Steps to winning Featured Snippets

source: How to Optimize Your Content for Google's Featured Snippet Box

Uncover what a Featured Snippet is and what steps you can take to help your business earn more visibility on a search engine results page.

Here are the takeaways…

1. Backlinks matter much less for ranking in the Featured Snippet when you already rank on page one.
2. There should be an area on the page where the search query appears in a header (h2, h3, h4, etc.).
3. The content you want to appear in the Featured Snippet (the answer to the query) should be placed in a <p> tag directly below the header mentioned above. This answer should be between 54–58 words long.
4. Google doesn't always just pull through a whole paragraph of text into the Featured Snippet. If you add "Step 1," "Step 2," "Step 3," etc. to the start of each subheading within a page (h2) then Google will sometimes just pull through the subheadings and list them chronologically, like in the example above for this URL. This is particularly prevalent in question-based queries.
5. Featured Snippets for the same query often have different content within Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.com.au, and Google.ie. Try "how to search on Google" as one of many examples.
6. For shorter, less question-orientated keywords that display a Featured Snippet (e.g. "Inbound Sales"), it's much more likely that Google will pull through a paragraph of text as opposed to a step-by-step. Page structure is incredibly important here.
7. Google tends to prefer 'answers' that begin logically as an answer would.