Google’s Rich Cards, which debuted in May for recipe and movie searches, have now expanded to include local restaurants and online courses.
Rich Cards are swipeable carousels that appear beneath search snippets, offering site owners a chance to let searchers preview individual content pieces 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 various sites.”
Besides restaurant searches, Rich Cards are also available for online courses from a range of providers including 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 mandatory, Google suggests using AMP HTML for local restaurant pages and online courses due to the speed advantage it offers users. Google is increasingly recommending AMP whenever possible.
To assist site owners in implementing Rich Cards, Google has updated several of its tools:
- Structured Data Testing Tool: Now displays markup errors and provides a preview card for local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
- Rich Cards report in Search Console: Now shows which cards across categories contain errors and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
- AMP Testing Tool: Now aids in validating AMP pages along with the markup on the page.
