How Snippets Can Make Your Listing Jump Out of the Page!
Your potential customers are most likely to click on search results that have pictures than those that don't. Apart from pictures, star ratings and videos also play a significant role in the amount of clicks that a search engine result gets. Part of this is due to the fact that the search engine Google has transformed dramatically in the past few years, with search results becoming more colorful with the help of images and videos being used, along with the search engine results.
My gripe on this matter is that even with the obvious benefits of including rich snippets in a marketing website -- such as highlighting a company's name and logo to increase CTR (click through rate) -- bizarrely, many business owners and webmasters choose not to enable them on their websites, leaving that to the mercy of Google. For all those who are unaware, rich snippets are essential when it comes to inbound marketing because it provides a sight-stop on your search engine link. Apart from that, it also boosts a website's listings from a Google perspective.
What are Rich Snippets?
Rich snippets are a kind of micro-data which are used to provide additional information along with the address of the website. These HTML coded bits of information on the contents of a particular website make it easier for Google bots to identify and comprehend the website before having them placed on the search engine results page.
For e-commerce websites, Google displays information such as product line, their price and customer reviews (the five star reviews that you often see next to a search engine results). All this provides additional information on the search engine results page which a searcher might be looking for without them having to click on the website. While the normal search snippet provides product information such as production description, rich snippets provide star reviews and additional information like, product availability, price, etc.
How to Install Rich Snippets:
So, how do you install rich snippets? The following are some of the ways in which one can implement rich snippets without quadrupling the amount of time it takes to write content for a marketing website.
•Go to the HTML code of the page in which you would like to insert the rich snippets to.
•Adding the micro data is a very important part of having rich snippets. There are different types of micro-data that one can add according to the page's requirements. You can markup reviews, people, events, location, recipes,products, organizations etc. Google gives a detailed tutoring on how this can be done here.
•Finally, performing regular tests and updates on the rich snippets is crucial to make sure you have added the right micro-data which is readable by the Google bots. You can test that by using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool which is located here.
Three Benefits of Using Rich Snippets:
Some of the additional benefits of using rich snippets are:
•Gain more search engine real estate
•Gets a website indexed quicker
•Enables links to stand out
Bottom Line:
No matter what sort of website you are running, having a clear idea of what Google really wants will give you the power to customize your webpage's code accordingly. The bottom line is that you want your customers to know that your product or service is of superior quality, upfront. Using rich snippets can do just that for your e-commerce website as well as for you business, giving your potential customer every reason to click on your website instead of the competitor's.