Schema markup is a form of microdata or code also known as “Structured Data”, which can be added to your website. It is a language or vocabulary that clearly provides more information about your pages to search engines, which in turn can improve your click-through rate and allow you to take up more space in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Regardless of the size of your website, there will be schema markup that can help you.
Some common schema types include:
- Article schema world well on news, media and entertainment articles,
- Event structured data can be used to generate extra attention for your upcoming events,
- Organisation (to describe a company, its logo and contact information etc.,
- Local business schema is a great way to highlight your opening hours etc. and use specific CTAs such as “book now”,
- Review markup can show your average number of rating stars and the number of overall reviews etc.
- Recipe schema can display an image of the meal, ratings, cooking times, instructions and more,
- Product schema can be used to mark up your images, product description, SKU, brand, reviews, price, condition, availability, and sale price.
By adding these markups to your website, they allow a search engine to showcase this information via Rich Snippets. With this, they can return more detailed and informative results for searchers.
What are the Benefits of Schema Markup?
Schema markup tells search engines about the relationship between the entities mentioned on your website. In other words, it helps them to understand what your content means.
The use of schema is not a rankings factor, so it is unlikely that you will see an immediate ranking boost as a result of adding it to your website. Still, due to the increase in CTR, it is entirely possible that you could see an improvement in organic traffic, as well as your ROI.
Your content will appear better in SERPs by showing that your recipe has a high star rating or that your product is currently on sale for £9.99.
It is believed that voice-activated devices such as Google Assistant and Alexa rely on information such as structured data to retrieve the information they return in their spoken search results.
How to Generate Schema
Not making full use of structured data is one of the most common SEO issues that I see in tech SEO.
There are a number of schema generator tools that I would recommend you use when adding schema to your website:
- Structured Data Markup Helper – This is Google’s interactive tool that allows you to enter a URL and click around the page to select and label each item on the page that you want to mark up.
- Hall Analysis JSON-LD Schema Generator For SEO – A quick and handy tool to quickly generate the correct JSON-LD for any page on your site.
- Merkle Schema Markup Generator – My personal favourite, this schema generator includes all of the required item properties and more in JSON-LD format.
While you do not need to use these tools to create your microdata, doing so ensures your code is error-free. Before adding to your website, I would recommend validating the code within the Schema Markup Validator or the Rich Results Test.
