Today’s tip is underutilized by most businesses and website owners. It’s rich snippets.
The eCommerce sites I operate for customers that rank on the first page of Google, one of the top methods for getting them there, was implementing a review system.
A lot of review systems don’t support rich snippets, but rich snippets are the key to getting your products and reviews to show up on page one or page two of Google.
The reason why is pretty simple: Google loves to support sites that show off the features of its search engine. What that means is that they’re going to give favor to people who are utilizing Google’s features. Google wants to provide a better experience to all the people using their platform. And so anyone who’s using an element of their platform to improve someone’s search experience, then Google is going to give back a little bit to those companies or those websites.
So what you want is to implement a review system on your website that allows people to select a certain number of stars and write reviews. The rich snippet portion of that review system is going to be reporting back to Google. So then, on the front end, in the search results, when somebody searches for a product, in the search listings, they’re going to see your product showing up alongside the reviews that people have left.
The review stars will stand out and draw attention to your product. You’ve seen this most likely when searching for something on your own. You’ll see five or six different eCommerce stores showing up with the product at the top of the results page. Underneath it, you’ll see the star rating and reviews. But sometimes there aren’t very many results, and that’s just a reflection of how few people are utilizing this.
The first step, if you’re running an eCommerce store, is to make sure that you have a review system. A lot of eCommerce sites, for some reason, have one but don’t encourage their shoppers to leave reviews of their products. So then, when you browse through some of these websites, you’ll see no reviews under their products, which is one of the reasons why people are favoring Amazon so much.
When you shop on Amazon, you see reviews and ratings on everything you can buy. People are looking for the item that has the most stars and the lowest price, right? So implementing that on your website is going to do two things. It’s going to draw people to your website instead of Amazon. Then it’s also going to get some favor from Google for putting a little bit more attention around your listing, and it’s going to lead people to click.
Google is going to reward you if you’re showing off the features that they’ve created to enhance the searching experience. So beyond that, if your site is not an eCommerce site, you still want to implement rich snippets in other areas, because, for the same reason, you’re showing off things that make Google’s search engine cool. And they want to favor the people who are doing that.