How much Rich Snippets will enhance your search results

Getting Google to accept your store into their Rich Snippets system can benefit your business in various ways.

Let’s take a look at a search I did for an iPad.

It’s pretty easy to spot the differences in these four results. Each one is showing different types of Rich Snippets that Google uses.

Best Buy’s is very plain and doesn’t show much about their products. But they do have three extra, smaller links on their result. Would you like an extra three links for your store’s listing? I bet you would.

Amazon’s listing is great. The orange stars really attract the eye and you can see that 4,623 people have rated it for a rating of 4.7. This is very strong social proof.

Walmart on the other hand has a similar Rich Snippet as Amazon, but with only 17 votes it’s clear that this product doesn’t sell as well there. If this wasn’t a name brand like Walmart, you might even think this store wasn’t as good as Amazon. If this was your listing, I’d be willing to bet that you’d lose the customer to Amazon.

But Walmart does have one redeeming quality: notice how Google is showing that this is “In stock”. This is a powerful indicator that can make your store clickable, especially for popular products that no one can keep in stock for long.

At the bottom is Target with a similar Rich Snippet that we’ve seen. But Target has even more data, the price range. For an iPad this doesn’t matter much because the retail prices are fixed but what about in a market where there are many similar products and prices range wildly?

All of this extra data does one thing for your store:

It gets more qualified buyers in.

Rich Snippets don’t affect your ranking. If you’re at #5, getting Rich Snippets setup won’t jump your site up to #2.

But of the 10 results on a page, your store’s listing will pop. For example, instead of getting 11% of the search traffic for a term, you might get 65%. Even down at the 5th spot.

It doesn’t end there.

When your product, its rating, prices, and stock availability are all shown in the organic results, your visitor is going to be primed to buy. They don’t need to comparison shop because you’ve already told them the price. They already see how many other people have bought so they don’t need to research your company as much.

They’re coming to your store just to click the ‘add to cart’ button and buy.

That’s the best kind of traffic you can get.

This is just an example of what Google might include in your Rich Snippet, but it all depends on if you’re exporting the data to Google. If your store doesn’t make this data easy for Google to read or you’re missing some data, Google won’t show it. Instead they’ll show a basic result for your store.

In a competitive market like iPads, just think how poorly your store’s listing would look in the search results when compared to these four.

Now you know why getting your store’s data into Google’s Rich Snippets is such a business boost. Now you just have to do it.