How to use rich snippets in your WordPress website and why it is important?

Rich snippets

Being an online business, it is always a desire to rank high and get the most traffic from the business keywords. Getting ranked in SERP is one thing but are you getting enough clicks to your website? To make yours visitors click your website depends on how good you represent yourself in the small portion of the SERP. That small area is called Snippet. But what do rich snippets imply in the SERPs?

As it is never too late, you must shift to represent your website with rich snippets in SERP than to represent with simple text e.g a title, website URL and small description about your website.

As Google is updating its features, are you utilizing them smartly?

Since 2014 the number of the website who have shifted themselves to rich snippets or featured snippets is eye-opening.

According to HubSpot research, they got 2X more traffic from the web pages which have been featured in Google SERP.

How do rich snippets help increase CTR?

Rich snippets help you define important and precise information from your website to display in SERP.

• Due to interactive nature of snippets, it is likely to display a photo, rating stars, price, event dates, etc. in search result snippets of your website.
• With the help of snippets, a visitor will likely to see well descriptive information in the Search engine snippets and likely to click on your website link.
• Above all, it also helps Facebook to display information about your website when it is shared on the social media channel.

As in answers to the search query, visitors will be seeing the answer to their questions in a nutshell and this will increase the probability to get a click on your website link in SERP.

Examples of rich snippets covering the content types

Rich Snippet of Recipes: 

It is important to use rich snippets for your recipes. While adding it one can include the information like preparation and cooking time, nutritional values and reviews and ratings about the recipe.

Rich snippets of events:

This snippet is used to focus on the events which may be organized locally or at many locations. The information this snippet may take is Date, Event name and Venue.

Rich Snippet for Products:

It is helpful to attract visitors to your website with the help of this snippet type to show price, availability status, rating and review about the product.

Reviews and Rating rich snippet:

The most attracting part of the rich snippet is to display review and rating section for anything it is used for. This gives firsthand knowledge about the product and helps visitor decide to proceed with the best available result.

Rich snippets for Software applications: A webpage which is about some software, especially mobile apps, should use this snippet to standout in the SERP.

Rich snippets for Videos:

Usually, videos created to describe a product or service are displayed in a rich snippet. The information that is contained in this snippet is a thumbnail, duration, description, and much more.
Use snippet plugin for your WordPress website

Adding these snippets to your WordPress website manually or by coding will be very difficult being a new user. It is highly recommended to use a plugin to add the snippets. It will increase the productivity and save you from codding hassle. By the time you may find many plugins which can help you add snippets. We recommend All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin as it is free and also provide great ease of use.

Install the plugin and then go to Rich Snippets icon in the left side menu in your WordPress admin panel for details available for all types of content.

While you are editing a post or creating a new post, you can see the plugin above the fold of your text editor to simply add the appropriate rich snippets. Follow the instructions and then publish it once done.

At last but not least, visit Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to see how the URL looks like with the rich snippets. Either paste the markup in the toolbox or click on the fetch URL link to enter a URL. To let Google’s Structured Data Testing tool review the markup click on validate button.

Good Luck.

It is important to note that adding rich snippets or featured snippets are the elements of on-site optimization and should be considered as part of it. If you have applied snippets to your website, what method did you apply?