What if I told you there’s a surefire way to boost your page rankings and cultivate better, higher quality traffic for your website? Does it sound too good to be true? It’s not.
What if I also told you that just under half of all websites take advantage of this powerful tool? You’d probably be shocked, and you wouldn’t be alone. Schema markup is that powerful tool. In this article, you’ll learn what schema markup is, why it matters and how you can put it to work for you.
Defining Schema Markup
The short answer is that schema markup is a shared, collaboratively created language that helps search engines understand the meaning and relevance of the information on a website. The best way to understand how schema markup works is the example provided by schema.org:
“Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string ‘Avatar’ in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means — ‘Avatar’ could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture — and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.”
In this example, schema markup could provide code to search engines that would help them identify “Avatar” as the movie directed by James Cameron, which allows those engines to serve up useful information to users looking for movie showtimes, for instance.
Schema markup was developed as a collaboration among Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, and its influence has been enormous. You may encounter terms like “structured data” or “structured data markup,” which mean roughly the same thing as schema markup, namely a way of highlighting key information for search engines.
When you use a search engine, your SERP (search engine results page) is likely to contain several different kinds of information. You’ll find paid ads. You’ll see a list of results, ranked in order of likely relevance. But you’ll also find content that relies on schema markup — things like straightforward answers to the question you typed (or spoke). You might find a box with the name of the business you searched for, and that box may contain operating hours, phone and address and even the option to make an appointment or reservation. That’s schema markup at work. Schema markup allows you to foreground vital information about your business and serve it up to search engine users.
Schema Markup By The Numbers
Here’s the crazy thing. As of October, 2018, slightly less than half of all websites use one of the major forms of schema markup or structured data. According to Google’s Introduction to Structured Data, schema markup isn’t required by search engines, though it is recommended. The official Google position used to be that schema markup didn’t directly factor into page ranking results, though Google’s Gary Illyes did devote time to discussing it at last year’s PubCon as something to pay attention to.
But does schema markup measurably affect your web traffic? All signs point to yes. Last year, Google presented a session called “How to Stand out in Search with Structured Data,” found in its entirety here. The results of the case study are clear: Structured data brings more people to your site and keeps them there longer. That’s the whole darn point of SEO, when you think about it. You can’t afford to ignore schema markup.
Schema Markup How-To
But the fact of the matter is that people do ignore structured data markup. Maybe business owners don’t realize how vital it is. More likely, though, people are intimidated by the prospect of attempting anything that’s even remotely related to coding.
For DIY types, Google provides a step-by-step guide to marking up your website. Schema.org provides your vocabulary, and for grammatical rules, Google recommends JSON-LD. Other common formats are Microdata and RDFa. In addition, there’s a useful Structured Data Testing Tool that lets you take your code for a spin.
The scope of information that can be conveyed to search engines by schema markup is remarkably robust, and if you’re just testing the waters, there are a few simple pieces of information you’ll want to encode to get you started right. In terms of grammar, you’ll want to create an HTML block by situating relevant schema references between a pair of <div> tags.
My best advice for getting started is to make the decision to do it. I’ve met many people who are intimidated by the prospect of anything that looks like coding, but schema markup is designed in a way that even beginners can successfully help search engines read websites more effectively.
Read over Schema.org’s examples and figure out the most critical pieces of information you want people to have about your business. Look for patterns in the code, and build your own. Don’t forget to test your work using Google’s Structured Data Markup Tool. If your work isn’t perfect the first time, be patient. The strings of code required for basic schema markup aren’t long or complex, and with a little attention to detail, you will be able to make your website work better for your business.
You probably know that driving traffic to your website isn’t just about learning a few party tricks. Content that’s genuinely useful and fresh is critical. Accurate, updated information matters. Schema markup is just one more tool that allows you to help search engines make sense of vital information in a way that’s authentically relevant to potential customers.