Google’s Rich Cards, initially launched back in May for recipe and movie searches, have expanded to now include local restaurants and online courses.
Rich cards are swipeable carousels that appear underneath search snippets. They allow site owners an opportunity to let searchers preview individual pieces of content before clicking through.
”By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best.”
In addition to restaurant searches, Rich Cards are also enabled for online courses from the following providers: Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL.
For more information, see Google’s developer documents on building Rich Cards for local restaurants and online courses.
While not a requirement, Google recommends using AMP HTML for local restaurant pages and online courses because of the speed benefit it provides to users. Google seems to be taking every opportunity it can to recommend AMP these days, whether a requirement or not.
In an effort to help make it easier for site owners to implement Rich Cards, Google has made some changes to how its tools work:
- Structured Data Testing Tool: Now displays markup errors and a preview card for Local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
- Rich Cards report in Search Console: Now shows which cards across verticals contain errors, and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
- AMP Testing Tool: Now helps validate AMP pages as well as mark up on the page.
