Rich Snippet

All ten lines on a results page used to look identical: a blue title, an address, two lines of summary. Built to the same template, nothing on screen told you which one held what you were after, so people clicked from the top down.

Ranking therefore decided nearly everything. The page at position three only got clicked when one and two failed to answer. Better content had no place on the screen to say so. Someone looking for a recipe had to open results one by one to find which could be done in thirty minutes.

So a way to put more into a single result line appeared. A rich snippet shows the values a page deals in alongside the title and summary, which changes how often it gets clicked without changing where it ranks.

Put machine-readable markup inside the page and the search engine draws those values into the result line. Four steps.

1. Record the page's meaning for machines. Markup that lets a machine recognize what a page is about is structured data: price, stock, and rating for a product; cooking time for a recipe; author and date for an article.
2. Match the types the standard defines. Only types the search engine supports get drawn, so values outside the list don't reach the display.
3. Check for errors with a testing tool. A single missing value can take the whole page out of eligibility.
4. Wait for it to take effect. Marking it up doesn't guarantee it appears. The search engine decides which presentation a given query gets, and the same page can be enhanced for one query and plain for another.

What changes is not the ranking but the share of impressions clicked. That share for unpaid listings is organic CTR, and a line carrying a rating and a price catches the eye before a line carrying nothing. Position three outperforming position one happens.

Faking the values costs a lot. Manufacture reviews to attach a rating and the enhancement gets pulled, and repeated offenses penalize the whole site.

"Still ranking third and the click rate doubled. The stars showed up."

Traffic grew with no change in ranking.

"One error in the structured data is keeping the enhancement from showing."

A bad value took the page out of eligibility.

"There's no supported enhancement for our page type."

It isn't on the standard's list, so this slot isn't available.

Theo added structured data to the Pagedeck help center. Forty documents written as question-and-answer pairs got marked up, and two weeks later the question list started appearing under the search results. When Ravi checked, the ranking was unchanged while the same impressions brought in 1.6 times as many people.