It’s not enough for a website to just rank well in organic results. In today’s world where the competition is tough when it comes to performing well in search engine results pages (SERP), you need to rely on different tools for your website to stand out and to be on top of different SERPs. SEO and paid results are not enough these days if you want your website to reach a lot of potential customers and to have a high percentage of conversion.
Google tools help your search engine results stand out by helping you leverage SERP features. These tools help you sharpen your SEO. They help you identify data on your website that is valuable to semantic search and search engines.
A rich snippet is the structured data markup that can be added to existing HTML of websites to allow search engines to have a grasp and better understanding of the information available on each web page. Normally, the search engine displays the title of the website, the URL, and the meta description of a webpage. When a rich snippet is added, more information is displayed regarding the actual result. The search engines can show whether the result is a person, a business, a product, a review, or something else.
Here are some of the SERP rich snippets that can make your SERP results stand out:
- Video snippet
If you want your video to appear as a snippet on SERPs, have your video hosted on YouTube. Provide details in the video such as a description, upload date, duration of the video, and thumbnail URL. Video results can appear in search engines as thumbnails and they are usually connected to a specific keyword.
- Review snippet
Reviews usually receive higher click-through rates compared to other search results that don’t have them. They usually appear in search engines as stars and they are shown for recipes, products, and other related items. They appear below the title and the URL. In order to use review snippets, you would need to implement schema.org and abide by the rules of the search engines.
- Knowledge panel
A knowledge panel shows detailed and broad information on famous people, places, movies, businesses, etc. The information may be gathered from several trusted sources and they normally appear on the right side of the search results on desktop and on the top of results for mobile. The type of information included is powered by the Knowledge Graph of Google.
- Local pack
A local pack is for doing local searches. These local searches include a location or business name or searches with local intent. The local pack includes a map with different location pins and the top three locations. Once you click on the map, it will show more locations. If you click one location, it will display a knowledge panel.
If you want your business to appear in the local pack, you need to optimize your Google My Business Page.
- Top stories
Top stories are displayed based on the result of a news search query. The top three stories that are most updated and relevant are the ones that appear in SERPs. If you want your website to appear on top stories, your articles need to have consistent, updated, and time-sensitive information.
- Image pack
Image packs appear on top of SERPs if certain keywords that are entered in the search query generate specific images or texts. In order for your website to appear in an image pack, you need to optimize the images on your website for relevant and related keywords.
- Sitelinks
Sitelinks adds important links to your website that appear below your search result in order to boost your current listing. If you are to use site links, make sure that you have a strong schema markup and internal linking structure on your website.
