SEO doesn't need to be complex.
Yes, good SEO takes effort – and websites who make the effort are likely to benefit in the long run – but there are some tools that can boost your site’s organic traffic in incredibly simple ways.
Rich Snippets are a little-known SEO hack that can really boost results for your business in organic search. Best of all, what you need in order to qualify for them is really easy to implement, so if you’re a busy marketer looking for an easy way or driving new customers to your website – this one’s for you.
1. First up, what are Rich Snippets?
Simply put, Rich Snippets are those helpful star ratings you sometimes see under organic search results.
According to Google’s developer site, a Rich Snippet is a short excerpt of a review or rating from a trusted review website, most commonly displayed as an average of the aggregate rating scores from many reviewers.
Basically, when Google finds structured data from your reviews or ratings on your website, they’re able to display your site content as a rich result — which enhances your listings’ appearance in organic search, and tends to drive a lot more traffic.
Here’s an example of Rich Snippets in action:
Islandsurf.com's product pages show up as rich snippet results in organic search
Having their star rating and quantity of reviews visible right in search results helps IslandSurf.com get potential customers to their site faster by removing the need to research their brand reputation.
Before shoppers even click on the link, they know upfront that the business has a solid rating and therefore can be trusted with their hard-earned money. This gives them a better idea of what kind of experience they’ll have with the company, and increases the odds that they’ll click on that result.
In fact, studies show that having Rich Snippets visible on your search listings can drive 20-30% more organic traffic, and generate 677% more revenue from organic traffic.
Now that the SEO value of these rich results is clear, the question becomes —
2. How do I get Rich Snippets on my product pages in organic search?
It’s most common to think of paid listings when you’re thinking about stars showing up in search results, but many people don’t realize that collecting product reviews can help you qualify for Rich Snippets in organic search so you can start driving new customers to your site.
Once you’ve started collecting and displaying product reviews through a product review widget with valid structured data, it’s time to tell Google to re-crawl your product pages.
Depending on how many products you sell on your site, it may make sense to have Google crawl your most popular products first. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
Log in to your Google Search Console and select your website.
In the Inspect any URL in "your site's name" field, enter the URL of the page that contains the TrustBox.
Once the URL data has been retrieved, click Request Indexing.
Repeat this process for all the URLs that contain the same TrustBox.
Google URL inspector
If you get a message that says "URL is not on Google", click the Test Live URL button to find out why Google can't crawl your page.
Once Google has indexed your pages, your review snippets should begin to appear in their search results.
You can also use this handy tool to test your URLs and troubleshoot your results.
3. Getting the most organic traffic out of your Rich Snippets
Once you’ve qualified for Rich Snippets, Google Search Console provides some really helpful tools to give you insight on how well those pages are performing, and help you debug any issues on pages where the reviews aren’t showing in the search results just yet. This can help you be sure you're maximizing driving new customers to your site.
Google's Review Snippet Enhancement Report
The Review Snippet Enhancement Report shows you errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site. It’s extremely helpful in not only identifying errors, but showing you how to fix them so you can enjoy the benefits of review snippets on all of your qualifying pages.
You can also uncover more details about your Rich Snippet performance in Google Search Console’s Performance Report. There, you can uncover how well your Rich Snippets are performing in search in terms of impressions, clicks, and CTR — and delve deeper into even more parameters and metrics.
4. Ready to earn Rich Snippets on your search listings?
The many benefits of Rich Snippets all begin with choosing a trustworthy product review provider with valid structured data. It’s not hard to do — our TrustBox widgets and eCommerce integrations let you make your product review data discoverable to search engines in just a few clicks.
If your review statistics meet Google’s requirements, your product pages will start showing up with star ratings in search results in no time.
Can’t get enough of this stuff? Don’t miss The complete guide to marketing with customer reviews: 2021 update for even more ways to improve your organic search performance with your customer reviews.
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