Although the concept of Rich Snippets may seem foreign to you, we all encounter them every day on Google. We’ll see them whether we’re looking for a favourite recipe or interested in reviews of a film that friends have recommended to us.
Although their use is not compulsory, when set up correctly they can be a decisive advantage that can help you improve your website’s visibility over your competitors.
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m attaching a couple of samples.
As you can see from the images, rich snippets are more visually appealing compared to classic snippets, which significantly helps to increase the visibility of the selected results in search and thus helps to increase their CTR (click-through rate).
But before we show you how to implement them on our website, let’s talk about them some more.
What are Rich Snippets?
The term “Snippet” refers to the combination of a page title, a brief description and a URL that is displayed in search results, called a snippet. SERPs.
If the website has properly implemented microformats resp. structured data, Google can display more visually appealing “enriched“ snippets – rich snippets.
For example, these can include ratings and reviews, images, estimated lead time or price, thus providing additional information to users and positively influencing CTR.
How can we get Rich snippets for our website?
As I hinted above, to get Rich snippets, we need to properly set up structured data in the following formats:
- JSON-LD, recommended.
- Microdata
- RDFa
Among the most well-known structured data are certainly:
- Evaluations – one of the most widely used structured data is undoubtedly evaluations. These are displayed in SERPs in the form of asterisks, but Google has stopped displaying them in selected cases due to numerous manipulations by website owners.
- Products – if you own an eshop, structured product data will clearly be a good choice. In addition to the product name, image, description or brand, we can also add an identifier such as ISBN, rating, price or availability.
- Recipes – visually they are easy to distinguish as they provide information not only on the name of the dishes and their pictures, but also on preparation time, portion size, nutritional values or calories.
- Company/Organisation – suitable for companies with a physical address as the company name, address, logo or geographical coordinates are required.
If we have already chosen the type of structured data we want to implement on our site, we just need to go to Google Search Gallery or directly to Schema.org, copy the selected type of structured data, edit it and publish it on the site.
To facilitate the whole process, we can also use so-called online Schema generators like the one from TechnicalSeo.
After selecting a certain type of structured data, the necessary fields that need to be filled in are automatically displayed.
Example of creating structured data for a blog article.
Once filled in, structured data is automatically generated in the right corner of the screen. Now just copy them and implement them in any CMS via Google Tag Manager or directly insert them into the page source code (between the HTML tags <head>insert here</head>).
To make sure that the whole microformats configuration was successful, we can use Schema’s official Validator tool to help us detect the implemented structured data for each URL.
However, if you are using WordPress and want to automate the whole process of implementing structured data, I’ll show you how.
How to implement structured data in WordPresse?
If your website is built in the WordPress CMS, there are several options to implement “painless” structured data quickly and easily.
To set them manually, you can use either Google Tag Manager or any plugin that allows you to add HTML/JS/CSS code directly to the head section.
However, if we want to automate the whole process of adding microformats, we can use one of the plugins like Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP, RankMath or Schema Pro.
The following process is very similar. Most plugins offer a quick setup using an assistant where we choose the content we want to apply structured data to and the type of data. For example, we can set the Article microformat to be applied to all published articles, or the Organization microformat to be applied only to the main page of the site.
Now that you know what rich snippets are, their importance for SEO, and how to implement structured data on the web to get them, it’s time to put your new knowledge into practice.
SEO consultant, WordPress guy and enthusiast of everything related to digital marketing. I help clients with the transformation of their business into an online environment, so that they start selling more thanks to the website and thus achieve their set goals.
