Everything Has to be Measured
As with all digital marketing, if you’re not measuring what you do, you might as well not be doing it. With that in mind, Google has added some new reports to their underrated Search Console tool. The new reports allow you to see how well your website’s schema is working. Specifically focusing on if Google understands your website well enough to display Rich Results when someone searches for your site, and, if any videos you produce are being shown in the search listings.
What’s a Rich Result?
Rich Results are the classification Google gives to content displayed on the search engine results page that is more than just a “blue link” or standard search result. This can be anything from shopping listings or Google images, to displaying YouTube video content on the SERP.
The screenshot on the right shows some of the Rich Results showing for Nike. In this case you can see their stock price, company size, and other demographic information about the sneaker giants.
If you’re not sure if your website is displaying any rich results, or rather if Google can read your site well enough to extract Rich Results, you can test it with Google’s Rich Results Testing tool.
The Value of Rich Results Status Reports
A large part of improving your SEO ranking is learning how to see your website through Google’s eyes. While you might think your website is clear, well written and intuitive, Google might not. And if you want to rank higher on the SERP, let’s face it…Google’s opinion is more important.
Being able to run the Rich Results Status Reports lets you see which rich results Google can (or can’t) read from your website, and fix any errors it flags up. Another related report that gives marketers more insight into how their content is displayed on the SERP is a separate report for video results.
These new reports are part of a major Search Console overhaul that has been ongoing for the last year. Which help to make Google Analytics less glamorous cousin much more user-friendly, and useful.
Where to Start?
If you’re interested in improving your search ranking you should be regularly checking in on all of the reporting available to you from Search Console. Making sure your website is marked up with the correct schema is one way of doing that. So when you next dig into your data, take the time to check our the Rich Result and video result reporting!
If you run the report mentioned above and don’t find any Rich Results listed for your site, rich snippets are a good place to start. Rich snippets help you display the best information in Google’s search results that mirror your company’s services and the type of content you produce.
To set up snippets, the first step is to dig into Google’s Structured Markup Helper. But doing this might require some knowledge of HTML.
If you’d like help in interpreting your website’s Search Console data—or setting up your data-collection tools—that’s one of our specialties.
Photo credit – Top: Pexels
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