Featured Snippet Competitor Analysis with Nozzle

With Nozzle, it’s easy to discover which of your competitors own featured snippets and how many each competitor owns.

This is important if you are trying to optimize your content for featured snippet status. Analyzing the featured snippets of different competitors can give you an idea of what a webpage or article needs in order to be made a featured snippet by Google. By taking a close look at the content of the competitors that are dominating featured snippets, you can learn about and imitate the dominating competitors’ strategies.

Why would you want to rank in a featured snippet? Click here to learn more about featured snippets and why they are important.

Find Out Who Owns Featured Snippets

To view who owns the featured snippets for your keywords, go to the Competitive Share of Voice dashboard and select Domains in the dropdown menu. Filter by “result > featured snippet > is featured snippet | is | True”, then sort by Keywords. If you have a specific section of your keywords in mind, you can add more filters, like device or keyword group. As you can see below, I’ve narrowed in on the “Camping Utensils (All)” keyword group for desktop only.

Once you apply the filters, you’ll see a table below showing the domains that have featured snippets. Under “Keywords” you’ll find the number of keywords for which these domains have a featured snippet. Mine shows that outsideonline.com owns 4 featured snippets, searanchlodge.com owns 3, and so on.

Diving Deeper

This bird’s eye view of the featured snippet landscape is helpful, but to get even more information about specific domains and their featured snippets, click on one of the domains in the table. I prefer to right click and open it in a new tab in case I need to refer back to this table.

This will take you to a performance overview page for that domain. Make sure all your previous filters are applied, then scroll down to the Keywords table at the bottom to see the exact keywords for which this specific competing domain has featured snippets.

I clicked on my top result, outsideonline.com, and applied my previous filters. You can see the 4 phrases for which outsideonline.com holds featured snippets, along with their corresponding URLs. Since all featured snippets appear at the top of the SERP, you can see that they are ranked #1.

Clicking on one of these URLs will open it in a new tab, so you can analyze a competitor’s webpage and strategize accordingly. If you click on one of the keywords, you will be taken to that single keyword’s performance page.

Scroll down to view the SERP Results displayed in a functional table format. Below that you’ll find the SERP HTML--exactly how the SERPs look in Google. Play around with the Nozzle Vision, SERP history comparison, search, and zoom tools to make the most out of the SERP Results and HTML.

Let’s look at the SERP Results and HTML for the phrase “propane stove in tent” above.

Analyzing Featured Snippet URLs Directly

Earlier, we looked at the domains that owned the featured snippets, then we dove deeper and found the keywords for which they held featured snippets, along with their corresponding URLs.

Alternatively, you can directly examine what URLs are ranking as featured snippets by changing from Domain to URL in the dropdown menu.

This will pull up a new table with data about the URLs that are ranking as featured snippets. Under “Keywords” you’ll see how many featured snippets each URL is ranking as.

Click on a URL to see the keywords for which it has featured snippet status. I clicked on the second URL, outsideonline.com/2303696/best-camp-stoves-2018, to see its keywords, which matches the data we saw for outsideonline.com above.

Checking out the URLs directly is an easier way to see if your competitors have one URL that is dominating several featured snippets or if there are multiple. This helps you know real quick which specific URLs you need to analyze and beat out of the featured snippet spot.

Analyzing Featured Snippet Keywords Directly

Like directly filtering for featured snippet URLs, it can be very useful to pull up a list of the keywords that serve up a featured snippet--because not all keywords do. Such a list will point you to where you have the opportunity to take a competitor’s featured snippet spot.

To see a featured snippet keyword list, go to the Explore by Keyword dashboard and apply the featured snippet filter, plus any other desired filters.

Scrolling down, you’ll find a list of all the applicable keywords that serve up a featured snippet, the URLs that hold the featured snippet, and other useful data, including CTR and search volume.

And there you have it! Featured snippet competitor analysis with Nozzle. As you can see, Nozzle is a very useful tool for analyzing featured snippets in terms of your competitors.

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