Conveying uniqueness of your business website in terms of products, services and information it has on offer as well as underlining its value to prospects requires a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy. Pushing your pages up the search engine ladder, even while making them reader-friendly is a challenging task. However, there are certain techniques that can help you in the process.
Beyond greatly improving your site pages presentation in Google search results, rich snippets allow users to find them while referencing a local place. They give site owners the scope to format visually-interesting product pages, reviews, and contact information for inclusion in the relevant search results snippets.
Making your pages relevant to local search results
By employing structured markup for describing a business, corporate entity or online B2B organization, owners not only enhance the Web experience by making it convenient to recognize relevant references to specific places but also help the search engine surface your resource in local search results. Here is how you can consider optimizing your site or pages for local search results:
You can drop a clear hint about your content so that Google Maps/ Images/ Local Search exactly know who you’re and what kind of content you have on offer in case additional opportunities exist to draw the prospect’s attention to your site. In this context, structured markup can come in handy. It’s a way to annotate information already there on your site to help a range of Google properties grasp information more correctly.
Imagine you’ve restaurant review on your page. Then you denote in your HTML its name, address, phone number etc along with the restaurant’s rating, and the review description. People can read and follow this information, but it may appear to be nothing but just strings of unstructured text to a computer. However, with structured markup (Microdata, Microformats, RDFa) you can opt to label each piece of text to make it amply clear a certain type of data that represents (for example, a business name, address, a review rating etc).
This is accomplished by adding HTML tags, which allow computers to fathom the data. They don’t have any effect on the appearance of your site pages. Google and other services, which look at that HTML, can take a clue from these tags for a better understanding of the individual elements referenced on any page.
An explanatory note on Google Maps explains how structured markup can play an important role in helping local search results: “In an endeavor to organize the whole world’s information geographically, Google always strives for the best possible sources about any place. But to find those pages that specifically mention the business, it must understand any reference to the particular business sans the convenience of the Web’s unambiguous and uniform system of hyperlinks. Your addition of structured markup helps in resolving ambiguities by clarifying that you’re in fact referencing a business, and also a very specific location. While annotating reviews, you also clarify the text that corresponds to the particular business’s review.”
To conclude, it is vital to make use of structured markup in order to let Google easily identify the places mentioned on a website. If it contains reviews or other user-driven information, the structured markup can help precisely correlate your product/service pages with the place mentioned.
