What Is Snippet In Google And What Updates Are Going On In This Regard?

If you are new to the term Snippet and you plan to start a digital marketing strategy for yourself then you might not be successful through that. To brief you shortly, Google Snippet is the short description shown during the search results beneath each website link and Google is planning to change the character limit of the snippet.

Initially, the character limit of a snippet was 160 but since a few days, webmasters have observed that Google has increased the character limit to 230 to 300. This can be a great change for Google and the SEO experts out there.

After observing the change, many webmasters have started changing and increasing the length of their meta descriptions but that is not going to work out much. To create a snippet, Google takes the data from meta descriptions and the web page equally. Rumours are that if Google increases the snippet length, it is likely to take the content from the page itself.

When did it happen?

Well, it must have started somewhere at the start of November 2018. On 22nd of November SISTRIX, dataset started observing the length of the snippet was increased from 50% of the search results. For now, it is sitting at 51% and at least 1 in the top 10 results has a long snippet.

Here is the chance that you update your meta descriptions and beat your competitors as they might not know what to do with this. Before they come to know, you can plan your next SEO strategy.

How will this affect SEO?

All the Digital marketing companies in Ahmedabad are talking about this change and are discussing how it going to affect the SEO Strategies. To cut the long story short, Google has basically changed two things; snippet length and of course the guidelines around then. The below points will show you how it is going to affect your content strategy:

It will change the content optimization

With longer snippet, it is possible that the reason for the search is accomplished at the look of the snippet only. Longer snippet means more data and it may suffice in many cases.

The click-through rate will be impacted

When snippets are sufficient enough to cater to the query of the user, they might not click the website and take help from the snippet only and hence the click-through rate will be impacted.

Lower click-through rate down the search results

The lower your rank in the search result, the lower will be your click-through rate as no one will scroll so long after having enough information from the snippets.

What should SEOs do?

Now that you know snippets are a tough call to your website and you need to change your strategy, buck up and make a list of things that you need to change to keep up to date with the Google.

Firstly, make a list of the landing webpages which received maximum traffic on the website by way of organic search. Once you do this, you can optimize your meta descriptions for a longer limit.

The second thing you should do is with your internal processes or CMS rules. If you have laid some rules where the description should be within the limit of 160, you need to change it to 300230.

The digital marketing world is highly volatile and it is required that you stay up-to-date with what is happening around. As Google has taken a big leap, you can at least take smaller ones to stay updated with it. Good Luck with your next SEO strategy.

Chirag Shah CEO and Founder at Shoutnhike.com I help client to grow business online with measurable result and swift ROI. I have 15+ years of Digital Marketing Industry experience and I have helped 2000+ business to grow online. I am Google Adwords and Analytics certified professional with practical expertise.