How to add rich snippets to website & grow traffic

Why Add Rich Snippets To Your Website?

Rich snippets and rich results stand out on a search results page and can help increase the click-thru rate (CTR) you get from your existing search listings as well as create new opportunities to show up on additional sections of the search results pages.

You are probably familiar with many of them without knowing what they were.

No doubt you’ve seen customer review stars next to some search listings in Google; those are called review snippets.

Example of Aggregate Ratings & Review Snippets

You’ve also probably seen a section on your search results page called “People Also Ask,” with common questions related to your search.

Example of “People Also Ask” SERP section – Gain Visibility here with FAQ and Q&A Schema

What are Rich Snippets?

Rich Snippets are search results that provide additional information beyond the blue-linked page title, meta description, and URL.

Google also provides Rich Results, which are search results that are have added visual or interactive features to help the user.

The differences are in how Google gets the data and how they show it to the searcher.

How do you get rich snippets?

Rich Snippets are using content from the web page along with its title, description, and URL to provide more details to the searcher.

Rich Results are pulled from additional structured data / Schema markup that you added to the code of the page/site.

Google uses Rich Results to provide more helpful details to improve the quality of their search results page for the person searching.

Let’s take a look at some Rich Results your home service company should consider targeting:

Local Business = define your business, its location, contact info, founder, audience, your service area, and more.

Review snippets = and aggregate ratings stars are available for products, courses, FAQs, how-to articles, books and e-books, events, recipes, movies and software.

Note: review snippets and aggregate ratings for Local Businesses will no longer be shown by Google as of September, 2019. See Google Search Central for more info.

Sitelinks search box = allows visitors to search your website.

FAQ page = create a FAQ page on your site and apply FAQ page schema to it.

Q&A = add this to every existing page with SEO-optimized questions and answers. It can be added to product, service, article, and blog post schema in the Subject Of field.

How-to = add this to every page with how-to content.

Example of How-to Schema Nested in Article Schema

Product = add this data to every page that offers a product. Create and nest an Offer inside the Product schema along with aggregate ratings and review information.

Image license = add this and keyword titles to your unique images. Doing so may qualify for being shown in image carousels on SERPs.

Logo = markup your logo as your own to show in searches and knowledge panels.

Job Posting = if you have a job posting page on your site.

Other Rich Results you may wish to target include:

Books markup = if you’ve published an e-book then use this schema.

Events markup = having company events open to the public? Use Events schema.

Example of Video Schema Markup

How do I add rich snippets to my WordPress site?

Make sure you have an optimized title and meta description for every page and post.

Rich results require structured data to be written to your web pages where it applies.

Structured data can be hard-coded to your site though that is a daunting task and probably not a cost-effective path to take.

Many WordPress plugins write some form of structured data to websites, but we found most of them very limited.

The tool we use and the only one we found that offers every bit of available structured data is SchemaApp.com.

For more info on adding Schema markup and structured data to your site, see our podcast #51, which is all about this subject.

Why are rich snippets not showing up?

Rich snippets and results are not guaranteed by Google, even if you applied and coded them perfectly. They only make your site, pages, and posts eligible for them.

The first step is to make sure you used the properly structured data for the page or post and then make sure you coded it properly.

You can use Google Rich Results Testing Tool to see if your pages, posts, and code qualify for Rich Results. It will show you if there are any warnings or errors and on what line of code they exist.

You can and should also use Google’s Schema Markup Validator Tool to see if the page, post, or code is using structured data code that is free from errors or warnings.

Note that Google says warnings are okay to use as is, but any errors need correction(s).

Make sure you turn off all other structured data being written to your site by WordPress, Yoast, Woocommerce, and other plugins that may conflict with those codes you want there.

You can use SchemaApp’s settings to do that and there are also other plugins that will disable any Yoast and WordPress schema markup / structured data being written.

Do rich snippets help SEO?

Google has stated that Rich Results and their required structured data do not directly affect search rankings but that they might one day become a ranking factor.

Summary

Rich results can provide you with more real estate and visibility on search engine results pages and improve the click-thru rates for those listings.

Google has provided you with a tool and path to achieve these results and stand out from your competition.

Is your company taking advantage of them?