Rich snippets are most often seen on a Google search page, alerting you to the rating of a restaurant or how long a recipe will take to complete. This contextual enhancement to content marketing might not seem like would be beneficial to your website if you aren’t involved with food, but this structured data can actually help increase the click-through rate on your site while also decreasing the steps on the path to conversion for your customers.

When implementing rich snippets, there’s so much information that you can highlight – so how do you make sure your rich snippets are implemented correctly and you’re getting the most out of them? Over the next couple of articles, I’ll go over my top nine tips for using rich snippets. If you’re completely new to rich snippets, start by learning more about them in my Rich Snippets 101 article.

Get Personal

When looking at Schema.org for the correct entity type to describe your brand, the choices can become overwhelming. However, following that path down “Additional Types” can be hugely rewarding.

For example, House Painter is an entity type. While we can reasonably assume that the content on a house painter’s site would be understood by search engines, the option of this entity ensures some understanding on the part of the search engines. Structured data gives us the tools to speak directly to search engines in a set, established way that we can be sure they understand.

Stick to the Basics

While it might be tempting to assign every rich snippet possible to your website, more isn’t always better with structured data.

Unfortunately, we can’t control what information Google and other search engines decide to display in SERPs. That means that when deciding what to highlight, we need to be focused on the top information that is likely to lead to conversions.

For retail and restaurants, hours and address location are likely to be some of the most important pieces of information for attracting new consumers into the location. Meanwhile, for B2B businesses, the services offered is more likely to be the information needed by a potential customer.

As you decide which information is most important for your business, remember that the information MUST be on the page itself to be included in a rich snippet. For example, if you want to highlight your address, that text needs to already exist on the page.

This is a great time to audit your site’s pages too. If your most important information isn’t already on the page, it’s time to reconsider how you’re presenting your brand and products/services online.

Plan for the Future

While structured data points may not be displayed for search results in your vertical currently, it is important to be ready for it roll out to your industry in the future.

Structured data also provides a way that search engines can better understand the main points of your site. For example, the name of a business can be presented in a way that search engines can understand and relate to. Structured data enables search engines to understand that a paragraph is a review or a specific sentence is about your location, and so on.

So while that information may not present in SERPs, which means you’re not getting higher clickthroughs from the highlighted info, remember that implementing rich snippets helps search engines to even better comprehend your site and its content. It also may not be too long before those SERPs for your industry offer a more enhanced experience. Google’s latest updates to SERPs only show that they want to continue to answer a user’s query straight from the results page itself. (If you haven’t heard about Featured Snippets, learn more about them here.)

Moving Forward

Once you have identified the most important and critical points of information to highlight and have verified that they are on the page (as they should be), you’ll be ready to start coding and implementing on your site.

In the next article, I’ll discuss best practices of adding rich snippets and structured data.

By: Samantha Torres