Rich snippets improve click through rates dramatically by improving the appearance of the listing, providing more information to the user, and increasing real estate on the page for better visibility. They help verify exactly what the user is looking for, so when they click through to the web page, they are more likely to stick around. This reduces bounce rate and increases time on site.

Rich Snippets in search results help improve your click through rate to your website.

The few lines of text that appear under every search result―are designed to give users a sense for what's on the page and why it's relevant to their query. If Google understands the content on your pages, we can create rich snippets―detailed information intended to help users with specific queries.

In 2011, Google, Bing and Yahoo came together to create a project called schema.org. This project consists of a series of HTML5 tags used to help search engines understand the content on a page. Google uses schema.org rich snippets to alter the appearance of SERP (search engine result page) listings; while Bing and Yahoo give a boost in organic search rankings for implementing it. What this means for webmasters is a new way to improve search performance from Bing and Yahoo, and to improve the likelihood a user will click on your search listing in Google.

Take a phone number for example. To users, a phone number is a phone number, but to search engines, it is just a set of numbers. By adding schema.org microdata to the phone number like in the example above, both users and search engines will understand that it is a phone number. A telephone number is just one basic example of a schema.org rich snippet. There are hundreds of different item types and item props out there.