We take a look at rich snippets and how they can help your website's SEO.

Beyond Snippets: create a virtuous circle with Rich Snippets

Well-known to webdesigners and SEOs alike, “Title” and “Description” Snippets are essential to a website’s readability and form the basis of SEO. They need to be optimized with measure and precision, both with regard to the algorithm and for visitors, as they are the first elements that will both promote a site’s SEO and encourage web users to visit it.
These titles and descriptions must therefore be thought out and written as a subtle balance that aims to seduce the search engine bots as well as potential visitors. But as essential as these Snippets are, it’s possible to go one step further thanks to their enhanced version, dubbed Rich Snippets, which has today become an essential part of any SEO strategy.

Enhanced visibility thanks to structured data

Rich Snippets, or structured data, are additional information about your content and activities displayed in SERPs: stars or ratings, product prices, breadcrumb trail, event dates or even internal search field.
Implemented since 2009 through the <a class=”c-link c-link–secondary” href=”http://schema.org/”>Schema.org</a> protocol shared by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, they enable HTML tagging of a wide range of information on your site, highlighting the content most relevant to the user’s search. In so doing, they encourage qualitative clicks, and are therefore the key to …

Relevant SEO that qualifies your audience

This is the key, because climbing the SERPs is not an end in itself: once you’re well positioned, to consolidate your presence and benefit as much as possible from it, Internet users need to find the answers to the questions they’re asking in your links, and for this to happen, these links need to respond as closely as possible to their search. Rich Snippets, if well designed, respond exactly to this need to match queries and results.
Google’s teams keep telling webmasters to “create rich content and you’ll rank well”. We would add: present your content in a relevant and optimized way and your links will not only be more, but also better clicked.

A quality audience, which improves your SEO

Your links will be visited more often, but above all they’ll be clicked by qualified visitors who’ll find content on your site that matches their search. Content they’ll take the time to read in detail, thus lowering your bounce rate, improving your trustrank and consequently your SEO.
You’re now in the virtuous circle of Rich Snippets, better and better positioned, more and more visited, earning the trust of visitors and search engines alike.

Selective display

As with Sitelinks, a site’s internal links sometimes presented below the description in SERPs, the display of Rich Snippets isn’t automatic and will depend on many factors, some of which it’s impossible to intervene in (not least the competition, as Google doesn’t want too many sites to display Rich Snippets on the same results page). This makes it all the more important to optimize Rich Snippets in order to maximize the chances of seeing them appear, on your main queries as well as on the long tail, and on desktop as well as on mobile (the mobile version requiring differentiated optimization).

Some tricky coding

Technically, parameterization is best done in HTML code using JSON-LD, RDFa and microdata microformats. These three microformats are compatible with each other and, when added to HTML code, can be used to implement the data and information to be transmitted to robots. Once microformatting has been carried out, it is recommended to check that it has been correctly taken into account by the engine via Google’s Search Console and the structured data test tool.

Snippets, more Snippets

Other Snippets have emerged in recent years, notably Featured Snippets (grey box at top of page), over which webmasters currently have no direct influence, and Rich Cards, image-based carousels that are tagged along the same lines as Rich Snippets, but so far only show cooking recipes and movie reviews, and are only visible on mobile. So today they’re only worth working on if you’re concerned with these areas of activity.

Conclusion: enrich your Snippets

The icing on the cake a few years ago, Rich Snippets are becoming one of the keystones of website optimization, both in terms of SEO and audience qualification, the two being increasingly intertwined.
Today, it’s essential to integrate them into your visibility strategy and to set them up with the utmost care, with a view to relevance that will sustainably boost your positioning in the SERPs.

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