Your website or e-commerce catalog has a lot of data. But your search engine results may suffer from being yet another link in a sea of competitor links. Elevating your results to stand out in the crowd is a great way to drive more business, and rich snippets can help your results shine. Website designers for small business know exactly how valuable rich snippets can be in terms of driving traffic and getting more leads.
Your WordPress or Magento products can use rich snippets to show much more information on a search results page than are typically available. Search engines also love this type of data, as it lets them really get to know your site offerings with discreet sets of information. The more informed a search engine is about your site data, the better, and your rankings will improve due to the enhanced data you are sending to Google, Bing, and other search engine providers.
How can you get this enhanced data on your site?
Rich snippets requires your web developers at Watermelon Web Works to update your websites template files. Any and all relevant data for a given product or post type can be enhanced with this data. What kinds of data are available to become a part of the rich snippet structure?
Events
Events are a common type of website offering. Many sites we host often want to showcase events they are holding and even sell tickets to events directly from the site. Rich snippets can show the date and time of an event, a link to the event location page, address information for displaying map directions, and even sub links to the web page of a speaker at the event. Showing this information on a search result entry gives your potential site visitors all the information they could possibly need to attend, and offers them an easy link to click so they can buy their tickets right away. This lets them get what they want without having to sift through more than one page.
Products
Products usually have all kinds of data that we want to expose, particularly design specs, product images, branding information, reviews, and even star ratings. This is the kind of data people want to see right away, and from a search engine result, you’ve already provided them with much desired information, all they need to do is click through and start adding products to their cart. Showcasing reviews is also a great boon to engage your potential customers, and you can tailor which reviews will best generate excitement for your offerings.
Recipes
If your website offers recipe data (for example, you provide food and beverage products) this is a great way to interact with your potential site visitors. Rich snippet recipes can show all of the recipe data right on the results page, and offer links to products you offer that can get them started.
Videos/Music
If you offer music and/or video products, you can showcase all of that relevant data on your results, including reviews, producer/director information, album and video cover art, and biographical information of artists and actors, and corresponding links to learn more.
People
There is quite a bit of information you can showcase with rich snippets if your site has content for a person, for example, an author. You can showcase any relevant biographical information you wish. You can also couple this with Google+ accounts to leverage even more social media interactivity from their search result.
Implementation of Rich Snippet Data
Implementation is usually done using the microdata markup. This is all outlined in the schema.org website, and allows a multitude of rich data to be formatted for search engine display. Just inform your web developer of what data on your site would be best suited for this rich content, and they can alter your templates accordingly. Further, you can ask the Watermelon Web Works team for a simple site audit, and we can provide you with our best practices approach to including this data throughout your entire site. This is a great way to handle this markup if your site has hundreds, even thousands of pages.
All of this attention to detail will reward you with increased page visits, increased page rank, and attractive information display, all of which translates into happier site visitors, and ultimately better performance amongst your competitors. For a full list of what data is available to showcase, you can check the plethora of available variables on schema.org, or just contact us directly if you would like us to do an analysis.