Let’s face the facts: Being ranked high in search engine results pages (SERPs) is nice but more often than not are no longer enough to ensure a successful online marketing effort. RICH SNIPPETS is a design which provides the searcher with more useful and informative search results. Rich snippets are part of increasingly enhanced SERPs designed to help users make decisions before they click.

Webmasters have a unique way of understanding web pages and its content. Though rich snippets can take many forms, it is usually in a form of structured content (to provide more information about the page and business) . Structured content can be anything from a business listing or review to product, people or event information.

Rich snippets allow webmasters to label key part of the information.

The labels make it clear that each denominated section of text represents a particular thing.

Where can Rich snippets appear ?

For marketers, it is important that they include rich snippets on their websites; because, only a text looks boring. The eye is drawn to search listings that look different (aesthetically pleasing layouts attract more attention). Rich snippets help you stand out in competition. Therefore, visual clues and images break-up the line of generic text. As a result your CTR will go staggeringly high, and this will bring you more qualified visitors, and that is, after all, what SEO is all about!

Following are the benefits of rich snippets:

Improve Click Through Rate (CTRs).

Everyone knows images help to get more attention than just normal text. The visual queues and images break up the lines of generic text and set the search results at the top.

Competitive Edge.

A lot of websites still have not made use marked up data. Including rich snippets in their text will give them a competitive edge over other by bringing in more number of qualified visitors.

Increase Conversion Rates

Aesthetically designed layout which includes stars (reviews), image (author, product) attracts users as compared to normal text. Rich snippets, help in bringing users to the site which in turn, increases conversion rates.

Draws User’s Attention to Your Relevant Result

As Google accepts microdata, use of rich snippets will call the attention of the user to your web page with information relevant to their query.

Provides an Instant Call To Action

Rich snippets is beneficial to your online business as it provides an instant call to action by including relevant terms in the search query.

Establish Trust and Authority

Use of rich snippets increase transparency between the author (author’s image, name and link to other articles being displayed ) and users. This not only increases CTR but also creates a feeling of trust and authority, by directly connecting the user to marketers.

We have already started implementing Rich snippets in all our clients websites.

Here is how we implement rich snippets: –

• We draw user attention to relevant page results by highlighting stars.
• We also add reviews which provides an instant call to action by increasing terms in the search query.
• We also show profiles of owners which in turn creates a feeling of trust and authority by allowing transparency.
• We add breadcrumbs  to improve your website navigation. It also lessens the Bounce rate and increases CTR.

Hence, as the name suggests, rich snippets provide very coordinated information. But despite their tiny stature, they can be extremely helpful to website publishers as it includes labels within the source code, helping the search engine to make more sense of the page at hand. In a nutshell, rich snippets will prove beneficial to the webmasters in terms of traffic increases and give users a better idea of what is on a page, thus providing an improved browser experience and creating an overall better World Wide Web.

Stay tuned for more developments in Rich Snippets throughout the year!