Introduction
To understand why snippets are important, you must first know what a snippet it. We asked a couple of our friends at reputation management companies to provide us with an explanation. They have told us that a snippet is an excerpt or description from your webpage. Meaning, it is just a really short explanation of what people can expect when navigating to your website. When we say really short, we mean really short. A snippet may only contain 160 characters. So, you can think of this as a tweet about your website.
Their Importance
When you are looking at a restaurant or retail outlet, you want to kind of have an idea of what is on the inside before you go in. In much the same way, snippets tell people what is on the inside and will hopefully attract them to look inside. When it comes to achieving the number one rank on a Google search, you are going to want to have a rich snippet. The reason for this is because the first three positions on a Google search get 50% of the web traffic. This only leaves 50% for the rest of the first page. While being on the first page of Google is impressive, they have found that people rarely navigate to the bottom of the first page anymore. In news, we call this being above the fold. We have been trained for generations to pay attention to the top half of a newspaper or magazine. This is where the articles they really want you to read reside. The same thing in cyberspace. By the time that people make it to the fifth position, they run out of steam and click on the page that is least objectionable or they revise their search.
New Snippets
Recently, you may have noticed if you type in something along the lines of “what are the best way to make eggs” you will find that there is a big result at the top of the page. This is known as a featured snippet. Google has begun to let people that hold the top position on the results page of certain queries to write a more detailed snippet. This is used by Google as a reward for a lot of hard work by the company to become an authority in the industry they are in. So, do not be surprised if you start to see more and more companies trying to get these top spots. You can even see banner ads when you type in something like “refrigerator.” There will be a line of choices for you. These are the companies that have put in a lot of time differentiating themselves in the industry. They are listed from left to right by the most popular brands from those websites.
Conclusion
Our friends at the reputation management companies to think of a snippet as an elevator pitch. You want to make sure you cover all the major points, but you have a set amount of time, or in this case, space to do it in. Take advantage of it and you will see how much more traffic will visit your website.