What Are Google Rich Results?
Simply put, a rich results is a special experience or link that Google places in their search results beyond the standard SERP link for a website. Rich results can be carousels, images, links, or any other non-textual elements. These results can greatly improve your overall website visits and traffic from Google SERPs. Note that Google rich Results used to be called Google Cards, and then Google Rich Snippets, and is now called Google Rich Results. Tomorrow… maybe something else. Google loves to change names of things.
Google Structured Data:
In Google’s own words…
“Rich results are experiences on Google Search that go beyond the standard blue link. They’re powered by structured data and can include carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. Over the last couple years we’ve developed the Rich Results Test to help you test your structured data and preview your rich results.”
Google Structured Data is designed to give the Google search engine an idea of exactly what your website is about. More specifically, what each individual page is about. For example, if you are posting a recipe for mom’s chicken soup. For Google to use this recipe as a Google Rich Result, it would need to see certain criteria such as ingredients, cooking time, temperature, calories, and so on. Your next page may not be a recipe however. Defining the structured data or schema is very important if you want to rank well, and get those little extras in the rich results. Google suggests that you read their docs on Structured Data Markup In Google Search. It can prove helpful in better understanding what they like to see in schema/structured data. It is important to note that when working with structured data and Google, that you follow the Google documentation on it as opposed to the schema.org docs. Schema.org is often used by SEO professionals when writing markups and the two should not be confused.
Ryan Levering, a software engineer at Google Search, breaks down structured data further:
Google Rich Result Types
There are currently 35 different rich results types according to the Google Search Structured Data Page. They are as follows:
- Article
- Book Actions
- Breadcrumb
- Carousel
- Course Info
- Course List
- Dataset
- Discussion Forum
- Education Q&A
- Employer Aggregate Rating
- Estimated Salary
- Event
- Fact Check
- FAQ
- Home Activity
- Image Metadata
- Job Posting
- Learning Video
- Local Business
- Math Solver
- Movie
- Organization
- Practice Problem
- Product
- Profile Page
- Q&A
- Recipe
- Review Snippet
- Sitelink Search Box
- Software App
- Speakable
- Subscription and Paywalled Content
- Vacation Rental
- Vehicle Listing
- Video
There is a huge benefit from having you website come up on Google Rich Results. I have also found from experience that the benefit is almost immediate, depending on what industry you are in. I was working for a client in the vaping industry that wanted to rank at the top of Google for individual vape flavors. We created individual “flavor” landing pages based on using a tag system and created bullet points within each.
We used almost 1100 different flavors, and it ultimately resulted in 653 Google Rich Snippets (as it was named at the time). The overall traffic for the two websites that we used these methods for doubled almost overnight The one thing that you always need to keep in mind is that you need to be willing to try doing things that you know that your competition is not doing. In this case, the results stood out and made a significant impact on website traffic and the overall profitability of the company. Funny enough, as you can see in the graphic above, Google was also allowing icons at the time, so we used those in all of the flavors and product pages that we could at the time. This stood out as well.
A few years earlier I was working with another vape company and through the course of working on their SEO, we established flavor landing pages through Shopify’s collection pages. Google has continued to use these pages in different ways on their SERPs. Here is yet another example of what the search of custard vape juice flavors” produces.
We used almost 1100 different flavors, and it ultimately resulted in 653 Google Rich Snippets (as it was named at the time). The overall traffic for the two websites that we used these methods for doubled almost overnight The one thing that you always need to keep in mind is that you need to be willing to try doing things that you know that your competition is not doing. In this case, the results stood out and made a significant impact on website traffic and the overall profitability of the company. Funny enough, as you can see in the graphic above, Google was also allowing icons at the time, so we used those in all of the flavors and product pages that we could at the time. This stood out as well.
A few years earlier I was working with another vape company and through the course of working on their SEO, we established flavor landing pages through Shopify’s collection pages. Google has continued to use these pages in different ways on their SERPs. Here is yet another example of what the search of custard vape juice flavors” produces.
In this example, Google used the page to answer questions about the particular line of products. The method in which we created the content to produce these results was so successful that even after working with both clients, they still both use these methods for content and SEO development.
Overall, at the time working with both of these companies, there was very little SEO being done on any vape websites. I took advantage of the dynamically created collections templates that Shopify uses along with the tag system. So pages were dynamically created using a specific flavor tag (for example “custard”), and content was created around “custard” with basic descriptions, and then each collection page included the products tagged with “custard” below and sorted by best selling. Over time, we created more than 5000 dynamically created collections and even had to ask Shopify to increase the amount of collections available to us. The campaign was highly successful.
With all of the changes that Google continue to make to their SERPs, it creates much more of a need to pivot with them. Right now, you can rank #3 or #4 in the SERPs on Google and find yourself on the bottom fold of the results page. They now have such a significant amount of other content such as rich results, sponsored ads, etc. showing up around and often before the SERPs that it really has become much more difficult to see what you actually searched for unless you are appearing in the Google Rich Results.
So, you need to make sure that you have your website optimized for structured data. If you are using WordPress, there are a ton of plugins to help. If you are using Shopify or Magento, there are third part apps to help. I believe that most other providers also have apps or plugins to help with this process. If they don’t I highly suggest you start doing it manually.
From there, develop a strategy. Then be consistent with that strategy and over time, it will pay off.
