It’s true that short content (I call them snackable content) is on the rise these days to cater to people’s shorter attention span. In my opinion, however, we should diversify between the short and long-form content pieces, as they require very different approaches to each other.

Short, snackable content must be attractive at the get-go, and you’ll need to find ways to engage and convert readers as soon as possible, for example by using interactive, shoppable tags. It’s also generally harder to optimize shorter content to rank with SEO (it’s more difficult to get backlinks), so you’ll need to find ways to promote this snackable content to get traffic (i.e. social media promotion, using Medium, etc.).

With long-form content, as discussed in this article, we can promote them through SEO and include more information to engage and educate the audience.

In general, use short content to attract, and long-form content to educate.

Hope it’s clear, thanks and best regards.

Yet, nowadays I keep hearing that we should focus on short, bite-sized content due to lower average attention span, but here you said that the ideal length is 1000-2000 words. What’s your take on this?

It’s true that it’s more difficult to generate organic traffic by ranking on these featured snippets (that’s why these queries are often called “zero-click search”. But there are still some opportunities worth pursuing.

For example, if you are a local business targeting local audience, aiming to rank on Google Maps (a type of featured snippet), is very valuable. Getting ranked on the top-3 spots on Google Maps can effectively generate in-store traffic, leads, and sales.

Also, getting a featured snippet for really relevant queries and questions in your niche is very nice brand exposure, which can indirectly contribute to traffic.

It will depend on the target queries, your niche, and many other factors, but there are ways to be creative and find value from these zero-click searches.

Thanks again!

thanks for the timely reply, and thanks for the very clear answer.

Is it really worth it to aim for these featured snippets, since, you know, as you’ve said, it’s hard to generate organic traffic with them?

Hi there Luiz,

Thanks for the kind words, and glad you liked the post. Also, very good question, and actually I just finished writing a content covering this featured snippet/rich snippet issue, so stay tuned!

To answer you here, however: yes, it’s true that more search queries now include rich snippets in the SERP (according to latest report, more than 50% of all queries), and most of them won’t result in a click/organic traffic to your website.

So, what can we do about this? In general, three things:
Research and find keywords with high organic CTR (mainly keywords that don’t include featured snippets). Remember that featured snippets can’t cover in-depth, long information, so work on your long-form content
Aim to get ranked on these featured snippets by implementing structured data markup (schema.org) and other optimizations. There are ways to generate traffic, leads, and even sales by ranking on these featured snippets according to the keywords/queries
Optimize your content’s presence on Google’s platforms (Maps, YouTube, Knowledge Panel, etc.), Google drives platforms on its own platforms

We have to embrace the fact that this is the direction Google and other search engines are going, adapt, and find opportunities.

Hope this helps, thanks and best regards.

I got a question, if I may, I keep hearing about how more keywords are now including featured snippets in their search results, and so it’s not really worth it to pursue SEO (or even blogging/content marketing at all).

What do you think about this?