Rich snippets, schema tagging, and why your business needs them
Rich snippets and schema tagging are one of the best ways to enhance your results on Google. With so many different result types now returning within the google search engine results pages (SERPS), businesses have a great opportunity to output their information for users in a variety of formats. To do this, your content needs to be tagged in a particular way, so that search engines like Google can format the content and include it in the appropriate manner within their index. This is where structured markup and schema tagging come into play.
Google is becoming increasingly suited to not just providing search results, but also for answering queries in the most helpful way, often not requiring the user to leave the search page at all and providing all the answers instantaneously. That’s why it’s now more important than ever to make sure your content is search engine optimised – and to make sure that your business or content is formatted for rich snippets.
What is schema tagging?
Schema tagging is the tagging of different content types within your landing pages that you want Google to index and display within their results pages. To schema tag content, you need to have some schema tag templates, and then you need to be able to embed these templates within the code of your landing pages (you might need your developers to help you with this). The templates can be found here for a variety of different types of content, including category page schema, business schema, location schema, and product schema.
Google provides a breakdown of what structured data markup is and how you can implement it.
Here we see that a URL from The Guardian has been tagged as @type Live Blog Posting. This means a headline can be tagged, date published, publisher, etc. This information will show up as a featured snippet, which differs slightly to a rich result.
What are rich snippets?
If you’ve used Google before, then you’ll be familiar with rich snippets. They appear in most searches, and as Google continues its shift towards a user focused experience, we’re likely to see them even more frequently in the future. Rich snippets augment the results that appear on your results page. They add little bits of useful information to help you choose which link to open and can also help take you to specific sections of a page to skip ahead to the bit you need.
Here we see rich snippets, where extra information is provided alongside the search result, such as ratings, cooking time, box office revenue, and related pages from the site.
How do rich snippets benefit your B2B SEO strategy?
What types of rich results are there that a website can rank for in Google
Google’s search gallery has a wide variety of result types now that a website can expose its content through for end users. This includes
- Courses
- FAQs
- Events
- Products
- Recipes
- Reviews
- Video
When you are planning your onsite content strategy, you should consider which rich result types would be of benefit to your end users, and then consider how you can integrate these within the content you are planning to produce on your website. By doing this, you can aid your end users in getting the information they require to be able to fulfil their need.
Ensuring that your sites are set up for rich snippets, by using the Structured Data Markup Helper, you can ensure that your results on the Google results page are more useful for users.
Rich snippets that help your ecommerce strategy
If you’re running an ecommerce business, you’ll want to show your potential customers as much information as possible about your products and the service they can expect if they transact with you. Therefore, it’s great to use product schema to mark up your products so that they can appear within the SERPs, and then also consider review snippets being integrated to demonstrate how happy your customers are with your service.
This type of integration would allow you to maximise your exposure within the results so that users can get an even better idea of your ecommerce business before they click through.
Rich snippets that help your b2b business strategy
B2B buyers require a lot more information before they make a commitment to a supplier. For this reason, it’s great to schema tag FAQs and articles that can appear directly in Google. Thinking about your target audience’s pain-point or use case will help you to ideate content that you can tag using schema and then output within the SERPS.
Conclusion
Using schema tagging to generate rich snippets is beneficial for the end user of a search engine, and for driving traffic to your site. Rich snippets are a way of making sure all the relevant information that can be displayed on the results page shows up efficiently within Google’s Index. This can then help to get featured results packs from Google that displays your site at the top of search engines with even more information. When considering your content strategy for the future, it’s worthwhile investing some time into considering the opportunities rich snippets present for your business and how you can integrate these within your plans ahead.
