Make your content irresistible with SEO rich text

Organic search helps brands grow, for free. That means, if you can optimize your organic search results, you’ll not only save on your marketing budget, but be more able to compete with better funded organizations that might have the financial resources to lean more heavily on paid search. 

However, optimizing organic search means that the digital content your teams produce will have to work harder to capture the attention of your customers and audience, and, more importantly, the attention of the search algorithms that crawl the internet looking for information to fulfil user requests. 

To put “work harder” into context, research suggests that Google alone handles 8.5 billion searches per day, or around 5.9 million per minute. Getting your content to cut through in that saturated environment is a challenge, and means thinking carefully about search engine optimization (SEO). Fortunately, there are ways to tip the SEO scale in your favor, and push your content up the search engine results page (SERP). One of the most effective is to leverage rich text. 

In this post, we’re going to look at SEO rich text, and how your brand can use it to make your content go further — even winning that coveted number-one spot on the results page. First we’ll define rich text and its SEO benefits, and then we’ll get into some of the ways you can use it with Contentful to boost your own content. 

Let’s get started. 

What is SEO rich text?

Rich text is digital text that has been optimized to communicate with search engines and generative AI (GenAI) engines. The idea is that rich text increases the likelihood that page content appears at the top of SERPs in a format known as “rich results” or “rich snippets,” or, in the case of GenAI engines, appears in results returned by GenAI engines.  

Rich results are expanded expressions of your digital content that appear first in search results, below paid ads. These results typically draw audience attention more effectively than a simple link because they provide a glimpse into the content beyond the link, giving searchers a better idea of whether the page is what they’re looking for, and whether it’s worth clicking through.

For example, if you searched “Why is cheese not sticking to pizza,” Google would search for rich-text content, and then use that rich text to create a rich result along the lines of:

With the advent of widespread GenAI search, however, things have changed. Now, more often than not, Google is returning AI-generated responses, called AI Overviews, in place of rich results. We understand that AI Overviews use rich text via structured data to create their AI-generated response, so we’ll be talking about GenAI a lot in relation to SEO rich text — in other words: generative engine optimization (GEO). 

How to create SEO rich text

Text becomes “rich” when you add certain elements to it including keywords, phrases, meta data, and meta tags, and structured data markup — we’ll look at these elements in a bit more detail later. The point is, these elements give your content a way of communicating directly with both search and answer engines, letting them know what the page is about, and how it might fulfill a user’s query. 

You can think of rich snippets as an enhanced search result, and SEO rich text as the means by which that result is enhanced.

As we noted earlier, rich snippets are more visually appealing to users than simple, vertically listed page titles and page descriptions, and so are more likely to encourage clicks. As Google Search’s document leak last year confirmed, Google uses clicks as a key metric for evaluating a page's quality and relevance when ranking and delivering search results, which means it’s worth the effort to get the search engine to present your page as a rich snippet to earn incremental clicks. 

There’s huge SEO potential for rich snippet results, and a lot of visual variety beyond the example we used above. For example, in a search for a “neapolitan pizza recipe,” a search engine would typically use the information specified by your structured data to transform a normal search result into a rich snippet that included the following properties:

• An image of the freshly baked pie.

• Average star rating from users, (hopefully) positively recommending your recipe.

• The time it takes to make the pizza from start to finish.

You’ll frequently see rich snippets when searching for products, events, FAQs, and more. You can include optional properties in the structured data too, including the author of the recipe, keywords (yes, keywords!), nutritional calories, recipe category, type of cuisine, a list of ingredients, and the full step-by-step instructions.

You might be asking: Why should I include these additional properties if Google isn’t going to include them in the search result? There are two main reasons:

1. Search engines will use these properties to better understand your content, which typically leads to greater clicks and improved rankings.

2. GenAI engines will also use these properties to better understand your content. In fact, they’ll likely use everything that you provide in their search which may lead to your content being featured in the response from the large language model (LLM), hopefully with a citation.

You can learn more about structured data for recipes here, and find all types of rich snippets that you can take advantage of in Google’s structured data search gallery which outlines exactly how to implement the markup and what to include to earn the rich result. It’s an excellent resource for your bookmarks.     

The benefits of SEO rich text

Enhancing your content with SEO rich text to better serve traditional search and generative AI engines has clear organic benefits for your brand.

