If you’ve ever wondered about the world of rich snippets, rich results, featured snippets, structured data, or schema.org—wonder no more.
In this blog, we’ll describe everything you need to know about rich snippets, rich snippets SEO, rich snippets best practices, how to create rich snippets for your website, and everything in between.
In short, you will be well on your way to knowing how to add rich snippets to boost your website’s visibility.
Excited? We are too! Let’s get started!
What Are Rich Snippets?
First, we’ll unpack the different terms we mentioned above to help you navigate the mysterious (and often confusing) world of rich snippets, featured snippets, structured data, and Schema.org. Once you understand these concepts, we can help you leverage the best practices for your benefit.
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets make your site or article stand out above the rest. While Google and other search engines may choose whether to display them in the search results or not, you can’t win if you don’t play the game.
It’s a bit like real estate; if you don’t list your property for sale, no one will know it’s available.
Be sure to follow rich snippet best practices, so Google and other search engines like Bing can find and promote your content in its rankings.
Our example below should give you a good idea of what rich snippets look like on Google. This image is what you should be aiming for when trying to earn rich snippets.
Featured Snippets
On the other hand, featured snippets answer immediate search questions, like converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, and display them directly in the search results without the user going to the website that provided the answer.
However, powerful featured snippets often encourage and entice users to click the featured snippet to navigate to the company’s web pages for more information.
But, what’s most important about featured snippets is that they are typically listed above the top of the Google search results page (also known as position zero). This, of course, is precious real estate in the search results as the top search result gets the most clicks.
Structured Data
Structured data, sometimes referred to as structured data markup, are little pieces of code that tell Google more information about your content behind the scenes.
Adding structured data markup to your website code makes it easier for Google and other search engines to understand, classify, and display your content in the form of rich snippets and featured snippets.
Schema
Schema or Schema.org is a website created by search engines to help them explicitly define structured data markup to webmasters in a vocabulary format.
In other words, webmasters use Schema.org to help major search engines determine classes or properties for their content.
Why Are Rich Results Important For SEO?
Rich results are beneficial in many ways, including the most crucial benefit, attracting more organic traffic to your site.
Organic traffic is valuable to your brand because it’s free! So, the more rich results your company can obtain, the better your chances to rank higher in the search results and the more free traffic that will navigate to your website.
How do rich results attract more organic traffic?
- First things first, rich results are more readily noticeable by the user. For example, you can expect a better visual result and click-through rate with content such as YouTube videos or lists, which are both rich results with schema markup. Rich results can also produce carousels and non-text outcomes, going beyond the standard blue link and enhancing user experience.
- Rich results can help you achieve top rankings or get your content closer to position zero with a featured snippet.
- Rich results are often the answers to voice search users—what a great way to gain site visibility and grow your site.
- Rich results target users in a variety of ways including, videos, lists, questions and answers, customer reviews, and more. These features stand out to the user and prompt further organic traffic to your website, giving your site a boost amidst solid competition.
When you implement structured data with Schema.org, you improve the chances of click-through rates to your website, helping to increase your traffic and conversion rates.
But, none of this means much unless you know how to use structured data to get rich snippets.
How To Create Rich Snippets
Schema.org provides a complete guide on creating rich snippets for your website. But, it can seem overwhelming at first.
An excellent place to start is to familiarize yourself with their documentation page. This page provides information about the site, schema, extensions, additional resources, and general guidelines for getting rich snippets to attract more attention. After going through the details on this page, you’ll have a good idea about how to create rich snippets.
Next, move to the schema page and choose a commonly used type, such as a book. What you select will depend on your site and what type of content you want to add structured data markup to.
You can then use the code details to create your unique rich snippets. Please note that this part may be challenging for anyone unfamiliar with coding, in which case we recommend hiring a developer to handle this step.
When you’re done creating the rich snippet, you can check the scheme markup with a structured data testing tool to ensure it’s providing the correct information to Google.
If the snippet passes the test, it is recognizable by Google and other search engines and can be added to your website.
We Can Help!
If this process seems too overwhelming for you and your team, we offer SEO services to assist with these tasks and help businesses bypass this challenge. Let’s chat!
10 Markups to Consider Using on Your Website
If you’re ready to tackle rich snippets, check out these popular structured data markups!
