Rich Snippets: How to Stand Out in Google Search Results

Rich snippets can be a great way to help you climb Google search rankings. Being found in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is one thing. Whether these users choose your website or not is another thing, and that depends on many factors. Of course, a page’s position within the SERPs is important, but it is also important to stand out from other results. This can be done with rich snippets. What are they, what types do we distinguish and how to implement them on your website?

What are rich snippets?

Rich snippets are additional elements that are visible in the search results.

In the "basic" version of a search result, the user will see the title of the page, a short description (meta title and description) and the associated URL address, as you can see in the example below:

However, the search result may look different and may be “enriched” with other elements important to the user (e.g. star ratings or images).

These extra elements are called rich snippets (or rich results). In the example below, we can see a rating for this recipe as well as additional links to similar recipes.

Rich snippets are designed to provide users with extra information about the page directly in the search results. Well-implemented rich snippets contribute to an increase in click-through rates (CTR), which means more traffic for your site. With this extra information, the searcher can quickly tell if the website contains the content they're looking for.

In addition, rich snippets are visual eye-catchers. They can attract the user's attention and allow your page to stand out from other results because these rich results generally take up more space in search results.

Rich snippets are what the user sees. In order to get these extra elements to appear in the search results, websites need to have structured data implemented in their code.

What is structured data?

To fully understand what rich snippets are, we need to look at the definition of structured data:

Structured data are HTML tags that "label" individual elements of the website page. This additional "structure" in the code helps Google page crawlers understand all the page content more clearly, so it can display relevant content in the search results.

With structured data in your HTML, Google understands, for example, what your opening hours are or what your telephone number is because it is labelled appropriately in your site’s code.

In the context of rich snippets, structured data is the code that helps Google display the extra elements that users see in the SERPs.

Rich snippets & featured snippets - how do they differ?

In addition to rich snippets, featured snippets may also appear in Google SERPs.

A featured snippet is the information seen at the very top of some organic search results (in the so-called "position 0"). They are generally longer fragments of text that should answer the user's query directly. They usually take the form of definitions, but they can also be, for example, a list or table.

In the example below, the search query has triggered an answer directly in the results. For more information, the user will have to click on the link below or keep scrolling for other search results.

The role of featured snippets is to provide all the relevant information on the search results page without the user having to click on a link. However, landing in "position 0" is a bit of a double-edged sword. If the result answers a rather simple question, the user may simply not visit the site anymore as their question has already been answered.

Rich snippets, on the other hand, are simply an enriched version of a single search result that are meant to inspire more clicks.

The SEO impact of rich snippets

Rich Snippets can help improve the organic performance of your online shop. Even if they do not necessarily have a direct impact on the positioning of your page in Google results, they help to increase the CTR (click-through rate) and therefore, the organic traffic to your site.

By providing additional information about a page's content, rich snippets can improve the user experience in the search results and positively impact traffic to your page.

In the long run, better organic traffic on one of your pages will play a determining role in the authority of your domain and therefore your overall SEO efforts.

Types of rich snippets

Shutterstock/REDPIXEL.PL

There are many types of rich snippets and they may differ depending on the subject and type of page they’re for. However, owners of online shops should pay particular attention to them. At a time when new e-commerce businesses are popping up every day, the important thing is to attract attention to your offer.

Recommended reading:
9 Ways to Differentiate Yourself From Your Competition

Here are the types of rich snippets that will be especially useful for e-commerce websites:

Star ratings

With star ratings in the SERPs, you can immediately show potential customers that your store is trustworthy and that your products are high quality. The search results not only shows users the average rating, but also the number of reviews left.

Rating stars in rich snippets can really contribute to an increased click-through rate of your ranked page. Not only that, but the stars are eye-catchers that stand out in a wall of text. You can read more about what to do to present your SERP reviews in the Google Search Central.

Keeping your structured data up to date as you collect more reviews is easy to do with Trusted Shops, which is a Google-certified reviews provider. Learn more about Trusted Shops Customer Reviews.

