At Searchology yesterday Google Rich Snippets were announced which will allow for greater markup of web pages to allow for enhanced information to be shown within Google Search results. Allowing two formats to be added to your site, microformats and RDFs, Google Rich Snippets are being hailed as Google’s plunge into the semantic web. The concern here is that this will decrease the amount of click-throughs to a website as all the information would be covered within Google. A rather unlikely story, if you consider that Yahoo SearchMonkey, which offers a similar markup model through RDFs and microformats, can improve site traffic quantity and quality. To truly capitalize on both opportunities to present structured data, multichannel marketers ought move quickly. The early birds here will get the worms as sites slowly take measures to keep up with the competition.
How does structured data improve your search marketing?
If one is striving to communicate with the consumer in the channel that they prefer, it is important to consider search when optimizing marketing strategies. Google Rich Snippets offer real opportunities to communicate relevant information to the search engine user. This would definitely improve search quality, and has the potential to greatly improve search quantity.
Products – Google allows for the following markup to be added for products. This means that this information could potentially in the future appear within Google Search results.
| Property | Description |
brand |
The brand of the product—for example, ACME. |
category |
The product category—for example, “Books – Fiction”, “Heavy Objects”, or “Cars”. |
description |
Product description |
name (fn) |
Product name |
price |
Floating point number. Can use currency format. |
photo |
URL of product photo |
url |
URL of product page |
Reviews – Reviews are another way for online marketers to increase traffic to their web presence. This allows for ratings from one to five, the date of the review, the name of the reviewer and other information about the review.
Meet the consumer in their most used channel
By communicating with customers on the number one most used website one earth, brands extend their reach and a good multichannel marketing strategy should, with recent announcements, include structured data. Sites that do will be amply rewarded, especially during the transitional period. The information that can be presented here is very useful to the user, the user being of course an eager shopper. Consumers enjoy that which saves them time and energy, and believe or not having to click on five pages to get what they are looking for is too much. Where greater details are presented, marketers have the opportunity to entice shoppers with ratings and price. This makes for more qualified visitors, and more apt to complete the sales cycle.
As many marketers are only starting to struggle with the social web, here comes the semantic web. I predict that online retailers will adopt this first, likely to dominate until larger brick and mortar retailers start to follow suit.
Popularity: 4% [?]
