Recipes and Rich Cards in Search Results

Recipes as cards on the phone

Search for a recipe on a phone and the top of the results may now be a row of large cards: a photograph, the dish's name, the site, a star rating, the cooking time. Swipe sideways for more.

Google introduced these rich cards last month, starting with recipes and movies. Every card comes from a site whose recipe pages carry structured data, a short block of code describing the recipe in a shared vocabulary.

For a bakery, cafe or food producer that publishes recipes, this changes what a search result looks like and which results get chosen.

Recipe pages without the markup still appear in the ordinary results underneath. They simply cannot be one of the cards.

What a rich card is

Rich cards build on rich snippets, the star ratings and cooking times shown under some recipe results for years. A card goes further: larger, led by a photograph, and grouped with others in a strip you swipe through.

For now the cards appear in English, in results on phones, starting with Google.com, so Canadian searchers will not always see them yet. Google has said more kinds of content will follow.

Search Console gained a Rich Cards report at the same time. It shows which recipe pages qualify, which have errors, and which could be improved with more information.

What the markup describes

The vocabulary comes from schema.org, a project the major search engines share. For recipes it covers what you would expect on a recipe card in a kitchen drawer.

• The name of the dish, as the page gives it.
• A photograph of the finished dish.
• Preparation and cooking times, and the total.
• The yield, such as twelve scones or one loaf.
• Ingredients and steps, as text on the page.
• Ratings and nutrition, where the page genuinely shows them.

The second decides whether anyone taps. A card is mostly photograph, and a dim, cluttered or tiny image loses to a bright one on the next card, whatever the recipe is like.

The photograph does most of the work

On a phone, the card's photograph is the largest thing on the screen. People choose between recipes the way they choose in a bakery case: by what looks good.

Photograph the finished dish in daylight, close enough to see texture. A photograph of the real result also builds trust, especially in gluten-free baking, where readers have met many recipes that look nothing like their picture.

The photograph has to appear on the page itself, not only in the code. Markup describes what the visitor will find; it cannot add anything that is not there.

Markup must match the page

Google's guidelines are firm about this. Structured data must describe content that is visible on the page, and ratings must come from real reviews shown there.

A menu, a product page for a bread mix or a list of specials is not a recipe. Marking one up as if it were is a common mistake, and can earn the site a manual action from Google.

The safe rule is simple. Mark up a recipe only where the page gives a full recipe a reader could follow.

A worked example

A gluten-free bakery with a storefront and a small online shop sells bread, baked goods and its own flour blends, and posts a recipe on its blog most weeks.

The recipes were popular with customers but nearly invisible in search. Each was a photograph of a handwritten card under a paragraph of chat, so search engines could read neither the ingredients nor the steps.

The bakery rebuilt each recipe as text: the name as the heading, a good photograph, times, yield, ingredients and numbered steps. Its web company added recipe markup to the blog template, so every recipe page carries it.

Each recipe ends with a short line naming the flour blend it uses and where to buy it, in the shop or online.

Whether any of them appears as a card is Google's decision. What changed is that they are now eligible, and readable, which they were not before.

Checking the markup

Run a recipe page through Google's Structured Data Testing Tool, which lists what the markup says and flags any errors. Test one before the template change goes live, then a few more after.

Then watch the Rich Cards report in Search Console over the following weeks. It lists pages with errors that rule out a card, and pages it calls enhanceable, which qualify but lack recommended details such as times or ratings.

Older recipe plugins sometimes produce markup in older formats or leave out newer fields, so a plugin that worked years ago is worth testing again.

What the cards change

The cards push ordinary results further down a phone screen. A recipe that ranked well as a plain link can now sit below a strip of photographs.

They also change what people compare. Titles on cards are short, so the photograph, the rating and the time carry the decision.

And they change what a visit is worth. Someone arriving from a card wants the recipe and leaves once they have it, unless the page offers a reason to stay: the ingredient you sell, the class you teach.

Food businesses without recipes

For a restaurant or cafe that does not publish recipes, the cards change little for now. People looking for somewhere to eat are searching for places, not dishes to cook.

Their work is still a menu in real text, current hours and an accurate Google My Business listing.

Starting a recipe section only to chase cards rarely makes sense. Recipes suit businesses whose customers cook with what they sell.

The counter-case

Rich cards are new, limited to a few kinds of content and not yet shown everywhere. A food business could reasonably wait to see how they settle before reworking an archive of hundreds of recipes.

The markup also guarantees nothing. Google decides when to show a card and whose, and a well-marked page can still lose to a better recipe or a better photograph.

Recipes written as text, with clear photographs and markup in the template, are better pages whether or not a card ever appears, so publish new recipes that way from now on.

Before adding markup

1. List the recipes the site already has.
2. Rewrite image-only recipes as text.
3. Photograph each finished dish in daylight.
4. Add recipe markup to the template, not page by page.
5. Test a page in the Structured Data Testing Tool.
6. Watch the Rich Cards report for errors.
7. Link each recipe to what you sell.

Step four is what keeps this manageable. Markup added by hand to each page is forgotten on the next recipe, while markup in the template arrives with every new post.

Making sure Google picks the page you intend is the same problem as in the wrong page ranking for your main service.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.