How To Feature on Google — A 2025 Guide to 'Rich Snippets' & 'Schema' for NZ Local Businesses

What are rich snippets and featured snippets?

There are generally 4 types of search results you see on Google:

1. The traditional Google search results that you are used to
2. Ads
3. Featured snippets, and
4. Rich snippets.

Google shows a featured snippet whenever someone searches a question. Featured snippets consist of information from a highly relevant webpage, surrounded by a border to make it stand out. One of Google's senior analysts, John Mueller, has suggested that schema probably isn't used for generating featured snippets, but it is for a lot of rich snippets.

Rich snippets are traditional website results that stand out because Google has expanded them with extra information (e.g. reviews, street addresses, contact information, video content, etc). This extra information is usually provided by 'structured data' like 'schema'.

What is structured data and schema?

Google puts in a lot of effort to analyse the content on webpages to understand what searches they will each be relevant to. This on-page content is not structured data. Instead, websites that have been optimised for SEO use page titles and meta descriptions. These are examples of structured data. They explicitly and concisely tell Google what a webpage is about, making it easy for Google to generate traditional search results. Google uses other types of structured data to turn traditional search results into rich snippets.

The most popular form of structured data is provided by schema.org. Their website, although scary-looking to non-developers, simply lays out what information you can explicitly tell Google about your website. For example:

• which image on your website is your logo

• the price range of your line of products

Schema.org calls these individual pieces of information 'properties' which are categories into 'types' (e.g. business information, product information, etc). The names of properties and types do not contain spaces, and they use capitalisation to make it easier to read names with multiple words. To distinguish the two, types start with a capital letter (e.g. 'LocalBusiness') and properties start with a lowercase letter (e.g. 'priceRange').

What schema to use on what pages?

Structured data like schema.org doesn't necessarily improve your SEO rankings, but it does help Google understand what your webpages are about. This allows Google to include your webpages in search results that are more relevant to you (which can help your SEO).

We know that Google uses structured data to generate many different types of rich snippets including: FAQs, how-to guides, logos, products, reviews, datasets, events, breadcrumbs, and a few others. The list is limited but Google is constantly developing new ways to answer users' questions more effectively, so we should expect more types of rich snippets to come.