Schema & Structured data – Are you using it to your advantage?

I wanted to publish this post on structured data in your web page’s HTML because it is something that search engines continue to use to better understand the content that their spiders are crawling. 

If your website isn’t using structured data at the moment, it needs to consider implementing structured data as soon as possible. 

Why should websites implement structured data?

Structured data will help search engines better understand the context of the content that they are crawling. So instead of just crawling text on a web page, the crawler can understand what the text is about. 

Below are a couple of examples of how structured data can be used. 

  • Phone numbers that will display in the search results so that people can make a phone call. 
  • Business addresses, which can also appear in the search results. 
  • Events that are listed on the site. 
  • Recipes that are published on the website. 
  • Specific content formats such as video content on the website. 
  • Product information such as pricing, quantity and reviews. 

You can the following links to see the types of structured data formats listed below. 

Does Structured Data directly impact SEO rankings?

According to an answer John Mueller gave in a tweet, it doesn’t have a direct impact by simply adding Structured Data to the site or the web page. But it will help search engines understand the context of the content, which can then boost rankings. 

You will need to test the structured data.

You will have to validate the structured data to make sure that it is free from errors, otherwise there is the risk that it won’t validate and display in the organic search results. You can use Google’s Structured Data Testing tool to validate that the mark-up has been implemented correctly. 

Pay attention to any errors that are flagged, such as logo sizing and incorrect URLs.

Once this has been validated using the structured data mark-up tool, verify any fixes in the Google Search Console

What benefits can you expect with Structured Data? 

It will make your web page’s content eligible for rich snippet results, which can increase your website’s organic search visibility and rankings. This will result in more organic search traffic coming through to your website. 

Will Structured Data increase in importance over time?

It is predicted that it will be. Bill Slawski from SEO by the Sea posted insights into Google Patents related to Structured Data. To summarize, Google wants machines to be able to read and extract facts when crawling content. The patent focuses on how JSON-LD Schema mark-up can be used to achieve this goal. You can click here to view the patent.

You can also click here to learn more about our Structured Data optimisation services. 

I also did an interview with Bill Slawski before, in which he stressed the importance of optimising for the Semantic web. You can watch the video below. 

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5 thoughts on “Schema & Structured data – Are you using it to your advantage?”

  1. Pingback: On-page SEO - BGDM

    1. Hi Emenike.
      Thanks for your comment.
      If you have loaded it through a plugin, can you check to see if there are any conflicts that are preventing it from showing up?
      If so, you may need to use another plugin.
      Alternatively, you can “hard code” the structured data into your web page’s HTML. But if you have a large site, it will be difficult to manage.
      If you would like, feel free to share a link to the screenshot of your error. We might be able to find a working solution.
      I hope that this helps.

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