Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google
and today I'll talk about how to use Search Console
to monitor and optimize your performance with Google rich results.
By the end of this video, you will understand
what are rich results,
how to monitor the rich results appearance on Google Search,
where to find errors in your structured data,
and how to ask Google to validate fixes you've done to your website.
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But before I go into the nuts and bolts of Search Console,
I'd like to say a few words about structured data and rich results.
As an introduction, if you haven't heard about it
or to refresh your memory.
When you search on Google, you can see many kinds of results,
including blue links with text snippets and rich results.
For example, if you search for a venue or a music band,
you may get results that show you nearby events
or if you search for falafel recipes,
you may get instructions on how to cook it.
Those are examples of rich results.
If you own a website,
you might want to trigger this type of results for your site
as they can be more attractive to users.
For that, you'll need to implement structured data markup.
Check our developer documentation
to find out more about what, how, and why to implement structured data.
In a nutshell,
here's how your decision-making process should look like.
Review the Search Gallery examples,
find the structured data type that matches your content,
check guidelines and requirements to be eligible to appear on search,
implement the markup on your pages.
After you do that, you can start using Search Console
to help optimizing your implementation and monitoring your performance.
In addition to the Search Console Interface,
which we'll talk about in a minute,
you can also use a public structured data testing tool
called Rich Results Test.
This tool can verify the syntax of your structured data
and, in some cases, provide a sample of what the result might look like
in Google Search.
You can either upload a piece of code
or check a specific URL for Google to crawl.
The tool shows whether your implementation has any errors.
You'll also have an option
to preview your pages search appearance on Google Search results
and how it will be seen by Googlebot.
Checking your own code can be very handy during development cycles
to make sure your structure data is valid even before you move to production.
Over time, as the pages with structured data
are indexed by Google,
Search Console will start showing reports for those structured data types.
After setting up your pages and seeing them get indexed,
your next step is to monitor their performance.
Let's run through an example of how you check
your rich results performance on your site.
First, open Search Console and navigate to the Performance Report.
Select Search appearance in the tabs just below the main chart.
You'll see in a glance the volume of traffic coming to your website
through rich results.
In order to understand your rich results performance over time,
add the
You can do that by clicking the
This will update your performance charts to show your rich results traffic
by queries, pages, countries, and devices.
You might find patterns in your data that show how important
or how unimportant a specific segment of traffic is.
Perhaps a specific group of queries or pages
are not driving rich results,
which could point at opportunities
to enhance your structured data implementation.
Additionally, you might notice a drop in rich results performance
if your structured data implementation was affected by a website change.
Once you have a better idea of your overall performance,
you should take a closer look into each specific structured data report
in order to learn about warnings and errors
that Google has encountered in your website.
Errors disqualify your rich results from being shown in Google Search,
but you may still be shown through a standard plain blue link.
Warnings can provide a somewhat reduced experience for users.
When Search console detects structured data
for one of the supported rich results types on your website,
it will create a report for each, summarizing all errors and warnings,
and it will send an email to account owners.
But if an existing issue gets worse, it won't trigger an email.
So it is important for you to check your account periodically.
This is not something you need to do every day,
but I recommend you check it once in a while
to make sure everything is working as intended.
For example, if your website development has defined cycles,
it might be a good idea to log in to Search Console
after changes are made to the website to check that nothing broke down.
You'll find the structured data reports under the enhancements section
in the sidebar.
You will see a report
only if Search Console has data for that rich result type on your site
and Search Console offers a report for that type.
Open the structured data type summary report you have access to.
By default, you'll see the trends for error items in the main chart,
but you can also click
and
and more details in the table.
The bar chart is great for monitoring trends over time,
but you'll probably want to check the details in the table below the chart
which provides the specific issues that Google found in your website.
To get more details on a specific issue,
click one of the errors to open a detailed report.
Here, you'll see the date when the error was detected,
the number of errors over time,
and examples of pages where Google detected it.
You can click a specific example page
to check instances of the error in your HTML code.
Now that you know what needs to be fixed,
you have two options:
make the required code change yourself
or share the details with a developer
that can perform code changes to your website.
You can do that by grabbing a link using the Share button.
After you or your developer have fixed the error,
click
There are quite a few types of errors and warnings.
So, if you don't understand what's wrong,
check the developer documentation
on the specific structured data type you implemented.
You can find a list of them in the Search Gallery.
Before I leave you to work on your property,
I want to mention one last report,
unparsable structured data.
If Google finds structure data that, for some reason,
breaks while parsing the page
before it can even identify the rich result type,
it will show that item as an error in the unparsable structured data report.
Parsing issues could point you to lost opportunities
for rich results for your site.
You should fix the errors in this report to get the benefits of structured data.
Once they're fixed,
the page structure data will be added to Google
or, in case there is still an issue,
it will show up in the respective structured data report.
That's it for today.
Hopefully, you'll be more comfortable
to monitor and optimize your rich results from now on.
In the next episode,
I'll talk about how to use Search Console to improve your AMP implementation
and make your site more usable.
Don't forget to subscribe
to the Google Webmasters YouTube channel
where we'll be publishing lots of Search Console videos.
So, stay tuned.
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