I have a client for whom we were able to optimize this site and gain 37 new Featured Snippets rankings, with only 7 of them ranking in #2 or #3 position (we are tracking mobile rankings and on mobile there can be multiple featured snippets).
Fantastic you say!
Well the impact on traffic was almost nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. In both GA4 and in Search Console.
And these are all very high estimated search volume keywords. And almost all of them were on pages 3-5 previously.
I did setup a separate keyword ranking report for desktop, which is about 35% of their overall traffic. And we only have 7 featured snippets. But still, with mobile making up 65% of the site's traffic we would have expected a pretty sizeable improvement in traffic.
Any ideas as to why this is? Featured snippet rankings should provide some of the highest click-thru rates I would imagine.
Also, I used to see referring URLs (for other clients) that had good People Also Ask box rankings, that have the "#:~:text=" in the URLs. But for some reason I don't see those anymore and I should be seeing them for the Featured Snippets traffic too.
Any insights into why this is? I'm baffled. The only thing I can think of is that users are getting the info from the SERP and then going elsewhere perhaps?
What's the intent? If it's informational, then most likely they aren't going to click. They're going to read the info and move on. If it's transactional, is the phone number in the featured snippet? Are they calling direct from it? We see plenty of traffic from our transactional snippets. But I agree People Also Ask is something to strive for as well.
Also, take into account SGE. SGE comes BEFORE snippets now, so if you're not showing up in SGE, that's where the traffic might go, as basically it's a MASSIVE snippet.
What's coming before the snippet on the SERP? SGE, as mentioned, what about sponsored ads or local results? If all those are hitting BEFORE the snippet, and the snippet isn't above the fold, it's not likely to bring in a ton of traffic.
So it's not just high quality keywords, but also analyze what's going on around and above the featured snippet.
You might have to change your strategy based on that. Hope that helps!
I've been saying this for years and already back when the featured snippets and "ranking on position zero" hype started on blogs like Ahrefs. To this day I haven't seen valid proof of this as in a case study etc.
Yet to me it appeared from the start that it's rather zero-click as the answer was already shown on Google. So it was a little preview of what is to come to with SGE (AI search).
What works instead is going after PAA questions. There is plenty of proof that this works for getting additional traffic. It also worked for me. You can even rank for high traffic one word keywords that way.