Revamp Your SEO Strategy with Schema Markup and Structured Data

Schema markup is one of the most crucial yet least used search engine optimization techniques.

As reported on Search Engine Land, around 80 percent of websites haven’t yet implemented schema markup.

However, it’s something that can boost your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs) if you grasp its concept and method.

According to Google’s John Mueller, Google might consider structured data markup as a ranking factor.

Okay! But what is schema markup?

Schema markup is a kind of code (semantic vocabulary) that you can use on your website to help search engines better understand and more thoroughly crawl your site. In this way, they provide more meaningful and informative results for users.

The best thing about this? Understanding schema markup isn’t a big deal if you’ve ever used rich snippets before.

It’s Schema.org that provides schema markup for websites. Schema.org is the outcome of the collaboration of the big names like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Yandex with the mission to create, maintain and endorse schemas for structured data on the internet.

Schema.org offers a list of the commonly used schema markups. For this, you can visit the Organization of Schemas page to view the list. On this page, you can discover the types that best suit your business.

Now, read on to explore how schema markup improves SEO and the way to implement it.

How Schema Markup Improves SEO

Internet users performing searches through search engines expect quick and meaningful results.

And schema markup helps you provide the same by making your website meaningful to search engines.

It’s a vital technique that improves SEO and is followed across the globe by the people who want their website to appear relevant and informative in search results.

Today, numerous brands are using schema markup to help search engines understand their site’s content. Schema markup enhances search engine visibility and offers an exceptional way to create search-friendly signals that can positively impact search rankings.

You’ll start to see higher SERP rankings, increased organic search traffic and more backlinks. To keep an eye on how much progress you make with this Schema markup strategy here, watch your Monitor Backlinks dashboard.

In Monitor Backlinks, you’ll easily be able to track all of these metrics: SERP rankings, organic traffic and backlinks.

 

 

If you don’t already have a Monitor Backlinks account, then you can take advantage of the 30-day free trial before starting this schema markup strategy. Who knows how much progress you’ll see in just 30 days?

Let’s take a glance at the following points to understand its advantages.

Schema Markup Makes Website Data Meaningful

Schema tells search engines the real purpose of using data on your web pages—not just what it says.

For instance, it makes search engine understand the difference between an ordinary text and an author name.

Take a peep at this example to understand how schema markup makes website data meaningful.

As you can see in the above image, Google displays reviews, cooking time and calorie information in the search results in a unique way.

People searching for this information on Google can now see the most meaningful data because the website food.com used schema markup correctly.

How Schema Markup Boosts Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Meaningful results mean an increase in CTR. Yes!

According to an article published on Search Engine Land, schema markup has the potential to boost organic CTR from anywhere between 10 to 30 percent.

A famous Dutch car insurance website independer.nl realized an increase of around 28 percent in SEO search share (CTR).

Schema Markup Makes Websites Appear as Virtual Business Cards

Schema markup has been invented for users. It gives online users an idea of what your website is all about, what you do, where you are and other crucial information.

It’s something that helps search engines read and return a website in a meaningful way just like a business card.

Take a glance at the following example to understand how schema markup turns a website into a virtual business card.
 

8 Different Types of Schema Markups for Different Sites

1. Organization Schema Markup

You can use organization schema markup to generate brand signals that will enhance your website snippet presence in SERPs.

Make sure you specify your logo, social media profiles and contact information. See how it appears in SERPs.
 

2. Website Schema Markup

You can use WebSite schema markup to generate the sitelinks search box for your brand name in SERPs. For this, you must have a site search on your site to enable sitelinks search box element. See how it looks in SERPs.
 

3. Schema Article Markup

If you have an informative website, you can use NewsArticle or BlogPosting schemas for getting to appear in Google News. Your post will look like this:
 

4. Site Navigation Schema Markup

You can use SiteNavigationElement markup to help search engines understand your site structure and navigation. It will show up in search results like this:

5. Video Schema Markup

If your website has embedded or hosted video content, you can use VideoObject schema. This way, search engines will show up videos for your web page in SERPs. See how it looks:
 

6. Breadcrumbs Markup

You can use BreadcrumbList schema to generate breadcrumb-rich snippets for your web pages in search results. Take a peek, see how it appears:
 

7. Schema Software Application Markup

To create app rich snippets for your application, you can use SoftwareApplication markup. Take a look how it appears:
 

8. Schema Product & Offer Markup

For an eCommerce website, you can use Product and Offer markups for your products to appear in the SERPs. You can include price, description, and status information like available or out of stock.

It will appear in SERPs like this:
 

How to Implement Schema Markup

To withstand in today’s online competitive space, it is crucial for you to rank well, look well and do well in SERPs to become credible for users and search engines.

Now, let’s take a glance at the steps to understand how to implement schema markup. It comprises of three main steps namely “Enter Page,” “Tag Data” and “View HTML.”

1. Visit Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper as this tool will help you add structured data markup to your web page.

2. Select data type that you are planning to markup. On this page, you will have options like Articles, Book Reviews, Events, Films, Local Businesses, Products, Restaurants, Software Applications, TV Episodes and TV Episodes with Ratings.

3. Paste in the URL of the web page of your website that you wish to markup.

4. Start tagging your data by highlighting text and selecting the type of elements you want to markup.

5. Once you are done with tagging, hit the “CREATE HTML” button.

6. Add schema markup code to your web page.

7. In the end, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to see your page appearance with the added markup.

Final Thoughts on Schema Markup and SEO

As we showed, using schema markup isn’t a big deal.

If you want to make your SEO efforts worthwhile, schema markup is a thing that deserves a shot.

Disregarding it may devoid you getting full advantage of your SEO efforts. Therefore, you can use it to see how it improves and complements SEO.

Experts across the world claiming that schema markup has a long way to go.

So, implement it to get an advantage over your competitors!