Do you know that schema markup can boost your website’s SEO and attract more visitors through search results?
In this article, you will learn the basics of schema markup and why it matters for SEO.
Let’s roll!
Table of Contents:
What Is Schema Markup?
Schema markup is also known as structured data. It’s a language of search engines using a unique semantic vocabulary.
In other words, it’s a code that’s added to a website to make search engines understand the content on a website.
When you add the schema markup code to a page, it can appear as rich snippets in the search results. This tells users what to expect when they land on a website page.
Note: As Google is the largest search engine and the one you’ll want your website to rank in, we will primarily focus on it in this article.
Why Do You Need Schema Markup?
Schema markup informs search engines about your web page and the content it contains.
Besides that, below are other reasons why you need schema markup.
1. Improved User Experience and Engagement
Schema markup gives search engines more information about your site and what the content is about. They use this information to display your website as rich snippets in the search results. This can help increase engagement.
Also, schema markup can help users know what to expect when they visit your site, giving them a better user experience.
2. Higher Rankings and Visibility
Schema markup helps search engines understand your website. This boosts the SEO of your site and improves search rankings.
When your website ranks higher in search engines, your content becomes more visible — hence more traffic.
Besides making your website more visible, schema markup will improve your Click-Through Rate (CTR).
3. Increased Trust and Credibility Online
Customers trust websites they see as an authority in their niche. Schema markup makes your website appear as an authority, which helps build credibility with potential customers.
4. An Advantage Over Competitors
As we mentioned earlier in this article, schema markup will make your website appear in search results. This can help attract more visitors compared to your competitors who are not using schema markup on their websites.
5. Greater Control Over How Your Site Appears in Search Results
Schema markup allows you to choose what information you want to appear in search results.
For instance, if you sell products, you can set up the schema markup to show valuable information about your products in the search results.
Types of Schema Markup
There are various types of schema markup to use based on the type of content you want to optimize. Below are a few schema markups you need to know.
1. Product Schema Markup
This kind of schema markup provides detailed information about a product, such as availability, price, review, and ratings.
2. Review/Rating Schema Markup
Customers often check the feedback from other customers before they buy your product or service.
Add review/rating schema markup to show potential buyers how other users have rated your products or services.
3. Event Schema Markup
Use event schema markup to give customers detailed information about an upcoming event, such as the location, price, date, and ticket particulars.
4. Video Schema Markup
As we all know, it’s hard for Google to crawl and index videos.
Video schema markup helps Google crawl and index videos on your website. It also helps your videos appear in the Google video search, besides those from YouTube.
5. Person Schema Markup
The person schema markup shows information about an individual, such as an address, education, date of birth, family members, and name. Google assumes that if you’re searching for someone by name, you’re likely looking for some basic information.
6. Article Schema Markup
Article schema markup makes it easier for search engines to understand the content in the article. It gives more details about the article, such as the headline, time published, a featured image, and sometimes even a video. Different types of article schema markups are news articles, blog posts, and scholarly articles.
7. Local Business Schema Markup
The local business schema markup helps customers find your company’s location and other information such as opening hours, contact info address, etc.
8. Organization Schema Markup
The organization schema markup gives details of your company introduction like contact info, location, official logo, and social profiles.
This makes potential customers find valuable information about your company without having to research to find the basics.
9. Recipe Schema Markup
Recipe schema markup is used in recipe website pages to appear as rich snippets.
Additionally, it makes searchers hungry when they see finished products before they click through.
If you want the complete list of what schema markup can do, check them out here at Schema.org.
Schema Encoding Types
There are three types of schema encoding; JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa.
These codes can be added to any HTML, XHTML, and XML-based document. They are used to add schema markup on your website for search engines.
However, RFDa and Microdata are the older ways of writing schema. Also, using RFDa and Microdata can complicate things quite a bit.
So, we suggest you use JSON-LD because it’s the easiest to understand and implement.
How to Add Schema Markup to Your Website and Boost SEO?
If you’re a WordPress user, you can use plugins to add schema markup to your website. Here are a few plugins that you can use.
If you aren’t using WordPress, follow the steps below to add schema markup to your website.
Before getting started, we would like to let you know that adding schema markup to your website requires some editing of your website’s code.
Yes, you heard us right! But, it isn’t as difficult as you’d imagine.
You can do it yourself and don’t need to hire a developer and learn new coding skills.
Here is how you can generate schema markup using Google’s Structure Data Markup Helper.
- Go to Google’s Structure Data Markup Helper https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/
- Select the type of data that you plan to markup.
- Paste in the URL of the page or article you want to markup.
- Highlight and select the type of elements to be marked up.
- Continue adding markup items.
- Create the HTML.
- Use Google’s Rich Results Test or Schema Markup Validator to find out what your page will look like with the added markup. Also, use the tool to test if it’s working properly.
- Add the generated schema markup to your web page. You can also add it before you test, but we recommend you to test it first to ensure proper functioning.
Conclusion
Bing and Catalyst study of 2017 show that only 17% of people were using schema markup.
Add schema markup on your website today and watch your website traffic grow.
