If you haven’t implemented Google Rich Snippets on your blog, you are missing out any easy opportunity to boost your traffic and revenue. Don’t believe, here’s how Rich Snippets benefit your blog.
Ratings
If you are running a review blog, for incidence, photography or a hotel review site. By implementing a small code or HTML snippet on your page source code, You can display the rating metadata on Search Results page itself. An example of Rating Snippet enabled webpage is illustrated below.
Rating snippet can significantly boost your web traffic, by increasing your Search Engine Page Result CTR. It lures the users into your page result and they are more likely to enter your site, thereby funneling further traffic with existing search engine positions.
Authorship
Google Authorship is a must-have rich snippet for any type of family safe blogs. It allows you to display a close-up photo of the blog author, in the search engine result. If you don’t have it yet, then read our article – How to Implement rel= “author” Code to WordPress.
Wondering how it would affect your traffic? The reason is the same as I’ve mentioned above. It significantly increases the CTR. Don’t be amazed, if your traffic doubles the following day.
Google also added a new metric in determining SERPS, Author Rank. It’s a boon for Google+ publishes. The number of followers, +1s fuel your Author Rank in turn increasing your blog authority. Make sure you only use your real headshot, instead of anime or vector images.
BreadCrumbs
By including a small snippet, you can enable breadcrumbs on your page results. It shows a tree structure of navigation links. To be honest, it may not increase the CTR considerably, but the search users may use it to pick out the best relevant result based on the category breadcrumb.
Product Snippets
If you own an e-commerce site, make sure you implement product snippets. It can surprisingly boost your sales and conversions. There are several sub snippets included in products category like Price, review, rating, Stock availability information (In Stock or Out of Stock), Category etc.
Amazon, is an avid user of Product Snippet. Before I wasn’t into webmaster stuff, I considered Product Snippets as a mark of trust and authority of e-commerce sites.
Make sure to follow the guidelines and don’t abuse the snippets, it could lead to drastic consequences including ban from search results.
In my opinion, the Google Authorship snippet is the most eye grabbing snippet in the Google SERPs. It conveys a sense of trust that the content will be good and informational and is the largest snippet on the SERP, unless you’re in the Google Shopping section of course.