What You Need To Know About Rich Snippets

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Rich snippets are Google search results that give detailed information about results.

This is displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

They help provide context to your page – on top of what’s been searched – and give someone an insight into what your page contains.

Basically, they help someone decide if your page is worth clicking on.

They can:

Rich snippets are best understood visually, so let me show you what what I mean.

Here’s a “standard” snippet for the blockbuster film, Black Panther.

It contains a headline, a link and a “snippet” of text below.

This hasn’t been optimised so the snippet contains the first lines of text from the article.

A rich snippet on the other hand, allows you to add extra information to your result.

Here’s a great example from IMDb:

The “snippet” text could be better. But the stars and extra information provide extra content a standard snippet doesn’t have.

You can see it’s a review and the site contains other information, like trivia questions.

These rich snippets have become essential for sites wanting to drive more traffic.

 Ranking in the first position is no longer enough.
 
You have to help a reader decide to click your page.

In this section of our SEO guide I’m going to show you why you should be using rich snippets and give you real time rich snippets examples.

What Are The Benefits Of Using Rich Snippets?

Although using rich snippets does not directly affect your rankings, they do come with a lot of benefits which can help you improve your rankings.

The main point of them is to provide extra information about a site before someone visits.

This can help make the traffic to your site more targeted.

 They’re people who want to be there.
 
This is great for a websites income and sign-up rates as the people are primed to visit. But let’s take a closer look at the rich snippets themselves.

You’ll notice that they stand out more in the search results than those around them:

This extra information then allows me to see exactly what I’m going to click onto.

So if I’m looking for a review of the film, I can see that’s what this site is offering before I click on it. Something that’s not clear with the other results.

The user also knows it contains a review and information about the quality of the film.

This isn’t clear with the other results.

These factors lead to an increase in click-through rates. (That’s the number of people who click on your result to go to your site).

In fact many companies have seen a 20 to 30 percent increase in their click through rates since beginning to use rich snippets.

 That’s big.
 
Especially when you consider that CTR’s are considered to be a ranking factor.

If you’re looking to:

…then rich snippets are definitely worth adding into your SEO strategy.

Up until now you’ve only seen one version of how rich snippets work – reviews.

But they’re also available to use for lots of other content, too.

8 Different Types Of Rich Snippets

#1: Business Rich Snippet

Business rich snippets provide extended information about your business, like…

If someone is specifically searching for your business or your location…

They’ll be see a rich snippet like this:

These are really useful to have. They’re snippets I use all the time to help me find when businesses are open, or to phone up and buy cinema tickets or whatever.

#2: Products

Product rich snippets often show:

Here’s a great example from Best Buy:

If you sell physical products this can do wonders for your product conversion rate.

The people who click through will be much more primed and ready to buy.

#3: Events

Event snippets allow you to show what events are happening in or around a specific area.

For example, if I search for “concerts in Berlin today” these are the results I get.

Although the snippet may look like it’s lacking in complete information (it doesn’t have all the concerts for today), it’s an incentive to click on your site and find out more.

#4: Restaurants

Restaurant snippets allow you to share:

Here’s one from my favourite restaurant back home:

These can be great for driving organic foot-traffic to your restaurant in the real world.

#5: Video

If video makes up a large part of your or your client’s business, there’s good news.

Video rich snippets allow you to insert a thumbnail of your video.

That means when they search like I did for “how to perform a kettlebell swing”…

 You can make your video stand out in the results:
 

If your video content is good enough, you even stand a chance of becoming the featured snippet for this result which shows up at the top of the page.

This can drive a tonne of traffic back to your content:

#6: Reviews And Ratings

You’ve already seen this earlier in this post.

But don’t scroll past just yet. There are multiple ways to use rich snippets for reviews.

For example, if you’re reviewing a restaurant you can show:

This is a lot of upfront information that can convince someone to click your page.

#7: Recipes

Recipe snippets are perfect if you want to attract someone to your cooking sites.

They allow you to show:

You can target this information to your audience.

For example…

Putting low calories if you’re in the weight loss niche…

To help you stand out and attract the right visitors.

#8: Music

Music snippets allow you to display specific information about an artist or album.

This can include information like:

This can help you to bring people into your social media following by providing links to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.

Or it can prompt people to start streaming music through Spotify.

BONUS #9: FAQ Rich Snippets

FAQ Schema have started to gain significant visibility in Google’s search results.

They help you to control additional real estate and you can use your favorite SEO copywriting tactics to hook people in.

If you want to add then to your site, you can use my free FAQ schema generator tool.

What Is The Difference Between Rich Snippets And Featured Snippets?

Good question.

Featured snippets are the cream-of-the-crop when it comes to rich snippets.

They show up in search results even before the first “official” ranking in Google which generally gives them a higher click-through rate compared with other types of snippets.

Featured snippets are usually displayed for question and answer based queries.

For example:

If I want to tie a tie for a wedding, and I search for how do I tie a windsor knot.

It brings up a result like this:

You can see this looks much different to a traditional search result.

In fact, it’s been completely inverted.

