How To Adapt Your Website For Google Structured Snippets

Google has officially announced the release of structured snippets, which are basically Knowledge Graph snippets that are directly embedded in the search results. While this may often provide searchers with a quicker method for finding the information they’re seeking, a concern for marketers is the possibility that this will reduce the traffic to their websites.

Amit Singhal, senior vice president and software engineer at Google, explained that while the company’s goal is to provide searchers with a quick answer, structured snippets are not a substitute for those who require more in-depth information and will therefore click on sources provided in Google search results to read more details on a website.

“If you look at a search engine, the best analogy is that it’s an amazing Swiss Army Knife,” explained Singhal. “It’s great, but sometimes you need to open a wine bottle. Some genius added that to the knife. That’s awesome. That’s how we think of the Knowledge Graph. Sometimes you only need an answer. The world has gone mobile. In a mobile world, there are times when you cannot read 20 pages, but you need something – an extra tool on your Swiss Army Knife. When you build a better tool, you use it more.”

Singhal’s analogy makes sense and does a good job of explaining the value of structured snippets in Google’s search results. However, it does not alleviate the concerns for marketers and web publishers about the potential reduction in traffic to their sites. It’s essential not only to have engaging content to provide searchers with incentives to go to your website, but also to adapt all websites accordingly to ensure the best use of this new reality in Google’s search results.

Google’s support page explains web publishers have various options to choose from to ensure that Google understands the content of their pages.

The company suggests that HTML markup is the best choice if:

• You want explicit control over how Google understands the events, recipes, or other types of data on your site.
• You can add HTML markup consistently to all data items.
• Your site structure changes frequently.
• You want other search engines to understand the content on your website in addition to Google. (The data that Data Highlighter extracts is available only to Google.)

Google suggests that using Structured Data Markup Helper is the best choice if:

• You can update the HTML markup on your page, but don’t want to write it from scratch.
• You want more control over how Google understands the data on your site than the Data Highlighter gives you.
• You want other search engines to understand the content on your website in addition to Google.

Google suggests that Data Highlighter should be used if:

• Your site displays data about events.
• You’re considering structured data and rich snippets for your site, but you are not yet ready to commit resources to updating HTML markup.
• You prefer to point and click on web pages instead of writing HTML markup.
• You can’t change the HTML markup on a site, or you can’t consistently mark up data items.