I’m often asked the question “How will you improve the traffic to my website” and Rich Snippets are a perfect example of how you can generate a large return for minimal effort. What happens if you could increase clicks to your content by 20-30 and what that do to spike your current traffic levels?
Always work with the content you have and see where you can improve and identify ways in which we can make it stand out against competing results in search engines. This is exactly where Rich Snippets can provide us with an edge that very few businesses are currently taking advantage but first let’s step back and understand what exactly they are.
What Are Rich Snippets?
Rich Snippets are a visual way to display products, prices and reviews in search engine results. They are created by adding a piece code to your website that provides additional information for search engines to use and display in results. Still confused? Let’s take a look at what I mean.
Do Rich Snippets Improve SEO?
No, Rich Snippets have zero impact in terms of improving rankings for your website.
Instead, what they do is improve the chance that your content will receive clicks by making your content stand out visuall in search engines.
It’s a little bit like turning up for work, if you turn up in your “trackie dacks” and “ugg boots” then you might not give yourself the best chance to stand out (even though it’s super comfy). Rich Snippets are the ‘tailored suits’ of SEO and give your search listing unique features to help it stand out.
It doesn’t mean that your content is better, although it should be, but it will help it stand on its own instead of getting lost in the clutter. It means that you have the opportunity to generate more organic traffic to your site with the same existing content, why wouldn’t you jump on board?
Take a look at this example and tell me which result you would click.
Many companies have seen between 20 – 30 % increase in organic click through rates
How Do I Get Rich Snippets For My Website?
If you’re using WordPress, or one of the major content management systems, then it’s pretty simple really. You’ve got plenty of choice with free plugins to implement it effectively on your own site and undoubtedly premium plugins are available too.
If you don’t use a content management system, or you cannot find one for your CMS, then you’ll need to get technical in order to get it working for you. That will involve coding it yourself and I’m not going to get into that in this post for obvious reasons.
Here are a few that you could try.
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Schema Creator by Raven
Rich Contact Widget
Can I Test Rich Snippets Are Working?
Absolutely! Fortunately for us Google has provided us with a tool that can test if our website and show us if rich snippets are properly configured. It’s important to note that just because your snippet shows correctly in the tool doesn’t necessarily mean that it will display in search engine results.
While trying to configure this myself I’ve seen that the tool can report everything as correct but only a portion of the rich snippets show in Google search results. Test it out for yourself and be prepared to be at the mercy of the big ‘G’ before you can actually see the results.
- http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=1093493
Tips for Configuring Rich Snippets on your Website
If you’re having trouble configuring Rich Snippets on your website we offer the following pieces of advice:
- Make sure your rich snippet markup is visible to visitors on your website.
- Make sure your markup represents what is on the page.
- Ensure that you optimise the rich snippet images for the thumbnail size of Google
- Make sure you have the right information configured for the right fields
- Ensure that the snippet used is current and is relative to the page.
What is the future for Rich Snippets?
This is a great question and it’s certainly one that should be asked given the recent removal of Google Authorship. Authorship was a way to assign an author to content and most importantly it allowed you to get your face in Google search results.
This was recently removed most likely because it reduced the amount of clicks Google was receiving for paid advertising, using a face in SERPs was simply more effective than Google had first imagined.
At this point Rich Snippets relates best towards video, recipes and reviews so if your business is involved with that it makes sense to get on board and see how it helps improve traffic.
Could Google remove it completely in the future? Absolutely!
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t make hay while the sun is shining, at the end of the day if the effectiveness of gaining clicks for your content reduces the amount of revenue that Google generates through paid advertising it’s likely a feature that will get the boot. The same goes if the feature is not widely adopted and is a struggle for website owners to implement which was likely the case for authorship too.
I feel that it can take just a few minutes to implement it on your site so why not spend the time and take advantage of it as there are so many businesses that aren’t currently using it.
