Make your blog stand out in Google with Rich Snippets

The search engine Google accounts for a large proportion of visitors to your website. It is therefore very important to ensure that you have properly entered all SEO (Search Engine Optimization) information, such as Metadata, Open Graph data, to improve the findability and search results of your website. But there is more: Rich Snippets!

A random search in Google yields a collection of results and links:

Example of a search result in Google

With Rich Snippets, extra information can be added to your search result. There are currently a number of types of snippets available:

• Articles
• Books
• Course
• Event
• Product
• Recipe
• Review

What are Rich Snippets?

Google always tries to offer visitors the most relevant search results possible. They do this based on all the data available about a website. That is, on the one hand, the content itself, but also metadata that says something about the page. Through Rich Snippets, they try to make the metadata insightful.

Reviews

In the case of reviews, they immediately show some star ratings.

Example of Rich Snippet for reviews

Events

For events, the date and time are of course very important. You do not only provide these to Google as text, but preferably also in the metadata. This allows Google to make smarter use of all available data.

For events, the correct data for the Rich Snippet has been included for some time:

Example of Rich Snippet for events

Event overview in Google

So with the metadata, Google could already compile its own getaway agenda... And sometimes they already do:

Example of using date metadata in Google

Rich Snippets for Blogs

For blog articles, we have also made the data for the Rich Snippets available. This Article Rich Snippet is now available for all written blog articles.

This gives Google the ability to show a richer view of the blog article. It is (unfortunately) up to Google whether the rich view is shown (or not).

News overview in Google

Example of Rich Snippet for news articles

Personally, we have not often seen Rich Snippets "in the wild" for blog articles. Often, news articles are shown in a more prominent tile, but blog articles are not (yet). The impact and influence of bloggers and influencers is growing, so we expect Google to give more weight to blog articles as well.

Example of Rich Snippet for blog articles on mobile and desktop

In the mobile Google Search App, more rich results are shown than on a desktop computer. Perhaps Google will do more for blog content in the future, so you will already be ready!

Want to see for yourself if your pages are ready for Rich Snippets? Then use Google's structured data testing tool.