Digital experiences

The search results that customers see on Google or ChatGPT can predispose them to engage positively with the content beyond the link by signaling its clarity, readability, and relevance. That positivity not only boosts click-through probability, but enhances digital experience in real time, and may translate to higher trust and loyalty over time. 

Click-through rate

Informative, visually appealing, search-engine results, or the inclusion of your brand in GenAI chatbot results, make that initial decision to click through to your content easier, which increases the chances of a user becoming a site visitor, a lead, and, ultimately, a customer.

It’s worth noting how much of an impact search ranking has on CTR. Recent industry data suggests that the number one ranked results in a Google organic search have a CTR of roughly 40%, while those at the bottom of the first page drop to under 1.5%. On the flipside, in a chatbot environment, user behavior is contained, so CTR drops to less than 1%, with less referred traffic from GEO results. AI search results do send more referrals but CTR is still 91% less than traditional search results, and 96% less in the case of chatbots.  

Conversion rates

In digital marketing, conversion rate is a reference to the desired actions that you want visitors to take as a result of engaging with content on your website or app. That might include clicking a call-to-action (CTA) button, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase. Since rich snippets offer context for unfamiliar visitors and visibility of what’s possible via engagement, it’s more likely that visitors will understand how your content is going to meet their needs — and end up taking that desired action. 

GEO has an impact on conversion rates too. That’s because there’s a possibility that searchers arrive prequalified from the GenAI search experiences (having conducted some amount of research in the LLM), and so are more likely to convert as a result.

Competitor engagement

If you’re adding rich text to your content, and your competitors aren’t, you’ll likely have an edge over them when it comes to customer engagement. Not only will you likely be enhancing your visibility in search results, but building a relationship with new and existing customers. The more reliable you are to those customers, the more likely they are to engage with your brand in the future. 

Generative engine optimization

With GenAI-powered search results changing the digital-search landscape, it’s increasingly important to think about generative engine optimization — how your content appears to LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini. Rich text contributes to LLM visibility, meaning that it will likely add further value to your content in a changing search landscape. 

Implementing rich text: The fundamentals 

We mentioned that, in order to make text rich, you need to add certain elements to it that encourage search engines to create rich snippets. Let’s take a look at that requirement in more detail.

Keyword research

You’ll need to perform research to identify the keywords that your customers are looking for, and which you can include in your digital content. You don’t have to use intuition here: examine the keywords that your competitors are using and use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. 

Content quality

Search engine algorithms can detect content quality, and then reward higher quality with better rankings. This means you should take care with the content that you develop and publish, avoid short cuts, tag images and graphics, optimize media for load times, and think about how to naturally include relevant keywords rather than keyword-stuffing. 

Content relevance

If you’re aiming to trigger a rich snippet, or be included in AI chatbot results, make sure your content actually includes the information that your audience is looking for. For example, if you’re developing the neapolitan pizza recipe we talked about earlier, make sure you include detailed preparation instructions, an accurate bake time, and even reviews from other users — so that search-and-answer engines can identify and frame that detail in their results. 

Experience, expertise, authority, and trust

Rich text results are also contingent on content meeting the requirements of Google’s experience, expertise, authority, and trust (EEAT) framework. You can help your content do that by ensuring that it’s produced to a high standard of quality, and features original research, data-backed insights, or expert commentary — all of which can encourage citations and links.

Optimized headings

Integrating keywords into your content headings, and using a header hierarchy (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to organize content, helps search readability — for both search engines and their users, and for AI processing. 

The structure that headers provide is ideal for facilitating rich snippet content detail for results like recipes, how-to-guides, reviews, and so on. Beyond that, the use of simple formatting (such as Q&As, bullet points, step-by-step instructions, and tables) can further assist search engine bots and GenAI bots in processing and understanding your content, and making valuable entity associations.

Linking

Your text-based content should include internal and external links. By adding links, you’ll not only demonstrate your content’s relevance to engines in order to build authority and strengthen keyword signals, but improve the browsing experience for visitors, and likely increase retention. 

Structured data

You can make your content more appealing to search-and-answer engines by adding markup to the HTML — essentially structuring it as machine-readable data. Then, when the bots crawl your content, they’ll be able read and understand that markup, and will be more likely to present the content as a rich snippet, or in GenAI results. 

To get started structuring your data, you can find a vocabulary of markup code, shared by the big search engines, on Schema.org or see our SEO guide to schema and structured data.

Meta content

Structured data often utilizes metadata directly, especially if you’re using a content model that organizes content by type such as header, author, body text, image, and so on. 

