How to get Rich Snippets?

The beginner’s guide to getting rich snippets

SEO and high search rankings are the need of every website, businesses use all the possible SEO strategies to get the best results. If you are one of them, rich snippets are an important strategy that you can use. Do you want to know everything about rich snippets? Let’s find out:

What do you mean by rich snippets? 

Rich snippets are search results of websites on Google, but with additional and valuable data. With the title, description, and URL of the website, Google provides additional information such as ratings and reviews just below the title to make the visual search look more visually appealing and more valuable. 

The information provided in rich snippets comes from the structured data found in the HTML or markup such as the Schema of the page. Some of the common rich snippets are reviews, recipes, events, ratings, etc. 

Generally, Google provides three types of data in search results namely, URL Title, and meta description. It’s called a normal snippet. Rich snippets add extra information to normal snippets that make the results more eye-catching and can help your website with CTR- Click Through Rate. 

Structured Data: Structured data is a type of format that communicates with search engines about your web pages’ content. It includes two components- Vocabulary that helps search engines understand the entity elements and a type of makeup code that helps search engines with schema. 

There are different types of Rich Snippets such as: 

• Reviews: Snippet that displays the star ratings below the title. They can be aggregated or individual reviews. 
• Recipes: This snippet showcases recipe photos, reviews, preparation time, and more from structured data. However, only applicable to recipes. 
• Music: snippet includes general music info by google such as album release dates. 
• Organization: Suitable for businesses, it displays and helps Google to understand information about businesses such as an address, contact info, and logo. 
• Video: Search engine crawlers cannot watch videos on your webpage, so video markup will help them understand the content videos. 
• Events: It includes location, date, time, and other details of the event. 
• Product markup: Give information about the product to search engines such as product images, price, type, etc. 
• Top stories: Allow your website to appear in the top stories box of search results on google. However, applicable only to google approved websites. 

Is it a SERP feature, Rich Snippet, or Rich result, and how they can help SEO? 

Rich result and Rich snippet are often used interchangeably, according to Google they are the same, but they prefer the term Rich results. Rich results are part of the SERP feature. SERP feature is anything that does not include standard organic listing. 

Although Snippets are not a part of ranking factors in Google, however according to a survey people are more likely to click on Rich snippets rather than normal snippets due to additional data as rich snippets often show more about content on the website which attracts users and they click on rich snippets Thus, increasing CTR. 

Steps to add markup for rich snippets of your website

Adding structured data directly to your website’s source code provides you more control, however only if you understand working with code. Or you can use Google’s structure Data Markup helper for markup code rather than writing it from scratch. Here is how you can use markup helper: 

• Open, select where you want rich snippets to appear and the type of snippet you are going to create. 
• Click on start tagging, and the web pages’ URL will convert into a Tag data view. 
• Highlight different elements of the webpage while you are in the Tag data view. For instance, if you want to add a price, click on the price tag. 
• Click on create HTML, tool will create code that you can copy or download to write into your webpage’s HTML. 

Validate the structured data for Snippets 

After you generated markup code and created a structured format of a web page, you need to validate structured data for Google to read and display according to the way you want them to. You can use the Rich Results tool by Google to check what Rich snippet will google take from markup code. Here’s how you can check: 

• Open the tool, paste the URL, select desktop or mobile device, and click on test. 
• The tool will generate the results, if the result has warning signs, click on detect structured data to check invalid elements highlighted that you need to fix. 

How to get the best out of Rich snippets? 

Rich snippets created from structured data are useful for CTR and look more organized and formatted which makes it easier for both Google and users. Here’s how you can get the best out of rich snippets: 

Decide if they are right: First things first, normal Google snippets can also bring good results for you. Firstly you need to know if such results will make a difference for the type of website and business niche you have. 

Implementing structured data: irrespective of how your website is created, using markup is the easiest way to add rich snippets to the website. Generate the code and paste it into the <head> section. If you are using WordPress, Shopify, or any other platform, plugins can help you. 

Validate the markup: Validating the code is important to know how Google is taking your markup code and how it’s going to display. It makes the rich snippet process foolproof. 

Monitor: Monitor all the pages and markup for analyzing performance and identifying errors. You can use the Google search console for performance and results. 

Final Thoughts: To gain more CTR and grab customer attention on rich snippets is great for websites, but one thing that you need to remember is structured data is where all the major actions for rich snippets take place. Rich snippets can make your website look good, but you don’t need to be an expert to write the markup code. using some plugins and code generators can help. However, Make sure your website has accurate structured data and markup you need for rich snippets on Google. Call Prempal Singh for free SEO consultancy at +91 7014165678.