Rich snippets | Enrich your google search appearance with structured data mark up

What are rich snippets?

Google Search results are embraced with different display styles and appearances. Rich Snippet or Rich Result is a google search category that includes search results enhanced with graphical elements like thumbnail images, carousels, review stars or other visual enhancements.

Google can display these plush results in various formats depending on the user’s device, country, and several other factors. For example:
Top Stories

Carousel Appearance

Data Highlighters

Enriched Results

Benefits of the rich snippet search results

Google introduced advanced search features to enhance its user’s search experience. With the snippets associated with the search results, a user can access more direct information. Making it easier for him to find relevant answers to his questions.

Including structured markup data in your web pages helps your listing to stand out in the GSP. A rich result helps you stand out in the GSP. This feature makes your listing more appealing visually. Thereby increases the chance of high CTR for your web page. For instance, if a user is planning to purchase a mobile phone and your webpage is embedded with the structured data showing mobile cost information and other specification. The accentuated information listing would be more likely to get clicked by the user than a simple plain organic listing.

How to enable rich snippet search feature?

You can enable rich result search features by including structured data on your webpage. Google processes the embedded markup while crawling your page. The highlighted information can appear in GSR, Maps, Assistant, or other Google products.

Structured data allows Google to understand and display, your website information in a new, innovative and appealing style (such as Assistant actions), to enable better search results (such as enabling users to search for recipes containing chicken or with less than 500 calories), or to store information in the knowledge panel.

What is structured data and how to include it on the webpage?

Structured data represents existing data in a preset field within a web page. In terms of SEO, it is a normalized format of information presentation and content classification for search engines. For example, on a book review page, who is the author, the publisher, the reviewer, what are the review ratings and so on.
This predefined data enables search engines to easily understand, analyze and classify the content of web pages.

Google Search supports structured data in three formats

Adding structured data is made simpler with online tools and plugins. Hence, you need not worry about the coding part.

Let’s have a look at tools to help you add the required data on your webpage.

Google Structured Data Markup Helper

This is a free tool to help webmasters tag their webpages.

To use the tool, select the data type, enter your web page URL and click start tagging.
After clicking start tagging you will see a screen like this

The next step is to select the text from your webpage content to tag. The selected content would automatically be inserted in a data items list on the right side.

Once you are done tagging all the elements, click the red colored create HTML button above My data Items.
Your JSON file is ready to download. All you need is to download the code and paste in your web page. And submit the page to search engines. Wait for your rich search result appearance on search engines.

You can further test your markup data with free Structured Data Testing Tool

WordPress Plugins

For WordPress users, a lot of plugins are available to add structure data and make the work easier for webmasters.

You just need to open your dashboard, head towards plugins and click add new.

Type structured data in the search box.

A list of plugins will appear and it’s up to you to choose one, download, install and activate to do the coding part for you to get the rich search result generated by the search bots.

The above tools may be your first step to get rich results but they do not guarantee a decorated search outcome. However, the Google algorithm is tailored to create search results that enhance user experience. It can take more than a few weeks for your rich results to appear.

Google can produce rich results from your website content even if you don’t add structured data. But adding markup would generate a much cleaner and appealing listing, as you would like to show it to your audience.
Adding markup does not affect your SERP rank.

Conclusion

• Rich snippets are helpful to show searchers significant answers relevant to their questions.
• The highlighted graphics in GSR help users to decide whether to or not to visit a website.
• Though rich results do not affect rankings. But they provide knock-on SEO benefits by enhancing your page indexability.
• Your mark up can get you high-quality traffic which may improve on-page behavioral data like CTR, Avg time on site, bounce rate, etc. With improved user behavior parameters, you may see a boost in your rankings.
  With rich results, you can directly convey your message to your visitors along with social proof like reviews. Thus, helping you get pre-qualified high-quality traffic for your E-commerce sites, and blogs, etc.
• Ensure correct structured data markup for your web page content to avoid getting penalized and rich result disabled by Google.
• Utilize tools Google has provided you for your benefit.
• Rich results are different from featured snippets.