The site uses rich snippets and the search results include pricing and stars to represent reviews.
Drive more traffic to your website
Another benefit of rich snippets is that they can improve your website's visibility and ranking in search engine results. Most search engines, including Google user structured data and rich snippets to better decipher a web page’s content. So, say you're selling a high quality Brazilian espresso coffee and have added rich snippets to the website including the product’s price. Your search result may also display the product’s price. Pretty cool, right?
How to Create Rich Snippets for a Website
Implementing rich snippets in any website requires the use of structured data markup or Schema. This can be done manually, but there are also many tools available that can help automate the process. Structured Data Markup Helper is a free tool that can be used to add structured data markup to your website. The form for generating the structured data is super simple to use.
You can generate rich snippets for the following:
Articles
Events
Restaurants
Book Reviews
Job Postings
Products
Software Application
Datasets
Local Businesses
Question and Answer Page
TV Episodes
The most popular methods of adding structured data that can be used for the implementation of rich snippets are JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa. If you use JSON-LD, it is lightweight code-wise.
How to Create Rich Snippets for WordPress
Because WordPress powered over 43% of websites that are online, as of 2023, it’s possible that you, the reader, might even be using it. If so, then this part of the article is just for you.
Now, you can manually add some structured data to your own theme files. However, there are some plugins that would help. Most SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath SEO can content block support for different structured data. They also have add-ons for local businesses, reviews for products, and much more.
Furthermore, a couple handy structured data elements that Yoast SEO provides is for FAQs and How-to articles. When you select the blocks for Yoast SEO, you can enter the question, answer, and even add an image. This block has the built in structured data that will let Google and other search engines know what it is and how to handle it in terms of how your page’s SERPs will appear.
Both of these plugins have compatibility and options to add structured data with other plugins, like ones for recipes, events, page builders, ecommerce and much more. Please note that some plugins may be free and some may require you to buy. However, if you’re wanting to optimize your site and let Google know how to handle your content, then making sure you have rich snippets is important.
“I added rich snippets to my site, but it’s not showing up in my Google search results?”
This does happen, and you probably wonder if you create rich snippets for a website and this happens, if it was worth the time spent. Well, you’ve done the right thing by taking the time to get rich snippets up on your site. When you’ve made changes like this to your site:
Did you re-submit your website’s sitemap to Google Search Console?
Do your pages using the rich snippets have substantial content that Google would consider of value when indexing?
Are the snippets added correctly?
Did you re-submit your website’s sitemap to Google Search Console?
When you create rich snippets for a website, and then apply them, you need to let Google Search Console know. As a note, if you’ve not added your site to Google Search Console, you should do that as soon as possible. Google Search Console is a valuable tool and the fastest way to get Google Search’s spider to crawl your website. If you don’t, you’re just waiting until the next time Google will naturally crawl your site.
Do your pages using the rich snippets have substantial content that Google would consider of value when indexing?
If your pages or in some cases, blog posts have rich snippets, but very little content, Google may decide not to award any rich snippet features to your search results. It’s important that your site adds value where other sites don’t. Not all websites have rich snippets or structured data, but some sites have more well-rounded content that is unique and people will find of value to them.
For example, if you sell products and have the structured data markup to tell Google to add rich snippets for price, reviews, and more, then make sure your product’s description is well written.
Are the snippets added correctly?
Whether you have a static HTML site or use a content management system powered by PHP, it may be possible that either you added the code wrong, or there’s some conflict. It’s important to troubleshoot the issue and fix it. You can check to see if the Schema is working right in the Schema Markup testing tool. There’s a test for both rich snippets, and to validate structured data markup.
As a note, adding rich snippets is more like a suggestion, not a guarantee. Google ultimately decides whether your entire site or your individual pages with structured data markup should have rich snippets in the SERPs.