1. Organizational Markup
The organizational markup helps pinpoint the brand signal of the organization. Google uses this signal to improve its knowledge of your brand and provide the correct information in the knowledge graph and local search results. Schema.org provides a template for this type of markup, so check it out to see what structured data you need for the organizational markup.
Most normal snippets display:
- Title tags
- The meta description
- The URL
However, organizational markup allows Google to display details such as:
- A business address
- Company name
- Social media links
- A logo
- Contact information
These details help Google pick up vital information about a business website.
2. Breadcrumbs Markup
Breadcrumbs markup is a smaller text path that tells users where they are on a website. Breadcrumbs are popular inserts into site architecture because they show a sense of organization and relationships between site parts, improving the user’s navigation.
They make visitors feel confident about moving around your website and finding the stuff they need. These small texts are usually seen at the top of pages which you can click to navigate to other pages on the site.
The main benefits of this markup are:
- Improving user navigation
- Clear organizational connections (relationships) between website parts
- Can include icons, text, images
3. Product and Offer Markups
Any e-commerce owner should use this markup to support click-through rates for customers searching for specific products. When you create these markups, you give search engines more information about particular products and offers.
Attributes of this markup can reflect:
- Product or offer type
- Ratings
- Review counts
- Pricing
- Availability
- Images of the product or offer
- Other product attributes
4. Ratings and Reviews Markups
Ratings and reviews markups display eye-catching star ratings, indicate to users how others rate your site or product, and are visually appealing. Website ratings and reviews provide immediate value to the user as a trust signal.
The best part about this type of markup is that they’re not just for e-commerce—they work for almost any website.
These ratings and reviews markups attributes can display:
- A single rating from an individual
- Average ratings or reviews from multiple users
- A star rating out of five
5. Local Business Markup
Help visitors find your local business instead of supporting big brands by using this schema markup.
If you use this snippet, your discoverability increases, enabling you to grow your brand. Practice your local business markup opportunities using rich snippets best practices on Schema.org.
The main attributes of this markup are:
- Physical location
- Business hours
- Contact info
- Other relevant information to serve your business growth
6. Q&A Markup
Combining user intent and valuable content in conversational search queries is one way that this markup can see your website reach a new height.
Q&A markup attributes reflect:
- Some of the most valuable questions and answers to FAQs for popular search queries
7. Video Markup
Search engines don’t understand videos, so they need some help. Adding video markup to your videos can help major search engines understand your video content better.
Google loves videos as much as most users, so using video markup will help this search engine (and others) find and display your work.
Attributes of video markup include:
- Page URL
- Video title
- Brief description of video content
- Associated video image
- Critical moments in the video at specific times
- Date
8. Event Markup
You can use event markup to promote webinars, concerts, festivals, and more. Event markups provide users with specific information in the search results such as:
- Event type
- Location
- Date
- Time
- Price
- User’s view
9. Recipe Markup
The recipe markup is very specific and valuable to any website that focuses on recipes and food preparation. So, if your website has a food focus, you should be using this one.
Recipe markup attributes include:
- Preparation time
- Cooking time
- Total time
- Ingredients
- Images
- Nutritional information
- Reviews and other information
10. Thing Markup
This one kind of makes us laugh, but yes, you can mark up a thing. The bottom line here is that if you have content on your website, you can use structured data.
Helpful Rich Snippet Tools For Optimization
If you’re curious about whether you are already using structured data correctly, I recommend using Schema.org’s structured data testing tool or Google’s rich results testing tool.
These tools are free and provide you with more insight into the structured data you have on your website and whether it is working correctly.
Schema.org Validator
Enter the URL or rich snippet you wish to test and run it through this validator. The results will indicate how your structured data functions and what possible changes you should make to improve it.
Google’s Rich Result Test
This tool shows the results of your structured data and makes suggestions for changes. If this tool cannot read the information, you will need to make changes until it is readable.
This tool allows you to analyze how your structured data works on smartphones and desktops, giving you more insight into what users see in the search results.
Rich Snippet Optimization: Next Steps
After reading through this information, you should have a good idea of how to add rich snippets to your website.
If this activity sounds a bit daunting, let’s chat. We have been in the digital marketing industry for over 15 years and have the expertise to create rich snippets on your website with little effort. We specialize in all types of SEO, including rich snippets that can add value to your work.
Our ultimate goal is to give you the tools you need to achieve your business dreams.
Give us a call to help your brand stand out in the Google SERPs with rich snippets.
