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Home Insider Blogs Ken Shafer's Blog Impact of Rich Snippets on Traffic
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Jul 26
2010

Impact of Rich Snippets on Traffic

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Posted by: Ken Shafer on Jul 26, 2010 15:24

On January 22nd, Google announced the inclusion of event-related information in their Rich Snippets. The protocol will be based off the hCalendar microformat and will look like this:

Now, let’s consider another post that covers Rich Snippets as well as something called “Answer Highlighting” which looks like this:

“Consider the example, [empire state height]. The first search result used to look like this:”

“With today’s improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:”

Let me start off by saying I’m not making a judgement here… I just want us to take a moment to consider what’s going on here. These improvements for the user can have a detrimental impact on your traffic numbers.

By offering more information to the searcher on the SERP itself, the developer is removing the need for the searcher to actually visit the website. In the above example, I no longer need to visit Wikipedia to see the height of the Empire State Building. As Google adopts more and more Microformat protocols, it seems logical that the number of visits siphoned off should increase.

What’s the motivation for developers to encourage proliferation of the protocols if your goal is to drive traffic to your website? Couldn’t this change your goals?

Let’s say you have a restaurant website with your phone number and address tagged with Microformats. Someone looking for your restaurant or a similar one, might find your Rich Snippet in the SERP and call your restaurant. Success right? Sounds like it. Now imagine how that looks to an Analyst when multiplied by 1000 times.  I’d see a steady decline in visits to the site from Google and need for a way to account for that.  The apparent success of the site would appear to be waning but the restaurant’s phone would still be ringing off the hook.

What’s next?

It’s not hard to imagine what else could be served up in a Rich Snippet. Why not figure out a way to display your actual lead or contact form right there? Imagine the havoc that would cause for conversion rates. If you think about it, it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility, right?

I think there’s opportunity for further discussion on the impact of Rich Snippets and Answer Highlighting on our analytics in the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts.


Comments (5)Add Comment
62
written by Brent Williams, July 26, 2010
Great post, Ken. I definitely see some benefits and concerns, like you mentioned... Will have to think about this some more.
77
written by Mike Whaling, July 27, 2010
Is the goal to "drive traffic to your website" or to sell more stuff (or lease more apartments in this case)? Typically, driving traffic to the site is just the first step in the conversion process. If we can eliminate steps for the prospect - even if that makes the 'process' a little more difficult to track - isn't that ultimately a good thing? (And is there an opportunity here for CallSource or Level One to step in and offer unique tracking numbers through microformats?)

To me, it's more important that my web presence is working, rather than relying on funneling everyone through one place. It's not as clean as we want it to be in terms of tracking, but ideally, it's still getting the job done.
62
written by Brent Williams, July 27, 2010
If it gets the job done, then yes. But too much of this is like outsourcing your web presence without having any say in how that process is conducted and just hoping for the best. Not saying it is not good to a certain extent, but losing too much control over your own information could be a concern in my opinion...
77
written by Mike Whaling, July 27, 2010
@ Brent: The website manager has the opportunity to control what information is provided to the search engines via the various structured data formats. If you think about it, this actually gives you more control of your web presence (at least in terms of content visible in your listings in search results). Generally, I think most online marketers (and not just in this industry) have a lot of other things to work on before they worry about adding these elements to their sites.
62
written by Brent Williams, July 28, 2010
@ Mike: Unless I'm mistaken, that only applies to snippets, not answer highlighting. With answer highlighting, doesn't Google just take your information regardless? Plus, even with snippets, I can see there being potential issues: For example, with any listing system, if you don't have a picture, users will generally bypass you, so to get maximum exposure you have to either accept lower conversion or play by those rules and put in a picture. But what happens when that concept is applied to Google? If Google gets enough buy-in at first, then you will have the same sort of decision - optimize for snippets or risk lower conversion. But who can afford lower conversion with Google? Therefore, you will be forced to utilize that system in order to (hopefully) maximize results. Which means they can still present your information how they want to. Yes, that's a little conspiracy theory-type of stuff, but I can see it happening.

But I think you are right that this is a long ways off for 99% of our industry...
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