Companies spend a significant amount of time ensuring they’re ranking well in search and developing high-quality content and websites that drive conversions. However, a key strategy often overlooked is how they can improve their entry on a search engine results page (SERP). Whether you’re ranking or not only matters if the search user is actually compelled to click through.
While a great title, meta description, and permalink can improve those chances… adding rich snippets to your site can significantly drive click-through rates. Imagine, for instance, that you search for a specific product online and a list of entries appears. If a brand halfway down the page includes an image, pricing, availability, or a review… you may be far more compelled to click that entry rather than the ones above.
A SERP is a landing page with the intent to research or purchase. A key part of your organic search strategy should be to implement and enhance your visibility on those search result pages… and rich snippets are your means of doing so.
Google Rich Snippet Resources
You can refer to Schema on how to fully implement rich snippets – that’s the standard that Google utilizes. There are three ways of including this data within your site, according to Google:
- JSON-LD: JavaScript notation embedded in a <script> tag in the page head or body. The markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event. 1ge’s content, such as through JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.
- Microdata: An open-community HTML specification used to nest structured data within HTML content. Like RDFa, it uses HTML tag attributes to name the properties you want to expose as structured data. It is typically used in the page body, but can be used in the head.
- RDFa: An HTML5 extension that supports linked data by introducing HTML tag attributes that correspond to the user-visible content that you want to describe for search engines. RDFa is commonly used in both the head and body sections of the HTML page.
Google Rich Snippets
Here’s a list of common rich snippets:
- Reviews – can be used to display reviews and ratings for products or businesses in search results.
- Recipes – can be used to display more details about a recipe, such as ingredients, cook time, or even calories.
- People – information such as location, job title, and the company can be displayed in a search result for an individual person – including their nickname, photo, and social connections.
- Business – details about a business or organization such as location, phone number, or even their logo.
- Products – product pages can be marketed up to display information such as price, offers, product ratings, and availability.
- Events – online events, concerts, festivals, conferences can provide more details including dates, locations, images, and ticket prices.
- Music – artist information including their images, albums, and even an embedded audio file to listen to.
- Video – a thumbnail and play button can be displayed, increasing click-through rates by 41%.
- Apps – download and additional information on software platforms and mobile applications.
- Breadcrumbs – provide a hierarchy of your website so that a search engine user can also interact upstream of a specific article to a category or subcategory.
If you really want to see an in-depth look at rich snippets, read 28 Google rich snippets you should know [guide + infographic]. Frantisek Vrab wrote an incredibly detailed guide with code specifics, previews, and other helpful information.
28 Google Rich Snippets You Should Know
One snippet that’s been deprecated is the author tag. It’s unfortunate (in my opinion) that Google removed this, as I believe it provided people with much better visibility on the articles they wrote across the web.
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