Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets enable you to show specific bits of data from your website in a user-friendly way on search engines.
All of the major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and even Pinterest are showing rich snippets in some form or another, and yet they’re still widely underused. Optimising your site with rich snippet information is a great way to drive more traffic and improve your websites click through rate – click through rate is now a major SEO ranking factor and therefore improving this is in your site’s best interest. The use of rich snippets is also likely to get your website an edge over competitors who may not yet have implemented them.
Rich snippets come in many different forms, some of the most common are:
- Organisation
- Reviews
- Recipes
- Articles
- Q&A
- Products
- Menus
Below is an example of the most popular form of rich snippet, the organisation mark-up. This enables you to show all of your companies’ information on Google in a more professional way than just relying on your Google My Business listing which will have a map, interior pictures and exterior pictures.
The product mark-up enables you to show further information about your products in search results without people having to click on to your website, this works both through Google Image search and also the main search results. A user will be able to see reviews, whether a product is in stock, the price and some basic information about the product before clicking on to the website in a similar way to the layout used in Google Shopping, therefore those who are less likely to be interested in the product when they see the price or image won’t click on to the site and your overall bounce rate/user experience statistics will improve.
A simple search for ‘What Is Google?’ will return the following Q&A rich snippet box, suggesting other questions and displaying short answers from the most relevant sites. For enquiry-based websites, this can be an excellent way of increasing visibility and authority on your subject of expertise.
