If instead of having this:
You want your website to appear like this in search results:
Follow this guide to learn how to enrich your snippets.
What are Rich Snippets?
Rich Snippets are more visually appealing search results with additional valuable information displayed along with the title, description, and URL. Additional information comes from structured data on the page.
When do they appear?
Rich Snippets can only appear for pages with certain types of information, and can be further limited by device types. There will be aspects of Rich Snippets that can only be displayed on mobile devices.
What is the difference between rich snippets and rich results?
You may have come across the term “Rich Results,” which is often used interchangeably with “Rich Snippets.”
We can define each of the terms like this:
- Rich Snippets – Regular search results with additional information displayed along with the title, descriptive snippet, and URL.
- Rich Results: Any type of search results visually enhanced with information extracted from relevant structured data. Rich Snippets are a type of Rich Result.
How Rich Snippets Improve SEO
Appearing in the top search results is great, but what ultimately makes people click is the snippet content. Rich Snippets help make your web pages look more attractive in search results.
You can use attributes such as prices, number of reviews, ratings or cooking times for recipes to improve the competitiveness of your page in the SERPs. They're giving you more space to attract clicks with important information.
However, we must be clear about this:
While having visually appealing snippets may generate more clicks, Rich Snippets are not a ranking factor.
How to get Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are created based on structured data that is available for certain pieces of content. The data is formatted and organized in a way that makes it easy for Google to understand and use it for SERPs and other purposes.
So instead of Google having to extract key information from something like this:
Tardará 20 minutos en hacer los panqueques. Aún mejor, estos son panqueques bajos en calorías, alrededor de 80 por porción.
They have it in a structured format that looks like this:
tiempo de cocción: 20 minutos
calorías: 80
In SEO, with structured data we refer to the vocabulary of schema.org used to mark up your content. Google may decide to use this data markup to enrich search results.
So how do you implement this markup and what types of content can you apply it to?
Below we show you the 3 steps you should follow to get the most out of Rich Snippets.
1) Check which Rich Snippets are right for you
Standard search result snippets can give a pretty good overview of the content. In many cases there is not much additional that can be provided to the user. In blog posts like this, for example, what else would you need besides the title, description and URL.
The process of getting Rich Snippets is well documented by Google. And that includes the types of content that are eligible for these search results improvements.
The list of the most common cases of Rich Snippets data markup includes:
- “How to” marking
- Product Type Marking
- Marking Comments/Reviews
- Software Marking
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Markup
There are many more options than these, but they apply to fairly specific website categories, such as recipes. The rest are:
- News, media and entertainment.
- Books
- Education
- Events
- data sets
- Job-related content
If any of the categories seem relevant to you, go to the official documentos, check out possible improvements and features for your type of content, and decide if they are worth implementing.
For the rest, we will take FAQ data markup as an example for the implementation process. The FAQ Rich Snippets implementation can be used on any page that has an FAQ section. This markup may look something like this:
2) Implement structured data
It is easy to create the markup and implement it.
One of the most direct methods is to implement the code in the section of your website.
For this, you will need to use one of the many schema markup generators. For example, you can use this, and select the creation of FAQ data markup:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "¿Es difícil implementar este marcado?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "No, para nada, hay muchos complementos y generadores de marcados."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "¿Los SEO aprovechan el marcado de preguntas frecuentes?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Sí, es una táctica bastante popular. Puede proporcionar mucho valor en la SERP."
}
}]
}
</script>
But what happens if you use a CMS where implementing custom code is quite problematic?
If you use WordPress, plugins can help you. Structured data is supported by SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math, or there are even plugins built just for schema implementation.
Yoast works well for the basics, like FAQs and “How to” outlines.
Continuing with Yoast and our FAQ example, the process is very simple. You simply select an FAQ block when creating a page and complete the questions and answers to your frequently asked questions.
The implementation processes depend on the plugin and the type of schema, so they may vary. Simply check the documentation for your chosen plugin to see how it works with your chosen schema type.
3) Validate the markup
The use of markup generators and plugins already makes the markup implementation process go error-free. But it is good practice to run it through the Google Rich Results Testing Tool. This will immediately tell you if the code or page is eligible for rich results.
Getting more attention and clicks with Rich Snippets is very good, make sure to enrich your snippets. And keep in mind that the structured data behind them is part of something much bigger.
Google uses structured data to help build its Knowledge Graph. This is what helps Google give more relevant search results.