Search Engine Rich Snippets: Step-by-step Guide

Everyone wants their website to be at the top of Google’s search result pages, but the same needs the incorporation of effective SEO strategies. The best SEO strategies can help you drive the targeted organic traffic right at your doorstep. But you know what can make your business success get off track from its path? Give us the opportunity to tell you. Pay per click ads of your competitors can steal your organic search results and impact your search engine optimization initiatives. This scenario calls for the need to do something as, without clicks, you can’t make the sale. 

Here, rich snippets can be treated as a rescue option. Rich Snippets SEO will allow your site to optimize its search results with add-ons like images and reviews to grab the attention of your potential customers. To know more about rich snippets, let us have a look at its brief explanation.

What are Rich Snippets?

Rich snippets are the lines in black text that can be seen below every search result listing. They describe the relevance of the popped up page to the phrase that a user used to search for a query, product, or service. They are the additional information that is highlighted on the search page so that the searchers can easily identify your page and understand its relevance with their query. Different kinds of information, such as pricing, usability, rating, availability, and others, can be seen in a rich snippet based on the query searched.

They can grab the attention of the users to increase the flow of organic traffic to your website. They boost user’s trust in your business by representing elements like images, prices, and reviews. These elements are the ones that most users search for, and by finding them at first glance, they are more entitled to click on your webpage. In a nutshell, rich snippets add power boosters to the pace of your website’s click-through rate by directing the visual attention to the applicable search result.

What content types do feature snippet schema markup supports?

The major search engines like Google recognize three different markup specifications, and which are Microdata, Microformats, and RDFs (resource description framework).

Rich Snippets, also known as structured data markup, can be used in the following content types:

• Reviews: Support both individuals as well as aggregate reviews, although different properties are used for each of them.

• Products: Structured data markup can be significantly used with the products and special offers you provide. The elements that can be included are name, image, description, brand, price, and reviews. By representing a lower price than your competitors, you can derive more customers.

• People: You must have noticed when you search for a well-known person on search engines like Google and Bing, they show richer information from their LinkedIn account. The snippets support professional information like name, title, role, contact details, and professional affiliations.

• Businesses & organizations: Support organizational content like business name, physical and digital address, contact number, geolocation (latitude and longitude), and logo.

• Events: The snippets support content related to future occurring events, but not the past ones. The other information includes data and time of the event, duration, details of tickets, and geolocation.

• Recipes: The structured data markup allows cooking related websites to post recipes, including information like the type of dish, preparation time, calories & nutrition content, and reviews.

• Music: Unlike Bing, Google has made provisions for rich snippets relating to music albums and songs. This can include links to buying individual tracks and previews of songs.

• Video Content: Support the embedded video content on your website and represent information like time duration, creator’s name, license, and the type of content.

How to add rich snippets to a website?

As you have learned how rich snippets can boost your SEO’s overall performance and what content types they support, now it’s time to find how to add them to your website. There are multiple options you can use for adding rich snippets to your web pages. The easiest ones include using a WordPress plugin or Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

With WordPress Plugin

Using a WordPress plugin, you can add rich snippets to your website pages. The best plugin to do the job is the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin.

You can start with activating the plugin and then click the Rich Snippets tab from your Dashboard that will show you a list of markups from where you can configure your schema markups. The open tab will show you every schema markup that you can create, including:

• Article
• Events
• Item review
• Product
• Person
• Recipe
• Software App
• Video

When you select a content type, the plugin will display the fields that you can fill to create any custom post. Once you created a new post or edited one, you will find a meta box labeled as ‘Configure Rich Snippet’ just below the post editor. The box will include a drop-down menu from where you can select the content type for your post on which you are working.

It is not mandatory to fill all the available fields, but there are some which are required by Google to display the rich snippets. Finally, save your post and store the schema markup data. Rich Snippets WordPress is one of the easiest ways that make you stand out from the crowd and get you the clicks you expected.

With Structured Data Markup Helper

Follow the steps mentioned below to use Google’s tool for creating schema markup snippets.

Step 1: Go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

Step 2: Select the data type you wish to markup.

Step 3: Paste the page’s URL you want to markup.

Step 4: Select and highlight the elements you plan to markup.

Step 5: If you want to add any other items on your markup list, highlight them too.

Step 6: Create the HTML.

Step 7: Finally, the generated schema markup can be inserted into your web page.

There are more tools available that provide you additional help to answer the question – How to add rich snippets? The tools can create as well as validate your schema markups, and they are as follows:

• Bing Webmaster Tools Markup Validator
• Google Rich Results Tester
• Google Data Highlighter
• Yandex Structured data validator API
• JSON-LD Schema Generator by Merkle

Rich Snippets vs. Featured Snippets

As already stated above, rich snippets are part of enhanced SEO initiatives that drive the targeted audience to your website by boosting the click-through rate whereas Featured Snippets are the text in the rectangular boxes that comes at the top of Google’s result page when you search for a query, product, or service. They increase the online visibility of your website and drive targeted traffic. 

Featured Snippets are better than Rich Snippets.

It is near to impossible to surpass the paid advertising with your SEO initiatives. Even if your website is not ranking in the topmost positions in a search engine result page, you can still manage to get a few more clicks with the help of a featured snippet. The snippets are designed to surface the best answers to questions asked by users. By creating effective and exact answers to the questions that your potential customers can ask, you can make Google feature your webpage content in a snippet. Make sure that you efficiently answer the question in not more than 50 – 60 words. 

But one thing that is common in rich snippets and featured snippets is that they both add rockets to your SEO efforts and make your online experience better. 

Summing Up

There is no denying the fact that when it comes to SEO, rich snippets can make a difference by a significant number of clicks. If you want to set your business as the leading one in your respective domain, then you must take the full advantage of schema markup to create creative and compelling rich snippets that will increase your organic search traffic.