Search engine results from Google or Bing are where your potential customers will first discover your website. So you need to make your website stand out from the crowd! Rich snippets will help cut through the noise.
Also known as structured data, rich snippets add more detail in Google and the detail that it adds is very much easy on the eye.
Food for thought
When I think of rich snippets I immediately think recipe pages, these are ideal for the use of structured data. Think of it this way, you decide that you’d like to cook salmon risotto for dinner and Google “salmon risotto“. Well, the results will return about 16.6 million pages, and nobody has the time or energy to sift through that much, especially when you’re hungry.
So how do you make your page stand out in the search results?
What if you had a picture of the cooked dish, how about the number of minutes needed to cook, what if there was a rating displaying 4 out of 5 stars, throw in the number of calories in the dish, and you have just presented your searcher with an incentive to click on your website.
Rotten tomatoes or Star studded?
Another practical example is film / movie information
If you search for example “La La Land review”, about 25 million pages are found. Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes have made their pages stand out with rich snippets such as ratings, runtime, genre and the director’s name.
When you think about how you used to select a film to watch in the olden days – you’d go to the video shop, read the synopsis on the back cover, scan the run time, director or cast names as well as ratings. Rich snippets or schema data utilises this human need for quick information.
It’s very important to get the right user to your website, rich snippets will help with this, reducing bounce rates and attracting more clicks with beautifully presented data.
Stand out from the crowd
At the code level, there are a few fundamentals that rich snippets can display in search results from your website. As an example it can be name, description, URL and image. Using the above examples, we can see these displayed details such as the Director and the image for the recipe.
OSD Digital Agency can set this up for you to have eye catching rich snippets, so that your website will gain the right clicks and help your business. As part of our SEO strategy we include rich snippets in the website code, so that your website stands out in the search engine results.
