How to Create Rich Snippets for a Website

Rich snippets, what are those? Did you know they could help benefit your site’s search results? In this article, you can learn all about this, as well as how to create rich snippets for a website.

Rich snippets are additional information that appear alongside the title and meta description of a webpage in the search engine result pages (SERPs). These pieces of additional information allow users to have more accurate search results. In fact, rich snippets can be a myriad of content types like images, pricing, reviews, videos, and more. This additional information, say like a review, can help a user know what product or service might be best for them.

Here are some ways that rich snippets can benefit your website:

• Increase your website’s conversion rate
• Drive more traffic to your website

Increase your website’s conversion rate

Rich snippets are important because they can help with increasing your website’s conversion rate. A website conversion rate is basically a way to determine if a marketing campaign is performing well or not. You can certainly apply this conversion rate to whether your search results are performing well.

With the rich snippets, they make your search result look more visually appealing. When using rich snippets right, you could stand out from the other search results, or your immediate competition.

Here’s an example of a HostAdvice Review of Verpex in the search results.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Now that you have some background on structured data markup, as well as how to create rich snippets for a website, it’s time to implement it to yours. Go through your web site page-by-page and analyze what you need. Make sure to bookmark the Google Structured Data generator tool to help you. Good luck!