How it Took Me 10 Minutes to Rank in Google Featured Snippets
For the past year I’ve been adjusting, tweaking and updating my SEO strategy with the goal of making it easier and faster to rank valuable, high-quality content in Google’s Featured Snippet. Now, it’s finally working, and the first thing I want to do is share my success and of course a step-by-step guide on how it all works.
Me
Let me do a quick intro. A few of you may already know me, but for those who don’t, I’m Marvin. I founded MySiteAuditor, a lead generation SaaS for SEO service provides that I bootstrapped to 40k MRR from a coffee shop in Chicago. Within 24 months, my quick success led to a 7-figure, all cash acquisition deal.
Before that, I ran a successful digital marketing agency in Chicago that was also successfully acquired in 2014.
My point is, I know SEO.
Today
I’m currently working on my third startup, Checkli. What was supposed to be a simple checklist tool to help me organize my chaotic entrepreneur lifestyle, turned into a massive platform of people all around the world making and sharing checklists.
To be honest, I really hate long blog posts, but even more, I hate reading long blog posts because the answer to my query is always buried somewhere in the 20th paragraph, at the bottom of the article.
There has to be a better way, right?
So, I decided to add a feature on Checkli that made it very easy to publish my thoughts in the form of checklists for anyone to see, copy, and use for free.
Think of Checkli as a Slideshare for checklists.
It was so much easier and faster than blogging.
And people loved them. They started saving, copying, and downloading my free checklists.
Lightbulb.
Everyone should be able publish their own valuable checklists for free on Checkli, not just me.
A few months later, we launched free Checkli Publisher Accounts, and wow!
People started sharing:
- Morning routines
- Fitness and health guides
- SEO and digital marketing checklists
- Startup books to read
- Cleaning checklists
- Bucket-lists
- Foods to eat and not to eat
- Travel destinations
- Fortnite checklists
- Disaster relief supplies
- Airplane landing procedures
- and so much more!
When worlds collide.
Next, I decided to combine my experience and knowledge of SEO with my love and passion for checklists, and like magic a star was born.
For all of our free published checklists I added the following:
- Readable, SEO-friendly URLS
- Featured images with alt tags and and captions
- SEO-friendly tags
- Crawlable and index friendly titles, descriptions, and tasks
- Lengthy descriptions
- Categories
- Links
- and more
Google Featured Snippets
If ya don’t know, Google Featured Snippets are usually the #1 search result shown in Google. They are small previews of Google’s top recommended search results. They normally draw most attention and the most clicks.
Most often you see them displayed as:
- a paragraph,
- image,
- video,
- table,
- and of course a list of items.
See where I’m going?
Bulleted checklists are a super popular and a very common type of featured snippet because people love lists. Lists are easier to make, easier to read and much easier to understand. Plus, lists take minutes, where as blog posts can take hours.
So, I’ve been tweaking and twisting an ethical SEO strategy to help our checklist publishers get ranked on page #1 of Google, and of course in Google’s Feature Snippet.
…and it’s working!
An example of a published checklist ranking #1 in Google’s featured snippet:
Since launching Checkli Publisher accounts, traffic has skyrocketed from high ranking checklists. So, I decided to run a few tests to see how long it would take me to rank in a Google Featured Snippet.
It was the middle of the NFL season, so I decided to focus on something trendy. I made a simple NFL checklist for our sports category. It took about 10 minutes to make before publishing it.
A couple of weeks later…
More results:
- Within a 2.5 weeks, my published checklist ranked #1 in Google for “NFL Teams by state”, “NFL teams in alphabetical order” and other closely related terms.
- 50,000+ people have visited the page
- 375+ people have copied the checklist
- 70 people saved it as a PDF.
A more detailed step-by-step guide on how I ranked #1 in Google’s Featured Snippet:
First
I researched keywords using Google Search Predictions, a free and pretty accurate way to find out what people are searching for in Google. It takes both your search history and millions of other people’s search history into account when serving up search term suggestions and predictions.
You can see Google Search Predictions when you start to search for something in Google. They also appear at the bottom of Google search results after you perform a search.
After about a minute (literally) of quick research, I decided that “NFL teams by state” looked like a good keyword to go after.
In addition to using Google search predictions, I also scanned a list by Ahrefs of the most popular words used in Google’s featured snippets.
Second
I made a checklist on Checkli and added an SEO-friendly title and description that matched the keyword I was targeting.
Third
I added a featured image with my keyword in the alt tag and caption.
Fourth
I added all the tasks. (I copied and pasted from another source.)
Fifth
I published!
Within a couple weeks my checklist outranked every other list of NFL teams on the web and has had more than 50,000 visitors and growing. In fact, this checklist is now shown as a featured snippet which, according to Moz, can increase traffic for Google search by 30%.
Breaking SEO News:
I’ve always been worried about content length because checklists don’t have a ton of content, compared to blog posts.
Will that hurt us? Will that limit our SEO potential?
Then, in mid 2018, John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, revealed that, “Word count is not indicative of quality”. Woohoo!
More examples of my favorite published checklists:
16 Powerful Books Every Entrepreneur Must Read by Neil Patel
How to Market Your Blog Post: 25 Actionable Tasks
Fear Setting: Tim Ferriss’ Template for Listing Your Fears Instead of Your Goals
So, how do you publish a checklist?
It’s so freaking easy, I swear!
We don’t charge any money, and don’t plan on charging any money to publish checklists on Checkli. There’s a link in our footer that you must use to become a checklist publisher.
- Create a free account (It’s free from this page)
- Pick a username
- Make a checklist (don’t forget to optimize your checklist)
- Add personalize options
- Publish (hit the button called “Public on the web”)
Checkli Analytics
I must say, we’re loving all this traffic, but not as much as our publishers love all the free traffic to their website. Since launching our publisher accounts, we’ve quadrupled traffic, and are still growing like crazy.
- 900,000+ checklists made and shared
- 8 million tasks created
- 95,000+ users have signed up
- 3,000+ checklists have been published (NEW)
- 134,000+ checklist copies saved
- 202,000 checklist PDFs downloaded
- 20,000 weekly visitors and growing!
Some final words.
Yes, it can take minutes to publish a checklist, but I’ve been doing this for a while. You still need to put time and effort into it. But it’s a heck of a lot shorter and easier than writing blog posts.
Most checklists take, on average, 20–30 minutes to make and publish, compared to the average blog post that takes 3–4 hours to write.
My advice is to not forget your basic content marketing 101 techniques:
- Always do keyword research first
- Pick something topical or trending
- Create a compelling featured image
- Follow my SEO steps
- Share on social media
- Link to as normal
Free Checklist Version of this Step-by-Step Guide:
What do you think?
Tell me in the comments below. Better yet, try it for yourself and tell me how it was in comments below.
I’m all ears and am eager for feedback.
PS: You can create a free publisher account on the the publishing page. It’s a separate and free sign up form for publishers.
