Schema markup is one of the newer and more complex additions to the SEO landscape. Schema is a new markup language for adding additional information in JSON to your page that formats certain types of data. Schema was initially adopted by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to provide more rich results in their SERPs, making search results richer, more helpful, and easier to understand. Its main purpose is to serve better SERP snippets and allow search engines to display all kinds of useful information like product reviews or information within recipes.
How Does Schema Work?
Schema is sort of like an instruction manual for search engines. It tells them how to process certain types of data on your website. For example, schema tells Google that a page is a "recipe", so it knows to display information like cooking time and ingredients in a special box in search results. Schema also gives Google instructions on how to process other types of content, like reviews or local business information.
Have you ever done a search and noticed rich results for certain sites like recipes, events, or reviews? Chances are those sites have implemented some form of schema markup.
Rich results give searchers quick access to information they want without having to click through to a website. The more information provided in the snippet, the more likely searchers are to find what they want without needing to check other websites, which means less traffic for you.
The code used to create the schema is called "microdata", and it's added to your existing HTML tags. This makes it easy for you to add to your website without creating new pages or changing your design.
Why is Schema Important?
Google has stated that schema improves click-through rate and gives you the potential for higher rankings. Most importantly, it helps searchers get answers quickly.
In other words, schema improves user experience. Google's mission is to provide users with the best answers to their questions as quickly as possible.
If you've been doing SEO for multiple years now you're probably aware of schema markup. But for those that don't know about it, I'll give a quick overview. Schema markup is a way to get search engines to show your content in more places and ways more appropriately. This ultimately leads to more traffic from search engines and improves your visibility within the SERPs.
As a digital marketer, I am always asking myself what is the best way to properly market a product to its intended audience? What we have found out is that having good content is not enough, it is important to have your content seen by your target audience. By implementing Schema code on your website you are able to tell search engines and social media sites what type of content you are publishing and they then display it accordingly. We found this valuable in helping us get more eyes and engagement on our blog posts.
Schema Markup Improves Click-Through Rate
Schema markup is one of the most effective ways to improve CTR on search engine results pages (SERPs). A recent survey conducted by SEMrush found that schema markup improved click-through rate (CTR) by over 30%. This massive CTR increase is due to the fact that schema markup adds better visual appeal, enhances user experience, and improves your SERP ranking.
With over 30% of all websites using WordPress, a large number of website owners are in need of assistance on how to add schema markup to their content. Knowing this, we’ve decided to create a step-by-step guide for adding schema markup on a WordPress site.
Schema.org is a structured data markup language that was developed by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex to help search engines better understand what your content and pages are about. Adding schema markup to your content allows search engines like Google to crawl your site and index it based on the information provided in the structured data.
Different Types Of Schema Markup
I know you're aware of schema markup. In fact, you've probably already started implementing it on your website. But there's a whole world of schema markup out there that you might not have considered. You've probably heard of the big ones — review (schema.org/Review) and episode/season (schema.org/Episode / schema.org/Season). But it's important to remember that Google has been rolling out new types of schema over the past year or so — and some of these new tags can really help your website rank better in the SERPs.
What Types of Information Can I Markup?
As you may know, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Schema markup is a great way to help Google better understand your content.
What types of information can I markup?
Schema.org provides a vocabulary that allows you to annotate your pages in ways that can help Google better understand what information is contained in each element on your pages. For example, you can use Schema markup to tell Google that a particular field on your page is an image representing a product, or that it is the author of a blog post.
The Schema website lists all the different kinds of data you can markup.
Here are the main ones with examples:
Articles: news articles, blog posts, magazine articles, etc.
Local Business: store address and phone number
Organizations: company name and description
People: name, photo, job title, and URL
Products: price, SKU or GTIN code, brand, and reviews
Why Does Google Recommend Using Schema Markup?
Google recommends using schema.org markup because it can help our systems understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. For instance, if you've marked up your pages with the appropriate schema.org properties, Google can use that data to answer searchers' questions more completely, provide detailed information about local businesses and showcase relevant apps more prominently in search results.
Google says it helps them "understand the content of pages and provide richer results." It also helps Google generate more accurate voice answers to questions.
Google recommends using schema markup because it can help their crawlers better index your site in search results, and it can increase organic CTR.
Why Isn't My Content Appearing as a Rich Result?
There are a number of reasons why your content might not be eligible to appear as a rich result.
If the structured data on your page doesn't match the content that is visible to the user, Google won't be able to show your content as a rich result. For example, if you marked up an event that happened in the past, or content that isn't visible to users (for example, text found in a <meta> tag), Google won't be able to display this content as a rich result.
Google may also not show your content as a rich result if errors are detected in the structured data, or if other issues are spotted on your site (for example, if it's hacked).
If Google encounters multiple pages with identical or highly similar structured data on the same website, Google may only choose to show one of these pages in search results. If your site has many pages that are eligible for rich results and you want them all to be eligible, consider adding pagination links (rel="next" and rel="prev") so that Google can discover all of these pages.
The Search Console Rich Results Test reports issues for rich results on your site. If you have an issue, you can see if it's caused by a problem with your structured data markup or other site issues.
If the Rich Results Test reports that your page is eligible for a rich result but it isn't appearing in Google Search results, first check that there are no warnings associated with the test. Warnings indicate that your page may be marked up incorrectly, and might need to be fixed before your page will be eligible to appear in a rich result.
Conclusion
No matter what SEO companies say, it takes more than a couple of schemas to rank on page one. The reason is pretty simple: the biggest factors in ranking higher in the SERP are authority and links. It's not about how many Schema Markups you have constructed for your website, it's about how many credible backlinks you have pointing to your website. You can't use schemas to catapult you up the rankings…but they still work great with SEO and marketers.
