Google Announces Rich Results for Home Activities

November 10, 2020 in Articles



Google Announces Rich Results for Home Activities

Google has recently added new structured data for the home activities.

By adding structured data to your event and video pages, you can utilize rich results to help educate searchers on different activities that they can do at home.

When people search for at-home activities, these events and videos can appear on the SERP as interactive, informative rich results, which offers more information to the users. 

Home activities that are centered around video may be an upcoming livestream or a previously recorded video, while an event would be an upcoming online event that users can participate in. 

Home Activities

Who Can Use This Feature?

Currently, these home activity rich results are only available in English for U.S. mobile devices.

Also, these rich results only appear for exercise-related queries, as the example above shows.

Guidelines for the Structured Data

There are three main guidelines to follow in order to have your video or online event displayed as a Home Activity rich result. 

1. Add Event or Video structured data.

Before you can be eligible for Home Activities rich results, you first need to add the event or video structured data to your respective pages.  

2. Events must be virtual events. 

Since we’re dealing with home activities, the events you add have to be virtual events if they’re to receive the Home Activity rich result. 

Your event structured data needs to follow specific guidelines of its own for this purpose:

  1. eventAttendanceMode needs to be set to OnlineEventAttendanceMode
  2. Location property should be specified as VirtualLocation
  3. Include the location.url property 
  4. Specific the correct timezone 

3. If your content is a video, add the description and duration properties to further help Google understand the video. 

Google also mentions that you can add the video and event markup if your content is an upcoming live stream, although this is not required. If you do choose to add the video markup for any live stream, Google recommends that you add the BroadcastEvent properties and follow the LIVE badge guidelines

Example of Video Structured Data

A video page with video structured data written in JSON-LD would have a code similar to this:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>20 Min Aerobic Workout Reduction</title>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org",
      "@type": "VideoObject",
      "name": "20 Min Aerobic Workout Reduction",
      "description": "Get your exercise in, from home. Watch this quick 20 minute workout video.",
      "thumbnailUrl": [
        "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"
       ],
      "uploadDate": "2020-03-31T08:00:00+08:00",
      "duration": "PT20M46S",
      "contentUrl": "https://www.googlebotclass.com/video/123/20-min-workout.mp4",
      "embedUrl": "https://www.googlebotclass.com/embed/123",
      "interactionStatistic": {
        "@type": "InteractionCounter",
        "interactionType": { "@type": "http://schema.org/WatchAction" },
        "userInteractionCount": 5647018
      },
      "regionsAllowed": "US"
    }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

Example of Event Structured Data

An online event page with video structured data written in JSON-LD would have a code similar to this:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Boxing Workout</title>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org",
      "@type": "Event",
      "name": "Boxing Workout",
      "startDate": "2021-07-31T06:00:00-05:00",
      "endDate": "2021-07-31T07:00-05:00",
      "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
      "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OnlineEventAttendanceMode",
      "location": {
        "@type": "VirtualLocation",
        "url": "https://googlebotcourse.com/boxing-workout"
        },
      "image": [
        "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"
       ],
      "description": "Boxing is a full body workout that rapidly changes the shape of your body through a dynamic workout. The technique develops lean, strong and flexible muscles.",
      "offers": {
        "@type": "Offer",
        "url": "https://www.googlebotcourse.com/event_offer/12345_201803180430",
        "price": "30",
        "priceCurrency": "USD",
        "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
        "validFrom": "2021-05-21T12:00"
      },
      "organizer": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Get Fit with Googlebot",
        "url": "https://getfitwithgooglebot.com"
      },
      "performer": {
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Virginia Woolf"
      }
    }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

The Home Activity structured data is now another way to get the content in front of the right audience. If you have video or events, it is probably worth trying out this structured data.

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