Google supports many interesting search appearance elements that can be applied to your page in search results

Google supports many interesting search appearance elements that can be applied to your page in search results:

A few of these result types are generated automatically by Google Search, but most of them can be coded for by your site, as we will explain. But first, let's talk about the general categories of Search results.

General categories of Search results

Google Search results include many types of display features. How they look changes over time, and the same result can be displayed differently depending on whether you're seeing it on a desktop computer or a phone, what country you are in, or many other factors. Google is trying to show a result in the most useful format for the searcher. These search results mostly fall into the following general categories:

Plain blue link
Enhancement
Rich result
Knowledge panel entry
Featured snippet
OneBox result
Discover

Why specify Search features for a page?

Adding Search features can provide Search results that are more engaging to users and might encourage them to interact more with your website. Here are some case studies of websites that have implemented search features for their site:

• Rotten Tomatoes added search features to 100,000 unique pages and measured a 25% higher click-through rate for pages enhanced with structured data, compared to pages without structured data.
• The Food Network has converted 80% of their pages to enable search features, and has seen a 35% increase in visits.
• Rakuten has found that users spend 1.5x more time on pages that implemented search features than on non-structured data pages, and have a 3.6x higher interaction rate on AMP pages with search features vs non-feature AMP pages.
• Nestlé has measured pages that show as rich results in search have an 82% higher click through rate than non-rich result pages.

What features are best for my page or site?

Some features are appropriate or available only for specific types of information on your site: for example, review stars are available for a recipe but not a dataset. Other features are available only for a specific device type (mobile or desktop). The following table shows features that you might want to use, based on the content of your page or site. Some features are site-wide, some are per page. The gallery page shows details about each feature.

Enabling Search features for your site

Some features can be requested using structured data on the page, for example, review stars and recipe cards. Some features are implemented automatically by Google, without any in-page coding, for example sitelinks.

To implement search features:

1. Use the table to help choose features appropriate for your page or site. Some features are available for all content types (for example, preferred site name can be used for all types of pages), and some rich results are specific to the content type (for example a recipe rich card is only available for a recipe).
2. Read the detailed information about each appearance element to decide if it's right for you.
3. Implement the feature as described in the documentation and validate any structured data using the Rich Results Test tool to ensure that it is valid and complete. Be sure to follow the structured data quality guidelines to ensure that the contents of your page, and your usage, complies with these guidelines. Pages that do not comply will not be eligible for structured data usage.
4. Use the appropriate Rich Result Status report to see whether Google has found, and can process, your structured data.
5. Periodically check the Rich Result Status report for errors. Structured data that was valid in the past can suddenly develop errors if you change a site template or as a result of other unforeseen events.
6. Monitor clicks and impressions for your search elements.

Measuring the performance of Search features

For some Search features, you can directly track user traffic on the Performance report. To monitor your traffic, select Search Appearance in the report. If you don't see a filter for your specific feature:

• Not all feature types are currently trackable. Read the documentation to see which features can be tracked in Search Console.
• Google hasn't detected any instances of that feature on your site.

Comparing the effect of Search features

You probably want to compare performance of your pages with search features with those pages that don't have search features, in order to decide if it's worth your effort. The best way to do that is to run a before and after test on a few pages on your site. This can be a little tricky, since page views can vary for a single page for various reasons.

1. Take some pages on your site that are not using any structured data, and have several months of data in Search Console. Be sure to choose pages that won't be affected by the time of year or timeliness of the page content; use pages that won't change much, but are still popular enough to be read often enough to generate meaningful data.
2. Add structured data or other features to your pages. Confirm that your page code is valid, and that Google has found your features using the URL Inspection tool on your page.
3. Record the performance for a few months in the Performance report, filter by URL to compare performance of your page.