As digital marketers, a large portion of our time is spent creating content for the websites that we look after. This content is most often used to help drive more traffic from Google organic search, increase click-through-rate (CTR) add value for new and existing customers. Ultimately, we want our content to make more money for our business.

In a dream world, all content that goes on the web would be useful and unique and provide the right information to our target customers. Sometimes this is not the case, so before creating any new content, it’s a good idea to look at any existing content you might have and see if there are any quick wins to be had.

Increasing traffic from organic search using Google rich snippet data

Of course, there are a number of things you can do to re-purpose your old content such as adding images, graphs and extra information  but here were are going to look at adding Google rich snippet markup to your content in order to try and drive more organic traffic from Google and ultimately make more money out of your existing content for your business.

You might have seen something like this in the Google search engine results:

This is a recipe for Oreo CupCakes which is a really good example of a brand or company using rich snippet data to drive organic traffic from google to a certain webpage.

As you can see in the image above, the brand has implemented reviews, rating, cooking time, calorie count and video rich snippet data on their page

Different types of Rich Snippet MicroData and the code to implement them

Rich Snippet MicroData lives within the HTML of your webpage. The Google Structured Data Markup Helper is a really useful tool for anyone wanting to tag their webpages with Rich Snippet Micro Data.

Step 2

Visit the Structured Data Mark-Up Helper, select ‘article’, and copy and paste your HTML (you can find this by viewing the source code on your webpage).

Step 3

Start Tagging – click the blue button to start adding your Rich Snippet Tags into your HTML.

Step 4

You can now select elements on your page – such as images, titles, authors and the article body to add the Rich Snippet Tags to your HTML document.

In the example below we are adding a date rich snippet – this will show up in your search engine result listing like this:

Example Result:

As you can see – there is now a date stamp on this listing – this affirms to google that this article is fresh content, and deserves to have a high ranking in it’s index.

Step 5:

There are other Rich Snippet Tags you can add (if your article contains those elements) its really easy to add them in – just click each element you want to add.

Nearly done….

All you need to do now is download your new HTML file with your tags, and give it to your developer to upload to your site.

Rich Snippets are just one way of adding value to your existing content – you never know – this might be just the edge you need to elbow out that annoying competitor!

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