First, what is a SERP?
SERP is simply an acronym for "Search Engine Results Page", that all-important piece of real estate on Google or Bing. When it comes to SERPs and SEO, content teams have typically been mostly focused on how often and where their content shows up in search. But now they can also focus attention on how content is displayed within these search engine result pages鈥攁nd that鈥檚 where "rich snippets" come into play.
What are rich snippets?
Rich snippets are essentially enhanced search results. We鈥檝e all seen Google playing with how their search results display for years now, from showing images, videos or "snippets" of the content itself, all in an effort to make the experience more engaging and useful. While this is great for the Google user, according to a in 2020, less than a third of Google searches resulted in a click. Google disputes this, and points out that while there may be less clicking, the volume of searches has greatly increased. Either way, the end result is an even more competitive SEO space.
What are the potential questions your customer is going to ask after the first query? Google really begins to reward these content clusters or chains. What are the questions in natural language that your customers are asking? What is their follow up question? Build content for both.
Why are rich snippets important to your SEO efforts?
As we have learned, less and less of Google's search traffic is leading to people clicking and landing on the resulting content. In response, content producers need to leverage every tool at their disposal to enhance SERP positions with structured data and improve Google rankings. This is where rich snippets, or rich results, come into play.
In the realm of SERP optimization, rich snippets serve as a cornerstone for enhancing visibility and driving organic search success. Through rich snippets, there is an opportunity to take up more real estate on those ever-so-valuable SERPs. One clear example by the numbers: whereas a standard organic search result occupies 90 pixels in vertical height on the screen, an FAQ rich-snippet result gets 250 pixels of vertical real estate. Not only is your rich-snippet result more prominent and engaging, its increased size works to further push your competitors below the fold.
How do rich snippets work?
Rich snippets make use of what's known as structured data as defined by . Essentially, adding this structured data to your content simply provides context in an easily digestible format for the Googles and Bings of the world. Google accepts structured data in , , Microdata and RDFa formats, but JSON-LD is clearly the preferred method.
Not every schema defined on is fully . But the list has seen rapid growth over the past few years. Currently Google supports structured data for rich-snippet results of the following schema types:
- Article
- Book
- Breadcrumb
- Carousel
- Course
- Critic Review
- Dataset
- EmployerAggregateRating
- Event
- Fact Check
- FAQ
- Home Activities
- How-to
- Image License
- Job Posting
- Job Training
- Logo
- Math Solvers
- Movie
- Estimated Salary
- Podcast
- Practice Problems
- Product
- Q&A
- Recipe
- Review
- Subscription and Paywall Content
- Video
- WebPage
How does Brightspot support rich snippets for better SEO?
There are several ways Brightspot supports your site's ability to show up in SERPs with rich snippets. If you use Brightspot鈥檚 out-of-the-box front-end solution, a lot of the work is done for you. Brightspot natively outputs structured data in the form of JSON-LD for Article, WebPage, , , Image, Logo and Publisher.
One of Brightspot鈥檚 biggest advantages is its ease of customization and built-in helper classes. In the case of structured data, this involves Brightspot's JSON-LD view model, which expands a content type's JSON-LD output simply by adding annotations within its JAVA view model.
It鈥檚 this flexibility that has enabled Brightspot customers like the to easily implement the for their content, and even take it a bit further to adopt Google鈥檚 Advanced SEO approach to . Healthgrades has adapted their Brightspot application to generate MedicalWebPages that output schemas for Q&A, Drug, FAQ and Video.
