With changes in Google algorithms and ranking factors, the competition for ranking top in biggest search engine results is constantly increasing. Among various SEO techniques employed to enhance the website performance on SERPs, one of the best techniques is adding rich snippets. The additional data like ratings, reviews, etc. that comes along with the website in organic results are known as rich snippets. They attract the users to click on the websites. Now, we are going to discuss how to optimize these snippets and what measures should be followed while adding them to the website.
Google introduced the rich snippets in 2009. According to it “Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.” If you want your website to display rich snippets in the search results, you should add markup formats to your web pages.
At the time when it was introduced, it attracted many websites owner’s attention. You can notice a drastic change in the click rate of the website after introducing rich snippets. It, also, right away gives a clear idea to the audience whether their search intent is being met or not. These snippets help them in comparing different websites that are displayed on the SERPs (search engine result pages). Thus, the online business holders should focus on SEO (search engine optimization) rich snippets to gain high traffic and top rank.
Rich snippets
Rich snippets are the additional information that invites users to click on the website. Web developers add them in the form of an HTML code on your web pages. You can also outsource web development and have a professional team of coders do the job for you. Adding these snippets gives additional brand exposure on SERPs. After adding rich snippets, the website will be more appealing, hence the visitors will lean towards your website that will result in an increase in the CTR (click-through rate).
What rich snippets do?
The rich snippets are of great benefit to give a boost to the SEO. Below mentioned are the three benefits that they provide:
- Adding them provides more specific, more relevant results to the visitors on the search engine result page.
- They allow visitors to compare different websites or products as ratings and reviews are already inserted into them.
- Google rich snippets that we see on SERPs provide extra information. They imbue a better understanding in the visitors before they choose your website. Rich snippets are also useful in improving click-through rate, reducing bounce rate, and increasing conversion rate. It is one of the best strategies for top ranking on SERPs.
How do rich snippets work?
Structured data invite users to click on your website as they provide specific information about your page. They allow Google to understand the actual context of the web page and display visually enhance results.
Adding rich snippets is an SEO approach wherein you provide Google the data that you control. The users get more answers and compare the information with other website results on SERPs. Adding these snippets to your website can bring more relevant clicks to it, but be sure that structured data doesn’t affect the ranking directly. There are more techniques like creating great content and marketing it, social media marketing, email marketing, link building, backlink analysis, etc. Rich snippets bring more traffic to your website and display the result in a better way.
Benefits of adding rich snippets
It is a well-known fact that adding rich snippets to the website won’t directly affect its ranking. But they have a positive impact on the performance of the website in multiple ways. Below given are some advantages of adding them. Let’s have a look.
- Attention seeker
Due to additional elements, rich snippets are more attractive than regular snippets. These rich results come in the form of reviews, ratings and hold other significant information. Since they take more space, they are easier to spot out among the list of results displayed on SERPs. So, we can say that adding them is a successful technique to catch the visitor’s attention. It will also bring more quality organic traffic to your website.
- Higher organic CTR
As discussed earlier, rich snippets are attractive and grab users’ attention in a subtle manner. Since more and more users will be preferring you rather than choosing your competitors, they will obviously click on your website. As more clicks are coming to it, the organic CTR will automatically increase. Improve in CTR will generate more leads, which in turn, will help improve the conversion rate of the website.
- Provide additional valuable information
Everyone wants the best results for their query. Suppose, you searched for a food delivery service near you and get a result with 4.5 ratings, another with 3.5 ratings, and one without any rating. You will definitely go with the highest rated food delivery service. So, due to the presence of additional information (reviews, in this case) it becomes easier to choose what’s best for you. Not only this, many rich results come with information like personal data, cooking time or hours (in case if a dish is searched), votes, etc.
- Enhance brand’s credibility
Being preferred by Google is another kind of success. It is a great accomplishment, and it shows that your website is more credible as compared to other websites that lack these Google rich snippets. Displaying a website with rich results itself shows that it is the most credible website.
How to optimize rich snippets?
Till now, you must have gotten an idea of rich snippets and how they perform. With their help, you can rank on top of SERPs as they invite users to your website. Below are some ways that can help you to optimize Google rich snippets.
- Choose the right snippet for your website
Choosing a relevant snippet for your website is very important. I mean, ratings and reviews are ideal for approximately every website but, if you are running a cooking website, then there is no point adding a music schema markup. A recipe schema markup will obviously go a long way. As discussed above, the ratings and reviews schema markup go with almost every website but, there is one more type of rich snippet that is preferred by the web developers.