The result is upside down to offer information first, and a link to a website second:

In comparison to the usual format which is:

These snippets aren’t bound to just written information, either.

They’re also open to video, as you can see in the “video snippets” section above.

If your content is good enough, gets a high level of click-throughs and attracts attention – you could also find your content in this position.

But to increase the chances of that happening

 You should add rich snippets to your site.
 
Which brings us squarely to the next section…

Add Rich Snippets To Your Website

By now you should be fully aware of:

 Now, it’s time to get into the fun stuff.
 
Let’s look at how you can add them to your website with a rich snippet generator and begin to reap all of these juicy SEO benefits.

What Makes Rich Snippets Appear In Search Results?

Rich Snippets come from what’s known at Schema.org markup.

(Most people just call it “schema”, though.)

Schema.org was created when Google, Bing and Yahoo came together to create a type of code that could help search engines produce more in-depth results.

The code is generated – either from the Schema website, or through a tool.

Then is filled in with your information.

If you were writing a restaurant review you would fill in the bolded parts of the code here:

<div itemprop=”aggregateRating” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/AggregateRating”>
<span itemprop=”ratingValue”>[Aggregate rating given]</span> stars –
<span itemprop=”reviewCount”>[Number of reviews]</span> reviews
</div>

Which would then display the right information – like 4.7 stars and 327 reviews – to be displayed in the SERPS. This has to be done manually.

Now before I go any further, I know this sounds like hard work and can be overwhelming.

The minute you see code, it’s easy to want to turn and run.

But this process can be made easy by using third-party tools and plugins.

Let me show you what I mean…

How To Add Rich Snippets To Your Wordpress Site

There are a couple of different ways you can add Rich Snippets to your website easily.

Method #1 – Rank Math

Rank Math is the best SEO plugin for WordPress on the planet in my opinion and I recently ditched Yoast Premium across all my sites in favour of the free Rank Math plugin.

Read my full Rank Math review.

One of the things Rank Math does very well – is adding rich snippet data to your posts and pages-

All you have to do is choose which type of rich snippet you want to add to your post/page and fill out the details.

For example my SEO Powersuite review setup look’s like this in Rank Math-

And produces the following in Google’s search results-

Pretty cool right?

Not only that but you can set RankMath to automatically add all of the article schema markup you need in one click-

Which creates beautiful results like this in Google’s rich snippet testing tool-

As you can see, I love RankMath and if you haven’t migrated from Yoast already you should do – it only takes a few clicks.

Method #2 – All In One Schema Rich Snippets Tool

If your current SEO plugin doesn’t support rich snippets then you can use the All In One Schema Rich Snippets tool.

It’s free to download from the “Add Plugin” section of your WordPress dashboard.

You can find it by typing in “all in one schema” into the search bar:

Once it’s downloaded and installed head over to the “rich snippets” section of your sidebar to ensure everything has been installed properly.

It should be around about here:

In this section of the tool you can add general schema markup information for your site.

(You can test the quality of your schema markup with a schema tester).

But where I want you to focus your attention is at the end of individual posts or pages.

When you open a new post or page you’ll now find this option beneath the text-input area:

From the drop-down menu you can select the type of post this is, to fit the style of schema markup you’ll need for your rich snippet.

You’ll then be asked to enter the right information for this page.

I mean…

Why play around with your website’s code when a plugin makes it this simple?

Method #3 – FAQ Rich Snippet Generator

If you want to integrate FAQ rich snippets then you can use my free FAQ rich snippet generator tool.

It’s really easy to use-

Just copy/paste your questions into the tool and click the button to copy your code!

Follow the full tutorial to get it setup right.

How To Test If Your Rich Snippets Work

Once you’ve chosen one of the above plugins and added rich snippets…

It’s important to test them and see if they’re working.

The easiest way to do this is with the Google’s Structured Data Testing tool.

All you do to run the test is enter your website’s URL into the box it presents you with:

Once you click “run test” the tool will begin to crawl the data on your site to find any errors.

Depending on the size of your site, this could take a few minutes.

When the search is complete it will tell you where it has found the schema data on your site, and present you with any warnings or errors in your code:

If there are any errors it’ll provide you with information about how they can be fixed.

Rich snippets are a great way to boost your site’s performance but it’s not the only way. Check out my SEO checklist and learn 45+ ways to increase search traffic this year.

Wrapping It Up

Rich snippets are expanded Google snippets that provide context to search results.

 They can increase your click-through rates and drive more traffic to your website.
 
Traffic is often more targeted because they’ve made a more conscious decision to click.

Rich snippets come in lots of different forms but are mainly:

Rich snippets aren’t to be confused with featured snippets.

But the code for each of these is the same.

And you must have rich snippets in order to qualify for a featured snippet.

Schema markup forms the basis of these rich snippets and the Schema.org code must be added to your site in one form or another, to make these snippets available.

Add rich snippets to your website by using either-

• RankMath
• All In One Schema plugin
• My free FAQ rich snippet generation tool

You can test your schema data and ensure your rich snippets are working by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

The next section of the guide is a very important one – Website Speed.