Rich Snippets: Definition, Types and How to implement it

Surely you've come across pretty eye-catching descriptions at Google search. Some include ratings or images; this is known as Rich Snippets. Learn what Rich Snippets are, which types there are, why they’re important and how to implement them.

Rich Snippets are one of the most undervalued tools in web-development, SEO optimization and online marketing. Discover how they can help your web positioning.

What Are Rich Snippets?

Rich Snippets (or also called enriched formats or Rich Results) are search engine (in this case Google) results with additional data displayed. Usually, this extra data is obtained from Structures Data in a page’s HTML. Common Rich Snippets can include events, reviews or recipes, for example.

Here’s a normal Snippet:

Which includes three pieces of information:

• URL
• Title tag (or meta-title)
• Meta description

And here’s an example of a Rich Snippet:

You can see that a Rich Snippet is like a normal Snippet, but they add extra data to it. In this case, you can see the rating, reviews and cooking time. This makes them more eye-catching than normal search results.

What Are Rich Snippets for?

Rich Snippets have a few advantages compared with a normal search results. Here are the main advantages and uses:

• They make it easier for consumers to find the type of content they are looking for. In consequence, it’ll be easier for SEOs to detect which is the most suitable result for the search which has been carried out.
• They can lead to a higher organic CTR (click-through-rate) since they achieve greater attractiveness and attention.
• Its use offers a competitive advantage against your competitors.

Where do the Rich Snippets come from?

Google gets their data for Rich Snippets from Structured Markup (like Schema) in a page’s HTML.

Why Are Rich Snippets so Important?

Not only do they help the user with answering their query, but also the SEO and Google in better understanding the information we offer.

Types of Rich Snippets

The first step of using Rich Snippets is deciding on which type you want to use. That way, you can use Structures Markup specifically designed for that type of Rich Snippet. There are a lot of types of Rich Snippets, but here are the most common ones:

• Reviews: Displays a star rating (out of 5) which can be written by an individual reviewer or a group of users.

• Music: With information on music like genre, members, label…

• Video: Video markups help search engines in understanding what your video content is about.

• Organization: These Snippets help Google understand key information of a organization like contact information, date of foundation…

• Product Markup: Product markups help search engines in compiling data about a specific product like prices.

And there’s much more types of Rich Snippets like Recipes (with time to prepare the dish, images…); top stories (with Google News); Events (with times, location, dates…) and more.

How do you implement Rich Snippets?

Thanks to Structured Data helps search engines to better understand your content. For example, if you publish a blog post which includes a vegan cookie recipe, after adding Recipe markup to your page, search engines will understand:

• How long the recipe takes
• Which images belong to the recipe
• The list of ingredients
• The steps

 Here’s how you can implement Rich Snippets in the two most common ways:

1. Implement Structured Data with Schemas

Many websites use Schema.org markup because it’s supported by major search engines like Google or Bing. Find the type of markup that you want to use and follow the guidelines to markup your content.

Also read the guide of Google on Structured Data for further information.

2. Use Plugins if you use WordPress

There are plenty of Plugins you can use. If you don’t want to use plugins, you can use JSON-LD, which is easy to use. It’s a short code of JavaScript which goes into the section of your site. Without it, you’ll need to manually add Structured Data to the HTML to your page.

How Do You Know if Rich Snippets Have Been Well Implemented?

You can test your Structured Data with the Structured Data Testing Tool of Google.

1. Insert the URL of your site or copy and paste HTML
2. Hit “Run Test”

This way, Google will show you any Structured Data that has been found on your page, with possible errors and warnings.

 Conclusion

One thing should be clear: even if you have everything well set-up, there’s no guarantee that your Rich Snippet will show up in Google. In fact, Google makes that clear in their documentations. 

However, using Structured Data maximizes the odds of getting your Rich Snippets to show in search engines. Step up your SEO positioning game and don’t miss out on the opportunity of increasing your CTR! Do you need more information? Ask us!