Rich results and structured data, from Google tips and best practices
The rich results of Google SERPs are features users are really familiar with by now and who appreciate and use daily, and perhaps it has been the sites themselves that have not yet understood how to fully exploit these spaces of “visibility” that appear on the search engine results pages. It is on this theme that Daniel Waisberg’s talk for the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks series focuses, which offers guidance and best practices to get closer to the rich results and use the Search Console to optimize the way the site appears in Google Search.
Specifically, the Search Advocate of the American company will try to answer four questions:
- What are rich results and structured data
- How to find out problems with alerts and checks
- How to correct and validate errors and warnings
- How to monitor and optimize organic traffic
What are the rich results on Google
Years ago, “when you went looking for information on Google, all the results were shown as simple blue links”, Waisberg debuts. And in fact, just look at this Google screen dating back to 2009 (just over ten years ago, via Oberlo) to realize it!
Over time, the answers that Google has provided to users’ questions have been enriched, “evolving into what we now call rich results” or multimedia results. These are “search results with special features or information”, with a wide range of possibilities.
For example, the Googler says, “among the multimedia results of recipes you could see a small photo of the dish and a preview of some ingredients; for job offers, a rich result could include a description, salary and a click through to submit the application”.
Structured data, to give more accurate info to Google
These new results are determined by Google’s ability to understand the content of a website, and sometimes Google can use the specific markups that developers add to their pages to allow machines to better understand the published contents.
These markings are called structured data, as we know, and the list of structured data types available in Google Search is constantly expanding.
How to implement and verify structured data
Depending on our content management system – CMS, you can install an extension or a plugin to which you can entrust the work of markups implementation that can be useful to our site. Otherwise, Waisberg suggests, “your developers can use Google’s multimedia test results to control and edit the code in the editor in real time“, a technique that can save time and effort because “it is increasingly efficient to verify that a markup works properly before moving to production”.
After you have implemented the structured data on our site, you can start to analyze them with the Improvements report of the Google Search Console.
Using the Search Console to verify problems and fixing errors
The topic of the work of