As Google announced on the Google LatLong Blog and Google Webmaster Center yesterday, Google Maps/Places now support the display of rich snippets, or rich data such as reviews, people and events to add more context to local search results.
The rating and price range on this search result are examples of rich snippets of data that can be classified by using structured mark-up.
Google said the “use of Rich Snippets can help people find the web pages you’ve created that may reference a specific place or location.” Rich snippets are created using structured HTML, which Google said will help “properly classify your site, recognize and understand that its content is about a particular place, and make it discoverable to users on Place pages.”
Although human users can easily identify content types, computers cannot without some kind of context in the mark-up. Structured HTML helps label information on your website to help search engines understand it more accurately. By adding structured mark-up, organizations help avoid ambiguous interpretations of site content.
In order to optimize for a richer local search, organizations must:
- Use structured HTML to help Google recognize and categorize the places mentioned on the website.
- Tell Google about their site content in case of further advancements in classifying information.
Visit https://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/ for more information about rich snippets and local search.
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