Ever notice how when you're searching for funny movies
or cake recipes, you click on a link,
you look at these suggestions, and you're like, meh.
So you go back.
You click on another link.
You look at the suggestions there,
and it just takes forever.
It's a bit annoying, isn't it?
Why is that?
Because what you're searching for is things.
And, in fact you're getting links.
What if instead you got organized visual results
to help you spot the thing that you wanted right away?
That would be neat, right?
We thought so.
So for this type of category queries,
we're changing Search to show more things and fewer links.
I am Mariya, and these are Rich Cards.
Rich Cards are building on the success of rich snippets.
They present categories of content
in beautiful visual carousels that you
can scroll left and right with images
and other interesting information.
As a developer, it's a great opportunity
if you present your content in this way
because you can stand out in the results
and attract more visitors to your site.
You also take up more space, and you
can add more elements from your on-page content
to the Search Result page.
Today I'll show you how to get your things into Search
for users who are looking for them.
So how does this work?
To get your content displayed as a Rich Card,
you need to add schema.org and JSON-LD
to the relevant bits of your site.
First, you need to find out if your content matches the Rich
Card verticals.
Verticals are listed in the gallery.
We've built up screenshots.
We have code samples.
We have different examples.
So you can browse there.
You can have a look and see what actually matches
what you have on your site.
And then also, each code sample has a link
to the Structured Data Testing tool
so that you can tweak the code in real time
and see what happens to the examples.
After you've figured out which vertical
is most representative of your content, what you need to do
is find the essential things to mark up.
Each type of Rich Card has fields,
without which we cannot display it in Search.
So, for example, for recipes, that's name and image.
But you can add more fields to make your cards richer and more
attention-grabbing than everything else
that we show in the Search Results page.
Again, for recipes, you can add calories.
You can add preparation time.
You can add ingredients.
And you can even add ratings.
So here, side-by-side, you can see the basic card
with only name and image marked up, and then an enhanced card
with ratings and preparation time.
So you can see yourself which one you would click on.
Now let's get down to business and add some markup.
We recommend using JSON-LD because it's an easy format
to use, especially if you're using a Tag Manager.
It saves you tweaking time when you
have to change the source code of individual pages.
But, of course, your implementation on your site
will depend on the type of content management
system you're using.
Once you've got your initial markup,
you can test it in the Structured Data Testing tool,
and you immediately see any errors,
like missing fields or syntax issues.
Input either the markup of a URL or the page with
marked up content into the Structured Data Testing tool.
If there are any errors, you will see them immediately
in the tool UI.
In our case, there's a missing image field.
Once you add the missing image field,
then everything checks out, and you
can use the Preview function in order
to see how this Rich Card will actually
appear in search results.
Once you're happy with the final state of your markup,
you need to deploy it across the different pages of your site.
One easy way that I'm going to show you
here is to use Google Tag Manager.
But, again, depending on how your site is set up,
you might have to use other approaches.
So, in our case, we go to Google Tag Manager,
we create a custom tag, and then we input the JSON-LD in there,
in the space for the tag.
And after that you can pick if you
want to deploy it as across all the pages of your site or just
a specific set.
You can pick individual pages, or you
can use regular expressions to catch specific patterns.
And once that's ready, every time
your page loads, Google Tag Manager
will also load the necessary JSON-LD
so that you have the structured markup on each of your pages.
So now you've done all the markup.
Your pages are getting processed.
What do you want to know?
You want to know what you're getting out of this, right?
So the place to go to find this out is Search Console.
Search Console is a free tool that
knows all the stats about how your site is
doing in Search, including your Rich Cards, if you have any.
First, you have to verify that you're an owner,
and then you will see every detail
that we know about your Rich Cards,
including how many were indexed, how many have errors,
and how many are just fine.
So one good question to ask yourself here
is, the ones that are indexed and reported in Search Console,
are they approximately the same number as the one
that you originally marked up and submitted?
If not, then you might have an issue with discovery.
Meaning that Google can't find all of your pages
and process them.
One way to solve this is by submitting a sitemap.
A sitemap is basically an XML file
which has a list of the URLs that you
want to submit to Google for discovery
and has some metadata about each URL.
So you can easily generate this with a third-party tool
and then upload it through Search Console.
And this will help us find out about all
of your pages that have markup.
Another issue that you might encounter
is that we're not showing some of your Rich Cards
in Search because they have errors.
And I'm talking here specifically
about the required fields that are missing,
or maybe the syntax is wrong for them.
So we'll show you all of those in the same report,
in the Rich Cards report.
And you can see them grouped first by markup type,
and then by error type.
So you can drill down, pick a category,
and take a few examples.
Then you can examine the code.
Each URL has a direct link to the Structured Data Testing
tool, where you can tweak the markup, fix the errors,
and see exactly how you need to change this across your site.
As you deploy to fix and we start re-indexing those pages,
you'll see the number of errors in the Rich Card report
go down, down, down as we're re-indexing each page
and adding more Rich Cards.
So now you know how to keep track of coverage
and also how to get rid of errors.
The next and the more interesting question
is, how much traffic are you getting from all these Rich
Cards?
So another place that you can look in order to find this
is Search Analytics Report in Search Console.
And we've added there a filter that
allows you to look at only the clicks
and impressions specifically for Rich Cards,
and here's how to filter down to that.
Now, here you'll find information
on queries, impressions, clicks, average position, top pages,
anything you want to know about how your Rich Card
content is doing in Search.
This is also a really useful place
that you can derive data for finding opportunities
to grow your traffic and attract more users.
One thing that you can do is compare your Rich Card queries
and impressions with everything that you get
for known marked up content.
And maybe you will identify some portion of your content
that you can mark up and make it even more attractive
in search results and that way get more traffic.
Another thing that you could do is also go back
to the Rich Cards Report and look at your enhanceable cards.
Those are cards where you've done correctly all the markup
for the required fields, but you could do some more
and mark up more fields to make the cards even more
eye-catching.
So having that and then comparing it
to the query information in Search Analytics
can help you see where it's worth the effort to invest
a little bit more in marking up different types of content.
So now you know what Rich Cards are,
how to implement them, how to debug errors,
and how to keep track of the traffic
that you're getting after they start showing up in a search.
If you want to find out more for specific verticals,
including the examples and the code snippets,
you'll find everything on the Developer Site.
And once you've done all the work to implement them,
you can keep track of how you're doing in Search console
after you verify your site.
Thanks for watching, and good luck.
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