Google Rich Results: What Funeral Homes Need to Know

If you haven’t noticed some major changes to the Google search results pages in recent years, you might be living in a digital cave. What used to be a page of 10 website links has evolved to contain elements such as ads, reviews, maps, and Google My Business profiles.

The name for some of these areas is rich results. Google notes that rich results can include both text and nontextual elements. A common example is the featured snippet, which is a short answer that appears at the top of the search results page for some queries.

Are Rich Results Valuable?

Rich results provide another way you can appear on the first page of search results, which does make them somewhat valuable. You may be able to land on the first page more than once by getting an organic link in the top 10 results and a rich result.

That being said, rich results aren’t any more powerful than showing up in the top three organic search results. In fact, they may be slightly less adept at generating traffic to your page because of their purpose.

Google designs rich results to maximize the value of its own properties. These results are meant to answer the question of the search on Google’s page, which means the user may never click through to yours.

Should You Chase Rich Results?

Yes and no. Some page is going to show up in those results, so better yours than your competitor’s. So you do want to understand what rich results are and how to win those spots.

At the same time, you should not create pages for the sole purpose of earning rich results. Instead, work on creating pages that provide helpful, relevant information for site visitors and work in some best practices for rich results at the same time.

A Few Tips for Creating Content to Win Rich Snippets and Other Results

Start by ensuring your page supports rich results. Google provides a free tool that checks your page for structured data and lets you know which types of rich results would be possible.

Next, ensure your page data is structured to clue search bots in that there’s rich info available. You do this with tools such as markup language. If you’re working with an SEO firm or web developer, they can handle this technical piece for you.

Finally, create content that aligns well with the type of structured data you’re creating. If you’re creating a FAQ, for example, ask a question relevant to the content on the page and then answer it clearly, concisely, and immediately.