What Are Rich Snippets?

You may have stumbled across rich snippets while seeking ways to improve your website’s SEO. If not, you may be wondering, what are rich snippets? Rich snippets are search results that offer additional useful information like reviews that will help your content shine and generate traffic. Read on to learn more about rich snippets, how they work, and how you can apply them to your site.

What are rich snippets and how do they work for WordPress?

Also known as rich results, rich snippets refer to more attractive Google search results that provide extra valuable information compared to usual results. They include review ratings, products, events, recipes, and how-tos. This data often comes from structured data found in a webpage’s HTML. You can implement rich snippets to your WordPress site with mark-up formats and languages like microdata, microformats, and RDFa.

Normal search engine snippets usually contain a URL, title tag, and meta description. Meanwhile, rich snippets are more appealing than normal search results. For example, you’ll see a rating for a carbonara recipe, a review count, an image of the dish, and duration. You may also find rich snippets with event details, FAQs, and carousels. If it’s a movie, you’ll see the release date, genre, ratings, and runtime.

Rich snippets are essential for SEO. They make your page more attention-grabbing and help increase your site’s visibility, hence boosting your click-through rate. Users tend to click on search results that offer them more relevant information.

Moreover, rich snippets allow Google to understand your site’s content better. As a result, you’ll have better opportunities for higher ranking.

How to get rich snippets

Besides knowing the answer to “what are rich snippets,” you also have to learn how to get them. You should add structured data to your page’s source code. Structured data refers to a code with a particular format that allows search engines to read and understand your page’s content. Search engines then use the code to come up with rich results.

You also have to pick the right type of rich snippet. There are tons of them, including people, products, articles, news, and movies. If you don’t have content about food on your site, then you can’t have recipe snippets. Meanwhile, if you’re selling tickets for a particular event, then an event snippet is ideal for you. There should be information on the time, date, location, and duration. You might want to pay attention to your highest-ranking pages too.

Once you’ve chosen an appropriate rich snippet type for your site, you can add schema to your page. Don’t forget to test or validate your structured data. Google has a testing tool that allows you to spot any invalid items or anything you’re missing to have a rich snippet.

Track results too, so you’ll know which ones worked and so you can use the data to improve your current content or make more.

Conclusion 🧐

Knowing the answer to “what are rich snippets” is the first step to improving your website’s SEO. The valuable information added such as star ratings, recipes, event details, and product specs let you experience several benefits. These include helping your site excel in SERPs, drive traffic, boost organic click-through rates, and increase conversions.

To get rich snippets, you should understand structured data, select the right rich snippet for your site, test your markup, and monitor results. With these strategies, you can achieve those rich results and stay on top of the competition.