The rich results testing tool can help you understand which of your website pages are eligible for rich results on search engine result pages.
You can use it to identify issues with structured data on your pages and visualise how rich results and featured snippets will look for pages on your website in search engine results.
Here is what rich results are and how the rich results testing tool can be used.
Here is how to check if your schema mark up is working.
What are Rich Results?
Rich results are special SERP (search engine results page) features that are available if you enable specific schema types on relevant content on your website.
These SERP features are intended to highlight key information on your pages.
Special features include;
- Carousels
- Image thumbnails
- product star ratings and review snippets; e.g. for products and employer ratings for a company
- Q&A pages
- FAQs
- How-to
- Recipe rich results
- Article schema
- Video rich results
- Educational elements on pages
- Speakable content
- Facts
- Company logos
- Local business information like opening times, services, ratings, directions and products
Schema can also allow you to markup subscription and paywall content so users are aware of the nature of the content on your website before they click.
Not every schema type you can use to markup content is eligible for rich results, so it is worth checking which schema types can make your content eligible for rich results before you create content or before you markup your pages if they are something you are specifically interested in.
Types of Schema that Produce Rich Results
Different schema types offer different types of rich results and not every type of schema you can use to markup content on your website will produce rich results on Google search results pages or search engines like Bing.
These schema types include;
- Article
- Book
- Breadcrumb
- Course
- Dataset
- EmployerAggregateRating
- Event
- Fact Check
- FAQ
- Home Activities
- How-to
- Image License
- JobPosting
- Learning Video
- Local Business
- Logo
- Math solvers
- Movie
- Education Q&A
- Estimated Salary
- Podcast
- Practice problems
- Products available to purchase online
- Q&A
- Recipe
- Review snippet
- Sitelinks Search box
- Software App (beta)
- Speakable
- Subscription and paywalled content
- Video
We can help you optimise your website with all of the schema types above and more, try our schema markup creation service to get started.
How much time does Google take to show rich snippets in search results?
We corrected errors with product schema markup on an eCommerce website on 02/09/2022 and found that Google had picked up on the markup the same day.
Product related rich results showed in SERP on this example as early as the same day as Google first detected the schema markup code.
However, more complex schema types will take longer and inclusion of your content within prioritized SERP features like article carousels depends on more than just having the appropriate schema in place.
For example, article schema used on a news article about a recent event or breaking news story may be featured only if;
- It’s a story relevant to the topic of your website
- Your domain is trusted by Google as a reliable source of information for information on the topic.
- Competitors publishing the same story aren’t considered as more trustworthy or a better fit for Google news inclusion
- Manual penalties
- Missing authority within your content; like lacking authorship
How long rich results take to display and whether they do appear at all, depends on how well the pages rank that you’ve added your schema to.
If your pages already rank within the top 10 search results you can expect to see structured data markup get picked up quickly.
However, the time between Google search engine spiders picking up your structured data and showing rich results will depend.
Why aren’t my rich snippet reviews showing up in search results?
There are many reasons why your rich result may not be appearing on Google SERPs (search result pages).
These can include anything from;
- Broken or incorrect code
- Missing critical attributes in your schema code
- Page, article or website not appropriate or relevant for rich results
- You need to wait longer for Google to crawl your web pages and detect the schema markup
The tool is useful to understand how features snippets might look for certain pages on your website. However, featured snippet eligibility does not mean your pages are guaranteed to appear.
Use the Rich Results Testing Tool
The best way to diagnose issues with the schema markup you’ve added to your page to try to generate rich results is the Google Rich Results test tool.
Not only will the tool tell you how many valid structured data elements are detected on the page;
It will detail what these elements are;
and allow you to identify critical and non critical issues detected on the page that you will want to consider fixing so structured data can display correctly.
You’ll also be able to preview what your results will look like in SERP by using the results preview tool, linked from the page.
These previews can differ depending upon the result type you choose.
Schema markup for recipes is particularly versatile as elements like; ingredients, how to steps, recipe reviews, videos and star ratings can all become featured results.
How to Check for Rich Snippets using the Google Rich Results Test Tool
To use the google rich result tool;
Enter a full URL of your website where you have an eligible type of schema markup.
Alternatively, you can enter the schema code you’ve written for your page. You can enter either the entire HTML of your page or the specific schema markup to test the page.
Select your user agent “Googlebot smartphone” or “Googlebot desktop”. You will usually want to use Googlebot smartphone if your website has been switched to mobile first indexing.
Press the yellow “Test” button.
See your results.
What the testing tool results mean
You’ll see a page that looks something like the image;
Each of the sections;
- Product snippets
- Merchant listings
- Review snippets
Are clickable, and will give you insights into what your rich results will look like, any errors or issues affecting them and the structured data that search engines need to crawl to create a rich result from your page content.
What are Rich Result Status Reports?
Rich result status reports are bulk structured data markup reports that you can view in Google Search Console.
In the example above, you can see reports indicating that a selection of marked up shopping pages, which contain product structured data markup, is error free and eligible for rich results in Google search results.
Why are some pages not eligible for rich results?
Some pages cannot be tested for rich results via the test tool. Some of the reasons for this are;
- the page might be blocked in your robots.txt file; blocked pages cannot be crawled and assessed
- the page returns a 4XX – the page is not found, or it’s blocking bots
- the page returns a 5XX – there’s a server error and the URL is unreachable
- URL is marked noindex – if there’s a robots meta tag marking the URL as noindex the page content won’t be tested
- Blocking critical elements and resources can mean that structured data isn’t accessible to search engines and therefore, tests fail.
How to make your webpage eligible for rich results on google?
Ensuring that your pages are crawlable and indexable by search engines is the very first step.
Next, ensure that you’re using the correct schema markup on product elements on your pages to help search engines effectively render rich results in their search result pages.
Consult the list of types of Schema that Produce Rich Results listed above to discover what types of schema can produce rich results.
Manually test your pages once the schema is launched. As well as helping you to visualize the rich results, you’ll also see advice and guidance on how to get rich snippets in google search results if you’re still struggling.
Finally, keep an eye on your Google Search Console account for your website and test different search results by testing queries that drive traffic to your pages.
How often are rich results shown?
You’ll see rich results frequently in search results.
From our tests, rich results are shown daily in the index as part of search results and these are often across some of the most valuable search queries.
Most product search queries contain at least one listing which has product schema markup on the page.
You can check the search queries, dates, pages, origin countries and devices where users are seeing product results, videos and review snippets by using Google Search Console.
How to check rich results in Google Search console
- Open Google Search Console
- Click into “search results”
- Click the “search appearance” tab
- Click “product results”, “videos” or “review snippets” from the list
- Click back to “queries”, “pages”, “countries”, “dates” or “devices” to see rich results for each category.
How to display review ratings in rich results
To correctly display review ratings for your products or business you can follow the steps below;
- ensure the page you want to markup contains reviews and ratings
- Update the product schema to include details of your products and services
- Validate the schema markup in the structured data validator tool.
- Add the product structured data to your page
- Check the rich results test tool once the page is live to ensure your page is eligible for rich results.
Examples of Review Schema
JSON-LD is the preferred schema type by most search engines. Here are examples of different ways that schema can be added to your pages.
You can find detailed examples of schema types within our courses. Check out;
- How to write product schema markup to understand how to write schema of different types to trigger structured data rich results.
- Choose Google Tag Manager SEO to get a step by step guide to rolling out schema markup with Google Tag Manager.
by Ben Ullmer
