by The Computing Australia Group | Google is the go-to product search option for most people. Did you know it beats even Amazon when it comes to product searches? This happens because of some interesting features that Google has, such as rich snippets. You might have heard of them but found it hard to understand them. The concept of rich snippets can be confusing for people new to SEO. So, our SEO team in Perth decided to set the record straight with this article. Hope it helps you.
What are Rich Snippets?
The result shown to the user in search results is called a “snippet”. Google search results snippets mostly display the title, meta description, and URL. “Rich Snippets” (sometimes called Rich Results) are snippets where additional data gets displayed. Hence, the name rich results or rich snippets. This extra information is displayed between the URL and the description. The most common snippets are reviews, events, recipes, and product info like prices, availability etc.
Snippets are visually more appealing search results with additional valuable information displayed alongside the title, description, and URL.
Rich Snippets and SEO
They are not a direct ranking factor as per Google. But they do help in an increased click-through-rate. Visually attractive snippets with additional data make your webpage more eye-catching in search results. Users will prefer to visit websites that give them more information in the SERPs. As your CTR increases and you get more traffic, search engines will notice that your page is more popular than others. This can help improve your rankings in the long run.
How to add Rich Snippets to your website?
Google shows rich results or snippets from Structured Data Markup (e.g. Schema) in your page’s HTML. Structured Data is a code written in a format that search engines understand.
Choose a Rich Snippet Type
The first step is to choose a rich snippet type that is most suitable for your site. There are dozens of snippet types, and choosing the right type is important or else the snippet may not get displayed. Some common ones are reviews, product availability, product price, product info, events, business info, videos, and FAQs.
Implement structured data
Once you’ve chosen the snippet mark-up, you need to deploy the structured data. This can be quite a messy affair. WordPress has plugins to add Structured Data to your site. If you don’t want to use plugins, you can use the most popular JSON-LD. If you find it confusing, it is advisable to take the help of an SEO specialist. Our SEO team in Perth is always ready to help.
Check marked-up pages for performance and errors.
And finally, you need to ensure that the snippets mark-ups are running fine. There are various tools like the one from Google itself – The Structured Data Testing Tool.
Structured data and Rich Snippets can be daunting and messy. That’s why our web development team in Perth is here to help. Contact us today or email at sales@computingaustralia.group and speak to our WordPress experts.
Jargon Buster
XML – stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a markup language to store, organize and transport data.
Metadata – Provides information about other data. Examples – author, created or modified date, file size etc.
CTR – Click-through-rate – Here, Ratio of number of users who click on your link to the number of users who viewed the result page when your link or ad popped up in the SERPs.
JSON-LD – stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data. A JavaScript code to simplify machine-readable data from websites to make it more easily indexable for search engine crawlers.
