How to Write Content to Grab Readers’ Attention and Win a Snippet?

Putting your thoughts into words and building a prosperous brand requires both time and energy. Or you can choose to take an easy road and write poor content but this will take you nowhere. Learn more about how to write answers to win a featured snippet on Google and capture people’s attention.

Writing good content is a choice, you can either choose to develop a solid content marketing strategy to boost SEO rankings, drive traffic or qualified leads, or publish a poor content without paying attention to users’ intent – a path that eventually will make a negative effect on your business. Regardless of the reason for creating content, whether it’s for business or just as a hobby, it’s important to do it in the right way.

This comprehensive guide covers smart ways to craft compelling, unique, and rich content that will increase your chances of ranking for several queries and win more than one featured snippet at a time. First, let’s take a closer look at the style that makes great content, and then I’ll breakdown five tips that gives more credibility to any business and bring superior results.

Let’s get started!

The Idealistic Style that Works for Writing Answers

It isn’t fair to say anyone’s technique of writing good or bad. But as a writer, I feel very disappointed to see people using the kind of tricks for creating useless, thin content that stuns the readers looking for relevant information. I’d love to present the technique that works I think absolutely amazing for featured snippets on search engines like Google and for writing questions and answers. So let’s get to it!

 

  • Begin with the Lead

 

When you are planning to showcase a story in front of the audience on any platform, it is good to start with a lead. Suppose, if you have a story of ‘a monkey has stolen money from the bank,’ try to put such strange yet interesting story in genuine words to capture people’s attention in a shorter span. Right from the headline to subheadings, try to cover the storyline in brief as much as possible like ‘a monkey steals from the bank’ and that’s all you need to inform.

 

  • Get to the Details

 

Leading with the lead is all about pulling out people’s attention and grabbing their interest. Then, you need to go further into details combining smaller pieces of the story. You might talk about how many monkeys were there and what bank did they rob and how much money did they steal.

 

  • Move to the Context

 

Once you are done with the details, it’s time to move ahead to the context. There might be some history of monkey, what does this say about the culture of that particular place and what people should do about it.

You can consider using this kind of style in any content to add more value, depth, and meaning. This will not only retain users for a longer duration but may also help to boost your organic search engine optimization (SEO) results.

You can simply apply this same style of writing to answer questions in SEO context – lead with the answer, dive into the details and data, and then address the sub-questions. Isn’t it so simple? If somebody’s asked you a question, start with the summary of the answer, tell them what they are looking for, and then get into the details and data to show your expertise and enlighten your perspective.

Actionable Tips that Makes Your Content Great

Informative and relevant content goes a long way with Google search engine optimization as well as your visitors. Using poor tactics and copying other people’s content may hit you with a penalty, which will ultimately ruin your bottom line. Below, I’ve outlined some powerful tips that will keep you on the right path and yield returns for many years to come.

 

  • Make Original Content

 

If you want to step a little further and build an authoritative platform, your content should be original. Remember, repeating the same concepts or posts time and again isn’t what you call ‘originality.’ Are you thinking you can simply gather articles from around the web and get permission to re-post them? If yes, stop right away!

Follow these two rules in life:

  • If you don’t have anything helpful to talk about, then it is better to stay quiet.
  • You will get what you pay for.

These two essential points will help you to move ahead in the right direction of making quality content and also proves to be useful in other phases of your life.

  1. Pay Attention to Powerful Headlines

A strong headline is a way to increase users’ interest and engage them for longer. The statistics of Copyblogger reveals 8 out of 10 people will only read the headline, and only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. That means, the headline is a secret ingredient for any kind of content and can determine the effectiveness of each piece.

Source: Copyblogger

Be it an article or just a post, your headline should feel good, sound fascinating, and relevant. You should learn to say a lot in just a few words that excite users’ interest. Invest quality time and effort with your headlines. If possible, make the list of a few and then choose which one you like the most. This is the first element people seek and will help them to decide if they want to read further or not.

 

  • Deliver the Information in the Right Way

 

Every writer should learn a sense of how to apply and convey the information. Don’t tell users what to do, but rather respect their preferences and offer them an assurance that they can learn skills on how to use your material.

When you write any blog post, provide users with tips on applying what you are conveying. Many times, writing well about a trending topic and using SEO white label reseller tactics will catch readers’ eye. 

 

  • Provide Answers with Supporting Information

 

At first, clear this fact – what is the main purpose of a search engine? Most people agree on delivering a set of right answers as Google seems good at this, for example, featured snippets.

Enter a query into Google like I did ‘top brands of watches in USA’ and you will be presented with snippets, or links, images, and videos. As you can see, when people use a search engine to get an answer on a specific topic, the search engine fulfills the job of delivering that answer. And that’s what you need to do as well.

When people read your blog post, view your infographic, or watch a video, they want answers to improve their knowledge. So make your content easy with important bits to resolve queries of people quickly.

 

  • Publish Engaging and Meaningful Content

 

If the last blog post you wrote was engaging enough, then readers will hang on to every word you wrote in your next posts. But the only way to accomplish this goal is to focus on writing engaging and thought-provoking content. Here’s how you can write great content:

  • Include questions: Always leave readers with questions but that doesn’t mean you make an incomplete post. Simply pull out some common questions and implement your knowledge to provide answers to it.

 

  • Make a promising introduction: Have you ever wondered how quickly people can make judgments about any blog posts? Most people certainly decide within the first or two sentences whether the post is worth reading or not. So focus on telling users why they should care about reading more and what you are going to discuss in that particular blog post.

 

  • People love listening to stories: You can use interesting elements in the introduction itself or include a story into your blog posts. It can help to clarify your point and will also make your content more helpful and engaging.

A Winning Strategy for 2020 and Beyond

Writing good content is never too easy but it becomes so much easier to convert your blog posts into leads and great results when you work on something that you’re really passionate about. The best part about content is that it is timeless. The blog post you write today, it will still be viewed, shared, and bring traffic to your site even after four years from now.

Just don’t push yourself too harder, focus on creating a rich piece of content and answer to readers’ queries to get a chance to land some featured snippets on Google.

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