Rich Snippets: What They Are and How to Exploit Them

The snippet is what appears in Google search results. It consists of the title , description , and URL of the site.

The Rich Snippet, as its name suggests, simply enhances this result with additional elements that will be displayed to the user. These elements can include ratings or reviews, prices, videos, and the name of the author who created the content.

The benefits of 'rich snippets' for SEO

The structure plays an important role in determining the click-through rate of a search result. This percentage is a relevant factor in assessing and ranking a website.

The enriched snippets can be used to highlight individual results using eye-catching elements such as videos, images, and ratings. The use of enriched snippets is particularly important for regular search results and can help increase clicks on the snippet. Meanwhile, SEO has developed its own niche for optimizing enriched snippets.

Indeed, the results they present do increase clicks and thus traffic.

In fact, thanks to the additional information displayed in the SERPs, rich snippets stand out from others and attract users' attention. Consequently, search results that provide more information are more likely to be clicked.

Their use allows you to further increase your click-through rate if you are already ranking first in search results for a specific keyword. Otherwise, you have a chance to compensate if you are ranked second or third. By receiving many clicks, Google will consider you as a reliable source and will grant you more visibility and relevance than others.

How to get rich snippets?

To display these rich snippets in search results, certain actions need to be taken. The first thing to do is to consult the comprehensive documentation on schema.org, a website born out of collaboration between Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

This standard, supported by all search engines, provides structured microdata.

You simply need to find the type of markup to use on Schema.org and mark up your content using the provided guidelines. To add structured data markup, you can use a WordPress plugin, Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD.

Choose the most suitable type for your content

The rich snippets are typically extracted from structured data contained within the HTML code of a page

The first step to getting the most out of it is to identify the type you want to obtain. This way, you can use tags specifically designed to obtain this type of rich snippet in the SERPs.

There are different types of tags, but a good portion of them (such as flight and book information) only apply to a very specific type of website

We will therefore focus on the most common rich snippets

1. Reviews affichage d’un classement par étoiles (sur 5). Il peut s’agir d’un avis unique ou d’avis d’utilisateurs agrégés.
2. Recipes: A special type of structured data that applies only to recipes. This markup includes data such as the dish's preparation time, comments, and images.
3. Music: Provides information about music, such as album release dates.
4. Film: indicates details about the director, release date, duration, and box office revenue. The most captivating feature is the audience rating
5. Product markup: signals search engines with information about a specific product (including price and product images). These enhancements are essential for e-commerce.
6. Organization: Helps Google understand key information related to an organization (such as a business), including address, logo, and contact details
7. Homepage: enables a website to appear in the "Homepage" section of search results. This applies only to websites approved by Google News.
8. Video: Search engines cannot "watch" the videos on your page. This type of markup helps them understand the content of your video.
9. Events: includes information about dates, times, locations, etc.

Once you've chosen the appropriate type of rich snippet for your content, it's time to apply it.

Structured data testing

After inserting it, you will need to validate it to ensure it is read and displayed as intended.

One of the best tools for testing structured data markup is the one provided by Google. Launched in April 2021, it doesn't test media results, but rather checks the syntax and compliance of the markup with schema.org standards.