Is Schema Markup for SEO suitable for my business?

In SEO there are many steps that can be implemented to improve and make your website stand out. What do you think will give web pages an upper hand over competitors?

The answer is schema markup. This code will give you an advantage of 4 average positions on SERP, in accordance with a detailed research study by various SEOs and Agencies alike.

It can be achieved by the addition of snippet of code to your webpage known as Schema Markup coined by Schema.org. (Schema.org is the not for profit collaboration by all search engines in order to bring structure to the internet and improve the display of search results)

So…. what exactly is Schema Markup?

Schema markup provides the search engine precisely what your content is trying to convey on your web page. It converts unstructured data into structured data. That is to say it makes your website have meaning to a robot that needs to be fed information in a certain way rather than relying on the Google Algorithms to help parse and understand the web page. This will keep the websites ranking while allowing freedom to modify the content that users will actually see and read on the website as they wish.

Schema Markup is so popular with SEOs because of how non-intrusive it is on the actual website design meaning business owners and website developers usually have no issue implementing it as it will not affect the integrity of their website and branding compared to something like large chunks of content.

The search engine algorithms will comprehend the information on the webpage as well as the relationship between the various entities. For example, they can relate a website blog to the author and category the blog is in as well as when the blog was published to make sure it is still a relevant result to show in the search results, giving you an edge as your content will be seen as newer than competitors.

Using this structure with the help of a piece of code will provide all the answers of who, what, where, when, and why to the search engine.

There are several tools and schema markup generators which can help you make the schema code for your webpage, therefore the ability to code is not necessary.

Benefits of Using Schema Markup

Approximately less than one-third of webpages on google use schema which leaves us with a lot of room to take advantage of schemas over our competitors to improve ranking and gain visibility.

As the page ranks higher on SERP, the clickthrough rate of the webpage simultaneously increases.

Implementation of schema gives you an opportunity to be eligible to obtain rich snippets as well to bring your page content to the top and take up more space on the Google search results. This translates into direct increases to your brand presence above competitor websites.

Rich snippets are results that are shown on top of SERP that gives users more information rather than just displaying the URL and meta description.

What are acceptable Schema Markup Languages?

Microdata, RDFA and Json-LD are the 3 types of code that can be used to add schema markup to your website.

Microdata:

Microdata is an addition to standard HTML tags making them more machine-readable. They are easier to use but can get quite messy as they must be used with every HTML tag within the body and it is more hands on in regards to code knowledge.

This markup include attributes such as itemscope, itemtype, itemprop

Resource Description Framework in Attributes (RDFA)– 

The use of RDFA and microdata are similar, they must be added with different HTML tags inside the body of the page. Additional attributes used in RDFA are typeof , property, about, datatype.

More examples can be found on schema.org.

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) :

This is by far the easiest to generate and implement because it can be placed anywhere in your web page within the code and can even be implemented via Google Tag Manager.

JSON-LD is easy to generate with the help of any of our schema markup tools such as FAQ Schema Markup Generator and Pros and Cons schema markup generator so make sure to take advantage of them and add it to your website to see results immediately!

JSON-LD schema has attributes like @context, @type.

Fun fact: Google that controls over 92% of the market share for search results prefers JSON-LD wherever possible as it is easily readable and can be added and removed with ease including with their useful tool, Google Tag Manager.

How to test Your Webpage for Schema Markup

The tools to test schema markup are Google Rich Results and Schema.org’s schema validator. These can help you check if your webpage consists of schema markup or not. If they are, then the content on the page becomes directly eligible for rich snippets.