Check Out Google’s “Rich Cards,” a New Search Result Format

May 18, 2016

Introducing rich cards, the latest effort dealt by Google to serve their increasing mobile audience. Rich cards are like condensed search results, presented in carousels at the top of the page. Users can scroll left and right to view information, like “peanut butter cookie recipes.”

Google is starting off by showing rich cards for two categories, recipes and movies. Like rich snippets, rich cards display web content in a more visual, easy-on-the-eyes format than ever before. They also use schema.org structured markup data, just like rich snippets. Rich cards can be selected from different sites, or even from the same site.

Rich cards could be a great way to increase awareness for your site.

What Do Google Rich Cards Look Like?

Rich cards feature less text than rich snippets. Gone are the sections of text that rich snippets would generate, which would sometimes include the first couple steps of a recipe, inciting users to click to see the entire thing.

Rich cards also use bigger images, making them more eye-popping on mobile. Review stars are used as well, hoping to draw user interest with stellar, trusted reviews.

We have to admit, Google rich cards look pretty snazzy. And we recognize the power behind them to affect users.

Make Attractive Rich Cards to Increase Your Clickthrough

Rich cards look like they’re going to be an effective new way to get users to click to your site. They show right at the top of the page, which is always a good thing.

Users are becoming increasingly reliant on visuals. Just like how you want images peppered throughout a blog or webpage, we’re seeing a move away from text for more picture-oriented search results.

Want to use rich cards to get more clickthrough? Take these following steps:

Use your best images. With the focus on images over text, make sure your pictures really pop. Whether that means breaking out a real camera instead of your smartphone or hiring a professional photographer to get the lighting just right, you need high quality images to draw people in.

Follow the E-A-T principle. Just because Google rich cards have a high focus on images, doesn’t mean you can’t go lax on your content. Google is still going to show the most expert, authoritative, and trustworthy sources from the pool of candidates—the “deck,” if you will. So if your recipe or movie review site, or other site since others will surely follow, uses great information, you’ll have a higher chance of being picked for the Google rich cards section—the “hand.” (See what we did there?)

Get good reviews. Reviews are a powerful indicator for users that a website is trustworthy. So you have to make sure you have some good ones for your recipes.

Make your markup perfect. We can’t stress this enough—you need to make sure your schema markup data is perfect. All the right fields need to be filled out, which can lead to your getting a rich card generated. You also have to keep an eye out for errors in the Google rich cards report, which you can find in Google Search Console.

Do it right, and Google rich cards can be like a beacon to attract new users. Do it wrong, and you’ll miss out.

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