Can One-Time SEO Get me a Featured Snippet on Google?

By David Wells, Digital Marketing Manager

Allow us at #TeamTechArk to toot our own horn a bit. We just got a featured snippet placement for one-time SEO, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Why are we so excited? Glad you asked.

What’s a featured snippet?

Google added featured snippets into Search Engine Results Pages (or SERPs) to display what it believes to be the best answer for a particular question or query.

Featured snippets in Google search display a 1- or 2- sentence answer to a question with a link back to the original webpage. Google crawls that website for what it thinks the best answer is.

Instead of clicking an ad or jumping into a webpage for an answer, the featured snippet is right there at the top, giving one lucky website prominent placement above the rest.

For “One-Time SEO,” TeckArk was that lucky website!

How do I get a featured snippet with one-time SEO?

The irony of our high placement is that you can’t get a featured snippet with one-time SEO. As we wrote in the original article, one-time SEO positions a new site for search engine success. It covers tasks such as:

• Metadata
• Semantic HTML tags
• Keyword-rich URLs and headlines
• Relevant content to targeted queries

In other words, one-time SEO serves as a launch point for ongoing SEO campaigns. At the beginning of each of our ongoing SEO campaigns, we perform one-time SEO tasks in the first month. We use one-time SEO to position keyword-rich, relevant content for ranking so that when Google crawls the page during our ongoing SEO campaigns, it finds concise information to put at the top.

And just like that, we have a nice billboard for our website, all for the low price of a little elbow grease.

What does ongoing SEO do to get me a featured snippet?

Ongoing SEO services primarily comprise three core areas of work:

• Publishing content off-page to build up backlinks. This is where TechArk SEO specialists spend most of our time.
  Backlinks are a key ranking factor for featured snippets. A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Our SEO specialists post on forums, bookmark your website in listings, and write small articles on other websites to boost your ranking through quality backlinks.
• Content maintenance and cleanup. Broken links happen. So do website updates and changes in trends. TechArk performs weekly website updates, such as 301 redirects, to ensure your website stays up-to-date.
• Regular content production the website. Our blog-writing services are designed to get Google to crawl your website on a regular basis. The more Google crawls your website, the more often Google discovers your website through backlinks and re-indexes it for higher website placement.

Nothing guarantees a No. 1 ranking or a featured snippet. But without ongoing SEO work, one-time SEO work will get you only so far.

Why can’t I just do one-time SEO?

Website are always competing with one another for rank and featured snippet placement. Google’s database of website contains billions of webpages,  many of which look like yours.

One-time SEO tasks ensure your site is technically sound. But after you build your website, you need to publish regular content to achieve (and maintain) rank.

I’m visiting this article and I don’t see your featured snippet.

By the time you read this article, it’s entirely possible that another website may have overtaken our top spot. Google releases regular algorithm updates that affect website ranking each day, and other webmasters are looking at our placement and trying to knock us down from our No. 1 spot.

The competitive nature of ongoing SEO means that ranking is never permanent nor guaranteed. You need an agency partner who understands this to ensure that you are always performing the ongoing work necessary to get good results.

I need SEO help.

That’s what TechArk is here for. Schedule an SEO assessment of your website and see how both one-time and ongoing SEO can help your business achieve great results.

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