Increasing Search Result Clickthroughs with Rich SnippetsWayne Eaker, Zengenuity @wayneeakerNovember 28, 2012 @ LA2M

TRADITIONAL SEO/SERP

CLICK THROUGH RATE BY SEARCH RESULT POSITION

1: 36.4%2: 12.5%3: 9.5%4: 7.9%5: 6.1%6: 4.1%Source: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-get-more-clicks-with-low-rankings

RICH SNIPPETS

RICH SNIPPETS

RICH SNIPPETS

RICH SNIPPETS

WHY DOES GOOGLE USE RICH SNIPPETS?1. Provide quick answers to simple questions without leaving search page.

2. Improves searcher’s ability to find the “right” page.

3. Searcher’s have better idea what to expect on the destination page before they click.

RICH SNIPPETS

HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?

RICH SNIPPETS

HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?Depends on who you are:

RICH SNIPPETS

HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?Depends on who you are:

For “Big Sites” (Yelp, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon):Google writes custom code to extract relevant information

RICH SNIPPETS

HOW DOES GOOGLE GENERATE RICH SNIPPETS?Depends on who you are:

For “Big Sites” (Yelp, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon):Google writes custom code to extract relevant information

For Everyone Else:Google looks for special machine-readable codes your HTML

...Maybe

RICH SNIPPETS

WHAT ABOUT OTHER SEARCH ENGINES?

Other search engines are not currently displaying rich snippets from website-coded microdata.

However, Microsoft is a partner in the format specification, so it’s possible it may be implemented in Bing at some point.

DATA FORMATS

WHAT TYPE OF MARKUP DOES GOOGLE UNDERSTAND?1. Microdata: http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/• WC3 Proposal• “HTML5”

2. RDFa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa• More complex, more complete• Extensible

3. Microformats: http://microformats.org/• Collection of domain-specific formats• hCard, hCalendar, hRecipe, hReview

EVENT EXAMPLE - WITHOUT MICRODATA

<div> <div>L’Amourita Pizza</div> <div>Reviewed by Ulysses Grant on Jan 6.</div> <div>Delicious, tasty pizza on Eastlake!</div> <div>L'Amourita serves up traditional wood-fired Neapolitan-style pizza, brought to your table promptly and without fuss. An ideal neighborhood pizza joint.</div> <div>Rating: 4.5</div></div>

EVENT EXAMPLE - WITH MICRODATA

<div> <div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Review"> <span itemprop="itemreviewed">L’Amourita Pizza</span> Reviewed by <span itemprop="reviewer">Ulysses Grant</span> on <time itemprop="dtreviewed" datetime="2009-01-06">Jan 6</time>. <span itemprop="summary">Delicious, tasty pizza in Eastlake!</span> <span itemprop="description">L'Amourita serves up traditional wood-fired Neapolitan-style pizza, brought to your table promptly and without fuss. An ideal neighborhood pizza joint.</span> Rating: <span itemprop="rating">4.5</span> </div></div>

LOCATION - GOOGLE PLACES: http://www.google.com/places/

VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK

VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK

VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK

HOW DO YOU SETUP VERIFIED AUTHOR LINK?Basically:1. Set up a Google Plus account.2. Link your blog to the Google Plus profile, with rel=“author” links.3. Link your Google Plus profile to the blog.

Specifically:1. Follow directions here:https://plus.google.com/authorship

BREADCRUMBS

BREADCRUMBS

HOW DO YOU SETUP BREADCRUMBS?Make sure your website urls have consistent hierarchical patterns. For example:

http://zengenuity.comhttp://zengenuity.com/bloghttp://zengenuity.com/blog/201211http://zengenuity.com/blog/201211/week-drupal-november-2-2012

REVIEWS / RATINGS

EVENTS

EVENTS - AGGREGATE

EVENTS - AGGREGATE

PERSON

PERSON

PRODUCT

APP OR SOFTWARE

APP OR SOFTWARE

MUSIC

RECIPES

RICH SNIPPETS - EFFECTIVENESS

DO RICH SNIPPETS WORK?

Hard to find scientific studies of effectiveness

Anecdotally:Verified Author Links:

30% Increase in CTR: http://selnd.com/U153cP 484% Increase in CTR: http://bit.ly/WtDDyh

Recipes:150% Increase in CTR: http://bit.ly/Tj9Nvx

DESKTOP / LAPTOP RICH SNIPPETS

DESKTOP / LAPTOP RICH SNIPPETS

MOBILE RICH SNIPPETS

RICH SNIPPETS - HOW TO ENABLE

HOW DO YOU GET RICH SNIPPETS FOR YOUR SITE?

In simple terms: 1. Put the correct code on your website.2. Verify the code using Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool.3. Make sure Google is indexing your site pages using Google

Webmaster Tools.4. Wait.5. Wait some more. (2 - 8 weeks)6. Check manually in search engine, or with Google Webmaster Tools

or Google Analytics.7. PROFIT!

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS - STRUCTURED DATA

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS - STRUCTURED DATA

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS - AUTHOR STATS

RICH SNIPPET TESTING TOOL http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

RICH SNIPPET TESTING TOOL http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

HOW DO YOU LEARN THE SYNTAX?

Best Place: Google’s page on Rich Snippets:http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170Has examples for every snippet type I showed, in all three markup formats. Easy to understand.

Other Resources:Microdata: http://schema.org/Microformats: http://microformats.org/

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

HOW DO YOU GET RICH SNIPPETS FOR YOUR SITE?

Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/rich-snippetsPlugins for Reviews, Recipes, Events, Author (AuthorSure)

Drupal: Has RDFa support built into Drupal 7Microdata Module: http://drupal.org/project/microdataSchema.org Module: http://drupal.org/project/schemaorgFivestar Module (for Ratings): http://drupal.org/project/fivestar

What Now?

RICH SNIPPETS

QUICK WINS

If you have a local business:Make sure you have a Google Places profile set up.

If you have a blog: Set up Verified Author Links immediately. (only 12% of tech bloggers have done this as of August 2012.) *

Google Webmaster Tools:Register your site with Webmaster Tools so you can track progress.

* Source: http://www.conductor.com/blog/2012/08/how-9-out-of-10-tech-sites-could-improve-their-search-listings-with-one-simple-fix/

RICH SNIPPETS

NEXT STEPS

If you have reviews / ratings on your site: Set up the review format on your site.

If you have events on your site:Set up the event format on your site.

If you have recipes on your site: Set up recipe format on your site. Consider adding star-ratings if you don’t already have them. Make sure you have photos. (and the photos are properly coded to the recipe format)

RICH SNIPPETS

BEYOND THAT

Breadcrumbs:Make sure your URLs follow a natural hierarchical pattern, and there aren’t 404s at some levels of the hierarchy.

Depending your site content:Consider implementing the other formats. Google is less likely to display them, but it can’t hurt.

Questions?Wayne Eaker http://wayneeaker.com/rich-snippetswayne@zengenuity.com@wayneeaker