That is FAQ schema markup. Nowadays, Google too is appreciating these types of data markup as these answers many of the burning questions that the audience may have and address it then and there. Hence, it is a better idea to involve them in your website as well.
- Build structured data
In the process of optimizing rich snippets, you need to follow all the best practices that would benefit your SEO. Building structured data using Schema.org structured data is one of them.
Structured data includes all the information needed by the rich snippets. Based on the data types, all the information is already in Schema.org vocabulary. With its help, you can easily optimize your website.
You can select the relevant data type match for the topics you are optimizing for by performing research into schema.org. Once you are satisfied with the data type, the next you do is to code the markup.
- Follow general guidelines properly
To optimize the Google rich snippets, present on your website, you need to follow the guidelines. It doesn’t mean that you have to follow many rules and regulations, just some simple guidelines. A few of them are mentioned below:
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- The snippets entered by you should be properly structured. Just try to markup your website using JSON-LD, Microdata, RDFa.
- Make sure that Googlebot can easily access your structured data.
- Don’t reframe from quality guidelines and follow the ones that are given in Google webmasters quality guidelines.
- It should be relevant to the content you are providing.
- Test your structured data
After the writing part is complete, you will have to check whether the code is running correctly or not. So, you can use different tools like Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool to test your rich snippets. Following are the steps that you should perform: –
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- Copy your code
- Paste your code or URL on the right place
- Click on the test code
- Monitor your structured data
Using the Google search console for SEO purpose and to monitor these snippets is always a great idea. You can easily monitor the structured data of your domain. It will detect the errors, specific pages, and items. By choosing the rich snippets enhancement tool, you can see the reports that show valid, invalid, and warning type URLs. By analysing the data, you can actually see whether your hard work has paid off or not.
Rich snippets optimization for video snippets
The main goal of adding rich snippets is to make your website appear on the top. These days, people are rendering services to optimise videos. There are tons of Google rich snippets but, the one that has attracted a considerable number of users is video snippets. Whenever advertisers want to promote their websites with the help of a video, then the websites appear along with a video thumbnail. Users are automatically attracted to videos which help in increasing the click-through rate.
There are some criteria that you should follow before adding video rich snippets to the website: –
- The snippet should be relevant to the search query.
- The video quality should be optimum, so it could play without any difficulty.
- The website must be mobile friendly and the mobile-first indexing must work well.
YouTube is the best social media platform to run video ads as well as organic results. The video that you are choosing to showcase should follow the rules that are given below: –
- The video should be stand-alone, in the sense that it could be played separately and the audience queries are satisfied without going to the website.
- It should familiarise such audiences who have no idea of your brand. This not only gives the solutions for their questions but introduces your brand to them as well.
Creating successful video information requires keyword research. You can conduct your research on the Google keyword planner tool, while also taking help of other keyword research tools like Google trends. If you are not able to understand what keywords to insert, then you can always outsource keyword research to a credible digital marketing agency. The keywords inserted by you should be in the title of the video, plus the meta. You can also create a meta tag for your website and by the end, you can talk a little about your website and can provide the link to your channel or website. Plus, you can request users to visit and subscribe it. This way you are providing the desired information to your visitors and gaining customers for your brand. It will increase brand awareness and credibility.
How to measure rich snippets performance?
You can measure the performance of rich snippets through SEMrush, an online visibility management platform. It allows you to measure the performance of rich snippets step-by-step.
The second one is through Ahrefs, an SEO software suite. It offers you a complete guide that gives you information about how to use SERPs features filter. With this tool, you can apply filters to track specific performance for the particular type of rich snippets.
Google tag manager is also helpful to measure performance. GTM tags are used to mark pages with specified structured data. By implementing GTM, you can receive reports where you can determine how you are performing with the measuring tools you are using.
Closing Thoughts
In the blog, we studied rich snippets and how to optimize them. Basically, they are extra information that appears with your website’s blog title and meta descriptions. They encourage users to click on our results (as they appear more attractive) instead of other websites that appear on the SERP.
But just adding them to the website is not enough. You also need to optimize it from time to time and for that, either you can do it yourself or hire help. Some of the processes have also been shared with you.
Hiring a digital marketing agency is kind of beneficial as they have experts that can create the websites and indulge the structured data at the time of your website’s development.
It is a fact that adding rich snippets doesn’t affect the ranking of your website directly but participates in the contribution of ranking it. You can also measure whether the hard work of adding rich snippets has paid you off or not. You can either go for SEM rush or Ahrefs to do so. GTM also contributes to measuring the performance of these snippets. Hopefully, you have found our blog helpful and interesting.
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