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Star ratings appear throughout Google: Search, Shopping, and Maps. The different platforms have different requirements for displaying stars. Want to learn more? Download our guide by clicking below:

Price

Price information is one of the most important elements that consumers consider when making a purchasing decision. You don't need to wait for your visitors to discover your prices on your product pages; you can display them directly in the search results.

Granted, this rich snippet may deter some shoppers from clicking on your site’s URL. However, it's important to keep in mind that the traffic that arrives after seeing the price will be more likely to convert.

In order to display the price on the SERPs, you will need to implement Product and Offer markup to your product pages and then you will need to import the data feeds via your Google Merchant Center account.

This is what the search result will look like:

For more information, you can visit Google Search Central.

Recommended reading:
What Is Trusted Shops and How Can It Benefit My Business?

Availability

Imagine the following situation: After weeks of searching, you finally find a product in a Google results page. You click on the link and it turns out that the goods are unavailable. Annoying, isn't it?

Thanks to rich snippets, you can also display whether you have a given product in stock directly in the SERPs (this can also be seen in the previous example).

By sharing this information in the SERPs, you not only provide the potential customer with valuable information, but also reduce the bounce rates of your product pages in case you are out of stock.

Delivery

The factor that distinguishes you from the competition may also be low shipping costs. Show this off with rich snippets! This is particularly important information, especially if you are offering free shipping.

Recommended reading:
Free Shipping: Should You Offer It in Your Online Shop?

Read more about what tags to use on your product pages to show, for example, your prices, availability, and shipping costs in the Google Search Central.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb navigation is an important element for both the user and the search engine. The former knows what path to take to find a specific product or product category, and Google bots receive information about the structure of your website.

In the example below, we can see that their product categories can be sorted by size and colour:

Check out how to implement this rich snippet in the Google Hub.

Recommended reading:
5 Tips for Making Your Website Easier to Navigate

FAQs

Rich Snippet FAQs are search results that present a list of frequently asked questions and answers on a web page. They are especially useful for blog post pages because they allow users to dig deeper into a topic quickly and easily.

Important: Since August 2023, FAQ results are only displayed for well-known government and health sites.

Google does change their minds sometimes, so it can't hurt adding the structured data, but the for now, the above-stated policy still applies. For reference, here is what FAQ rich snippets look like:

You can read more about flagging frequently asked questions here.

Search bar

Customers can search for an item in your assortment… directly on Google. This tool will be useful mainly for famous brands with a very wide product catalogue. Users don't have to go to the shop's home page to search its assortment and find the appropriate product page.

You can read more about this extended snippet here.

How to implement rich snippets

Each of the extended snippets has its own tag that should be added on a specific subpage. They come in three formats:

• JSON-LD (recommended by Google)
• Microdata
• RDFa

Rich snippets can be implemented in three ways:

• Google Search Console: This is done with the Data Highlighter tool. After entering the website, click "Start highlighting", and select the correct URL and type of information (e.g. Products). Then, select parts of the page, assign them the appropriate tag, and click "Publish".
  
  
• HTML code of the page: This is a manual way of tagging your website code. Schema.org will be helpful with this method, which will help you find the appropriate tag.
  
  
• Plug-ins: If you use WordPress, you can use popular plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math to implement rich snippets. Other e-commerce platforms will likely have similar plug-ins.

It’s important to note that merely placing the appropriate tag in the HTML code does not guarantee that the snippet actually shows up in the search results. Structured data is only a guide for Google, which ultimately makes its own decision about displaying rich snippets.

The last step is to verify that you have implemented rich snippets correctly. This can be done with the help of the Rich Results Test tool from Google.

Conclusion

Extended snippets can help you stand out from the competition and make a great first impression at the beginning of the customer journey. Rich snippets have an impact on increasing the click rate of your subpages and reducing the bounce rate. Moreover, identifying individual website elements with structured data sends a positive signal to Google.

This article was first published on and then adapted from our Polish blog: Rich snippets, czyli jak wyróżnić się w wyszukiwarce Google