How to grab featured snippets in search with this FREE Google Sheets Template

This Google Sheets template helps you to find every featured snippet opportunity for your site in no time.

Do you like getting more traffic from Google?

Of course you do.

Say hello to featured snippets. 👋

To get featured, you don’t necessarily have to create more content or build more links. Featured snippets can be like a cheat codes for traffic.

What are featured snippets?

A featured snippet is a quick summary of an answer to a searchers question. They are displayed at the top of the SERPs and are pulled from a webpage (hopefully yours).

If you’ve never seen one, this is what they look like:

The goal here is to provide users with a quick and direct answer to their question without having to even click through to a specific search result.

Did you know that featured snippets show on 12.29% of search queries according to this study by Ahrefs?

That’s a lot of opportunities. Let’s find them:

Finding featured snippets in search with Google Sheets

Finding featured snippet opportunities doesn’t have to take ages. In fact, with Ahrefs and this spreadsheet tool it’s pretty simple.

How to use the sheet

To get it setup…

What you’ll need:

Step 1 – Setting up the sheet

First things first, you want to make sure you have made a copy of the sheet.

Now you’ll want to see what featured snippets opportunities there are for your site. Ahrefs will show you two types:

  • #1 Existing keywords – your site already ranks for these in the featured snippet
  • #2 New keywords – these are opportunities you can get in the snippet. The snippet will appear for these keywords, but you aren’t in it (yet).

Step 2 – Get your organic keyword rankings

Head over to Ahrefs Site Explorer and search your site:

Head over to the ‘organic keywords’ report. Now, you’ll want to head over to the SERP feature filter and select ‘featured snippet’.

This will only show you keywords that contain snippets.

Step 3 – Export featured snippets

Now you an export your results.

If you’ve got a small-ish site, the quick export (1000 results) may be enough. Otherwise you can do a full export. Just be aware, that Google Sheets can run quite slow when crunching through massive .csv files.

Step 4 – Import snippets into the Sheet

Open you the Sheets template and go to the Ahrefs here tab.

Go to File >>> Import and upload the .csv you’ve just downloaded from Ahrefs.

When prompted, select Replace current sheet and hit Import data.

NOTE: when you import your spreadsheet, it will replace any existing data in that tab. So make sure you have a backup, or create a copy of the sheet for each new project you work on. 👍

Step 5 – Let the sheet crunch the data

In the snippets tab you’ll now see all the keywords, their search volume & position and ranking page that contain a snippet.

Like I’ve said, the keywords here will either be in the featured snippet already or on a SERP where they are active.

From here, you’ve got a couple of options:

  • You could filter the sheet to show you pages that you don’t have the snippet for. You can trim this list down but filtering the position tab to only show keywords ranking on page one (as snippets generally only show for page one rankings)
  • Could go do some competitor analysis to see who does occupy the snippet and see if you could steal it.
  • Equally you could use this as part of a bigger content strategy and focus on updating your pages.

Featured Snippet Resources

Don’t forget to grab a copy of the sheet here to help you find featured snippets in search. Also, checkout the directory of Google Sheets templates to help you automate other SEO & content tasks.