Google Rich Snippets – Why To Use Them?

We all know the primary purpose of search engines. They help us find things on the web. Engineers are constantly improving the systems and never miss a chance to introduce innovations to make the search even faster and more convenient, e.g. addition of local search feature. It significantly improves search results when you’re looking for some products or services nearby. Some of these innovative ideas can serve for marketing needs as well. Let’s talk about a rich snippet and see how useful it can be for your online business.

Jason Mikula:

Talking micro formatting and rich snippets boosting CTR & rankings at #smx #11a

Kristine Schachinger:

If Google offers a search filter and your site does NOT use rich snippet/microformats, you will not be in the result #11a #smx

What is a Snippet?

If you still don’t know–a snippet is a short piece of text information describing a website on the search engine result page. It contains a page title, meta descriptions tag, and a link to the page itself. Meta description is vital and contains information about the page to which the user will land following the link. Today every search engine is trying to make search results more useful and informative. As a result, we have rich snippets on Google result page.

What Makes Snippet Rich?

In search results, you can find some variations of rich snippets that stand out against the rest of the items and attract more attention. And clicks. Here is the list of most popular types of rich snippets.

Products

Online shop owners know the power of a good Product snippet: it shows rates, price, reviews amount. Today it’s the most powerful method to increase CTR. And it’s must-apply on every e-commerce  website. It is very useful for online shoppers and effective in attracting them to e-commerce websites.

Products with Multiple Offers

Significant difference between this rich snippet and the one described above is that here you can see the range of prices for the product. Of course, it’s widely used by online stores today.

Applications

Brief description of various applications in this type of rich snippets saves a lot of time for people looking for a certain app. But if you make these few lines sound catchy and informative at the same time users will click the link quite actively. Application rich snippet works well for small and local software development businesses.

Reviews

Rating of a product, number of comments and its price range–all of this you can see on the snippets of review type. Yellow pages owners highly appreciate them as various products and services can use such snippets.

Recipes

It used to be a real pain to find the right recipe among the multitude of offers. These snippets appeared to be extremely helpful for websites that position themselves as highly informative and earn money from traffic. Now on the search result page you can see the rating of the dish, time needed for cooking and general amount of calories it contains included in a single snippet!

Movies

Rating and other people’s opinions are exceedingly important social factors that influence a great deal of things including our decisions and choices. Online and offline cinema owners mostly take advantage of this type of snippet.

Music

There are a lot in common between Music and Event snippet. They both contain lists. But in music, it’s the list of songs with their names and duration. You can listen to them right from the search result page! So if you sell music through the web or have an online catalogue of music on sale in your offline store this rich snippet is the best choice.

TV Series

It’s like a Movie type of rich snippets apart from the note that it’s TV series. It looks like it’s the only reason for Rich Snippet Testing Tool developers to single it out as a separate type.

Events

Showing the date, name and venue of the event described on website the rich snippet is quite notable among other search results. Media portals use this option to deliver the information faster and attract more attention to the event.

Authors

Bloggers, companies and other authors who share their writings actively use this rich snippet. Its key feature is the picture of the author and we know photographs are very effective in catching the eye.

People

Social networks use people type of rich snippets. It provides you with a picture and some short info about the person you’re looking for.

Google has always tried to help their clients to see if the content of web pages offered in search results applies to queries. That’s why developers constantly change algorithms and apply multiple filters to sift the rubbish out. Examples of rich snippets given in the article are only a half of what microdata, microformats and RDF can do. Maximize the opportunities of getting more visitors from search engines by the global network to increase chances for business success.

Contact your webmaster or SEO consultant to find out if they can implement rich snippets on your website. Want more details on benefits this feature can bring to your business or web-project? Ask us privately via e-mail or by leaving a comment for public discussion.