A study revealed that almost 35% of all online Search starts on Google.

Therefore, as an e-commerce website offering B2B or B2C product or service, it is imperative to appear on this behemoth search engine to drive traffic and boost sales.

Have you noticed those fancy looking results that appear for different search queries?

Rich Snippets- an amazing feature by Google makes you stand out from your competitors on the search engine. These are also known as Schema Markup that helps to

It helps increase visibility, improves the click-through rate and boosts sale.

These will go a long way and help you to sell more products to potential customers.

For any e-commerce brand, whether B2B or B2C, rich snippets are essential. It helps any brand that is struggling to grab the attention of customers on the search engine.

Does it affect your ranking?

A ‘sneak preview’ based on the page content of a website helps customers to find exactly what they are looking for.

The contents of the website are the deciding factor and based on that, extra information such as reviews, ratings, site navigation breadcrumbs, event information, product details, etc.

Although it does not affect your website’s ranking directly on the search engine, but it definitely makes your page easy to index on Google with targeted and accurate metadata.

Rich snippets actually help to multiply visitors. Very often, it is seen that a Google search leads to a SERP with minimal information. Therefore, any visitor would get a vague idea as to whether the listing matches their search criteria when they click through.

When they visit a site and find it irrelevant or not having the exact information they are looking for, they will bounce back to the search engine and search again. This will affect the performance of your website.

Rich snippets provide information that is more exact and improves the way the user sees it on search results. This definitely has indirect SEO benefits and has a positive impact on your site. Users would click on a site that displays social poof like reviews, ratings rather than one without! In fact, a study has revealed that 90% users are highly influenced by online reviews. Therefore, the click-through rate of your site shoots up.

Snippet components

• Standard snippets mostly consist of the stored metadata, description, title and the cached URL of a page. However, there are restrictions put on by Google when it comes to the length of the URL and the number of characters in the title and description. Google cuts off the snippet and auto-generates a snippet from the available content. However, there is no guarantee that Google will display the exiting metadata even though it complies with standard SEO rules. At times, Google displays a snippet based on the search query.

Google highlights any snippet that has the same search terms keyed in by a user.  This helps the user to identify the pages that have similar keywords and enhances the browsing experience.

• Rich snippets contain additional elements like ratings, reviews, pictures, links, prices etc.

Adding rich snippets to website

The information that is required to generate rich snippet in the search result is stored by HTML mark up in the source code of a page. These are an advanced form of snippets and require additional formatting in the source code. Marking up the pages of your website with structured data helps Google to identify certain types of elements and display them in a search result as a rich snippet.

The search engine crawls through these structured data and displays relevant rich snippets in the search results.

The markup languages supported by Google are microdata, microformats, and RDFa.

You can determine the various important and relevant HTML tags for your website by using Schema.org, which is a collection of rich snippets. You can then structure that data accordingly.

Useful tools by Google to add rich snippets

It is not always easy to markup structured data to a website. These tools can be useful in this process

• Structured Data Report offered by Google search console, helps to identify the structured data on your site. It also checks for errors if there are any, gives insight and offers advice on fixing it.
• Data highlighter allows you to tag relevant and important data fields by highlighting it. This, in turn, enables Google to understand the structured data on your site and displays it better on SERPs in the form of rich snippets.
• Structured Data Testing Tool enables webmasters to develop, test & modify structured markup. The ‘Fetch URL’ functionality is useful in testing existing structured data markup in a given URL or the code snippet to test the markup code.

Data types supported by Google

Google can integrate rich snippet for the following data types:

• Products
• Reviews with ratings
• Prices
• Availability
• Recipes
• Events
• Organizations
• Music
• Copyright information
• Videos

What can you expect after incorporating rich snippets?

Google analyses and assess the markup before displaying which might take a couple of weeks after implementation.

After repeated analysis, the snippets initially show up for a few pages. This goes on for some time.

Temporary rich snippets for your entire site show up after Google’s thorough analysis and assessment for errors.

Google can penalize you for incorrectly using Rich Snippets. Be careful and ethical in your implementation.

Rich snippets enhance the relevance of your results, improves user experience with better click-through rate and direct call-to-action.

Adding rich snippet ensures that customers get your correct business detail.

Whether you are a B2B or B2C business owner, manage your brand’s image and popularity with eye-catching search query result. Attract users, to click on the search engine listing, so that you can pitch your product or service to larger audience base.

Source:

https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/exemption-requests

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6280012?hl=en