What are Rich Snippets?

Rich snippets, also known as rich results, are a feature on SERPs that displays extra details about the search result.

Rich snippet for Harvey's burger restaurant business information
Example of a rich snippet when you search for Harvey’s on Google.

This particular rich snippet displays business details such as where it was founded, headquarters, and social profiles.

Some of these features include:

  • ratings
  • review count
  • images
  • videos
  • prices

These rich results are displayed when webmasters include a special code, called structured schema or schema markup, within a web page’s HTML.

Therefore, generating and implementing schema markup for a web page is an aspect of on-page SEO.

Here’s an example of the schema markup used to generate rich results for this article:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "mainEntityOfPage": {
    "@type": "WebPage",
    "@id": "https://searchfreaks.com/on-page/rich-snippets/"
  },
  "headline": "What are Rich Snippets?",
  "description": "Rich snippets, also known as rich results, are a feature on SERPs that displays extra details about the search result. These rich results are displayed when webmasters include a special code, called structured schema or schema markup, within a web page's HTML.",
  "image": "",  
  "author": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "SearchFreaks",
    "url": "https://searchfreaks.com"
  },  
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "SearchFreaks",
    "logo": {
      "@type": "ImageObject",
      "url": ""
    }
  },
  "datePublished": "2024-04-17",
  "dateModified": "2024-04-17"
}
</script>

Why use Rich Snippets?

Having extra details in your search results makes your search result stand out among others, while also making it look more appealing.

Details such as reviews and ratings are crucial for businesses, because people often rely on social proofing to make purchasing decisions.

Whereas having images or prices for a product can help shoppers when they’re researching different brands.

Therefore, rich snippets can help you get the most out of your search rankings, driving more organic traffic to your website.

When to build Rich Snippets?

Almost every website can benefit from building rich snippets, especially if they include these types of pages:

  • articles and blog posts
  • recipes
  • how-to guides
  • videos
  • products
  • FAQs
  • services
  • local businesses

As long as your aim is to rank higher on search engines, you should always try build a rich snippet for your web pages.

How to Manually Set Up Rich Snippets

To manually build rich snippets for your SERPs, you’ll likely need access to the HTML of your website.

There are plenty of free generators for schema markup that will save you lots of time.

We don’t recommend manually coding the schema yourself unless you’re a web developer or a masochist, but even then most devs would rather use a generator because it’s easy and free.

TechnicalSEO.com has a free tool that creates schema for any type of web pages.

Once you’ve created your schema, insert this code directly into your page — preferably within the <head> tags.

On a CMS like WordPress you can paste your schema directly into an HTML block for the page in which you’re building a rich snippet.

Test Your Snippet

You’ll want to test your page to ensure your schema was set up properly with a free tool such as Google’s free schema markup tester.

screenshot of a successful rich snippet test from Google
Screenshot of Google’s rich snippet test for this current page.