This means that adding keyword-relevant metadata to your content, in the form of page titles and meta descriptions, will provide significant SEO value and contribute to the generation of rich snippets. Be aware of formatting conventions for metadata, including optimal character length. 

Applying SEO rich text with Contentful 

We know what SEO rich text is, and how it can help your content — but how do we go about creating content that earns rich snippets in Google’s search results as well as visibility in GenAI search results? In other words, how do we apply SEO rich text to our content?

In the back end of a content management system (CMS), SEO rich text is essentially a list of nodes that developers use to help structure and organize content for search visibility. In the front end, those nodes aren’t noticeable, and are built in to the interface that writers use to create their content. 

Contentful’s headless CMS makes it easier for nontechnical users to create rich text because it provides a dedicated rich-text field for written content that supports semantic HTML, internal page linking, and a robust JSON+LD creation. JavaScript Object Notification (JSON) for Linked Data (LD) is a format that makes JSON capable of representing structured data in a machine readable way. These are the backend details that help your page’s copy get parsed, your page sub-headers noticed, and your content structured as rich text for search and answer engines. 

For those unfamiliar with what SEO rich text looks like, here’s an example of the node list in Contentful’s “rich text” content field that we use for publishing articles. It’s worth pointing out that every node list will be unique to each data set.  

You can see how it’s possible to transform this content node list into React components, and pass that on to other parts of your template layouts.

So, how do we apply SEO rich text across other types of digital content?

Processing rich text to create well-organized content

SEO is often a guessing game about what a search engine algorithm prefers. However, search engines haven’t been shy about telling us they prefer well-organized content. For example, content organized with semantic HTML 5 tags will be much easier for a search engine bot or AI bot to process and understand.

As you can see in the example code above, Contentful automatically treats headers as section dividers, without model bloat or information duplication. Before rendering our array of rich-text nodes to HTML, Contentful splits that list on each H2, creating a series of rich-text node arrays. From there, Contentful renders out each set of elements within their own `<section>`. 

With the leading headers at the top of each section, and the following elements, we might strongly intuit that a crawler and web-parser will have an easier time understanding where a sub-grouping of content starts and ends, and where the keyword header relates.

Processing rich text to create valuable JSON+LD

JSON+LD is a way of structuring data that allows pages and content to appear as rich text snippets in Google SERPs and help answer engines such as ChatGPT Search surface your cited content in their results. 

So, in more detail, JSON+LD is a JSON array that you save in the “<head />” of your page, with each object describing a type of digital content — a list of FAQs, a university, a pizza recipe, and so on. You can markup your page with structured data for a huge range of content items, and (as we mentioned earlier) you can explore a shared vocabulary for these items on the website Schema.org or Contentful’s guide to schema SEO

For example, if you label a webpage as a “Product,” Googlebot could use that additional information to showcase your page in a shopping carousel, and include additional fields such as price and average customer rating, along with a thumbnail of your product. It could do all that under the “Product” structured data markup using JSON+LD.

On Contentful, creators don’t have to worry about the technical details behind the rich snippet, because the Contentful CMS allows writers to embed rich-text models in the text.  

In this environment, you can create specific models that match the JSON+LD and structured data markup specifications that Google and GenAI engines use for each respective schema type. 

This structured input allows us to:

• Format content in semantically appropriate HTML.

• Properly link it and nest it in other content.

• Transform these steps into comprehensive JSON+LD.

Because the component rendering HTML markup is also generating our JSON+LD, we can make direct navigation references between our JSON+LD and HTML code elements — including specifying the anchor link for specific steps in the how-to process. 

Build SEO value with Contenful 

Contentful is designed to transform organic search potential, adding SEO rich text and structured data markup to content effortlessly, without complicating content workflows or adding to the content creation burden. 

From small startups to some of the biggest enterprises in the world, our platform empowers everyone on the content team — whether you’re a developer seeking to optimize for the latest search algorithm nuance and climb search engine rankings, or a marketer working to launch the latest campaign quickly without worrying about the technical requirements of an SEO model. 

And if you’re only just beginning your exploration of SEO rich text, don’t be afraid to use Contentful to go beyond the formatting tips we included here. While rich text can help you trigger rich snippets and increase conversions, the Contentful CMS can push every aspect of the digital experience for your audience. 

You can even start exploring those possibilities today by creating a free Contentful account. 

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