall Page Readability

The original page had a few readability issues.  First, there was one large paragraph at the beginning that needed to be split into two.  Second, the placement of the logo in the middle of the content broke up the flow of the page so we moved it to the right and let the text flow around it.  Lastly, we modified the wording of several sentences to make them easier to understand. 

5. Better Section Headings

We modified the vague subheading “Additional Resources” to “Trail Maps” to better explain the items listed below.

6. Better Link Text

Several of the links did not adequately explain what they linked to, so we updated the text.  Ambiguous link text is also a problem for accessibility so it’s important to use text that clearly communicates the purpose of the link.

7. Alt Text

Lastly, most of the images were missing alt text.  This is also an accessibility issue.

The Results

After making these updates and re-submitting the page for indexing, the landing page quickly took over as the featured snippet with the added summary text used as the highlighted text.