A snippet is a representation of a web page in search results. It mostly consists of title, URL and description. A correctly composed snippet directly affects the CTR (the ratio of the number of clicks to the number of page views in the output). It improves the behavioral factors, increases the number of visitors and the profit that the online business gets.
Pay attention! Correctly composed snippets are only one of the elements of optimizing an online resource. If you want to promote an online store, portal or blog to the first positions of publication, remember the adaptability of the site , the speed of loading web pages, correction of cyclic and broken links.
How to create a snippet for search engines
There are three types of snippets in Google output:
- ordinary - consist of the title, URL and description of the web page;
- extended — may include additional information: price and availability of the product, rating and number of reviews, photo of the recipe.
- block with answers ("zero position") - a fragment of text, supplemented in some cases with an image, which gives a complete answer to the user's question.
In order for ordinary snippets to appear in the search, you don't need to take any special actions — it's enough to write the correct title and description and wait for the web crawler to scan and index the page. At the end of this article, we'll share some tricks to help you create an engaging snippet.
Extended snippets are generated if the schema.org micromarkup is implemented on the site. You can check whether it has been added to a blog or online store, and if it is, whether it is formatted correctly with Google's Structured Data Validation Tool. Enter the URL or piece of HTML code you want to test and click the "Run Test" button. After 3-5 seconds, information about which schema.org elements are implemented in the online resource and whether there are syntax errors will be displayed on the right side of the screen.
How to write an extended type snippet? Delegate this work to a programmer who knows how to work with micro-markup and is well versed in the types of information that can be marked up with it.
When it comes to promoting a site using blocks with answers, we mostly mean Featured Snippets — fragments of web page text that contain a complete answer to a user's question. Sometimes these fragments consist of sentences that are not placed one after the other in the text of the web page.
To get to the "zero position" you need:
- Promote the page to the top 10.
- Make a list of short questions that relate to the content of the page and to which you can give a complete answer. An example of such a question for an SEO blog is “what is a snippet”.
- Give an answer of 40-50 characters to the given question. Answers to questions like "What is N" should start with "N is...".
- Add schema.org micro markup. It helps search engines generate rich snippets and tells you if a web page is suitable for "position zero".
How to compose an attractive plain snippet
Using the following rules for creating a snippet and applying the recommendations from previous articles on the CityHost blog (for example, optimizing the site's usability ), you will effortlessly increase CTR, the number of visits to the online resource, and profit.
- Add a call to action. For example, "Come in and get a 15% discount."
- Analyze competitors' snippets and incorporate their most interesting elements into the descriptions of your website's web pages.
- Sometimes snippets are generated based not on information in the description, but on the content of the page. In this case, so that the snippet continues to attract the attention of users, create high-quality content, without errors and typos. If you don't do this, the answer to the question about what the snippet affects specifically for your site will sound like this: "To reduce the number of visitors and the percentage of CTR".
- Add an attractive favicon. You can visually highlight the site in the output by creating a favicon that is different from the icons of competitors' sites. For example, if they mostly use round favicons in cool colors, add a square or triangular icon in red or pink to your online store or blog.
- Use special characters. For example, ?, ?, ?. They attract attention and increase the likelihood that the user will go to your site.
That's how you learned about how a snippet affects traffic and what steps to take to use this element to make your blog or online store attractive to visitors before they even come to it.
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