Isn’t that EXCITING??? Google Search Results Snippets are Longer!!!!
What, you ask, does that mean? And even more, why should you be excited about a Snapit? Snitwa? Snippydoo?
This is a snippet view of Google headquarters.
I know you are dying to know so I will tell you! When people search for something in Google they put in a word or phrase and then Google displays the Search Results with a TITLE, a LINK to the site and a SNIPPET of information about the business.
Snippets are the short descriptions that comes up in the Search Result. For years it was just that – super short – you had 160 characters to cram in a relevant description of what your business offered, or what you were selling, or what the article was on that you just posted, using keywords you hoped people were using to look for you. For example, if you typed in “wordpress, seattle” into your Google search window, Google “spiders” would go onto the bazillions of pages on the web and search for snippets that have “wordpress, seattle” in them and match that to your request and that’s what your results would display. Well, it’s a bit more complex than that, but that’s basically what’s happening in those nano-seconds after you type your search request and Google delivers the search results.
But NOW, Google has changed the snippet length to 320 characters, so that means you can create a longer more detailed description for your “snippet” and boost your chances of getting seen (and possibly better rankings) in Search Results. And that is pretty exciting! If someone doesn’t know about “wordpress” they might put in “dependable web developer seattle” and my snippet could very well come up in their results because I have all those words in my newly extended snippet. See?
Here are 2 stunning examples of BEFORE & AFTER snippets. You can see that BEFORE I had to keep the snippet super brief and use basic descriptors/keywords like “Seattle Web Design, WordPress, Shopify, training, etc…”. But now, I can ramble on and add more information how my company creates websites for businesses, entrepreneurs, non-profits and artists, and how incredibly qualified, dependable, reliable and experienced we are!
(Did you notice how clever I was in discreetly plugging my business attributes while dispensing incredibly useful information?)
Before:
After:
We use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress and it has a fantastic “snippet preview” feature for every article or page you write/manage.
So, the long and the short of it (ha ha – snippet pun) (the short and the long of it?) is that it’s great thing for businesses to use to their advantage and get more visibility in search results because Google upped the snippet size.
Photo credit: R. Shade
