Why You Should Use Schema for SEO & 3 Benefits
If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or establishing your web presence, then you may have never heard of schema or perhaps you’ve heard of it, but don’t know how it can help with your search engine result pages.
Here’s what I’m going to cover:
What Schema Means
In simple terms, schema markup, also known as semantic markup, is code that you place on your website to aid search engines in providing you with more relevant search results.
Here’s an example of the results for my Google Business Profile Guide:
Schema Tells Search Engines What Data Means
The content on your website gets indexed and returned in search results. But with schema markup, some of that content gets indexed and returned differently.
How? Because the markup tells the search engine what that content means or gives additional context about the page.
In the above example, Google is displaying the FAQ schema generated.
According to Schema.org:
Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.
Schema.org vocabulary can be used with many different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD. These vocabularies cover entities, relationships between entities and actions, and can easily be extended through a well-documented extension model. Over 10 million sites use Schema.org to markup their web pages and email messages. Many applications from Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex and others already use these vocabularies to power rich, extensible experiences.
Is Schema Markup Important for SEO?
Yes, it is’¦ but is it a definite ranking factor? Not quite. The reason that schema markup exists is to provide more avenues for search engines to provide definite information about the content on your site.
This means that search engines can match your data against a user’s intent or search query and make sense of your data based on the information you provide.
This will improve a user’s experience on search engines, and it can also be a ranking factor, along with some other best search engine optimization practices.
3 Reasons Why Schema Is Important
- It provides extensive rich snippets
- It drives organic click-through rates
- It boosts your website’s search engine optimization
Schema.org offers data markup for all kinds of content. So, your website can rank better. The most common content types are the following:
- Articles
- Creative Works
- Local Businesses
- Organization
- Restaurants
- Persons
- TV Episodes & Ratings
- Places
- Book Reviews
- Products
- Movies
- Software Applications
- Events
There are still hundreds of other data markup types: from entertainment to medical and legal schedules. Any type of data on your website can have a corresponding itemscope and itemtype in Schema.org.
Schema Markup Provides Extensive Rich Snippets
A major benefit of schema markup is that it will improve the appearance of your web page in search engine results because it improves the rich snippets incorporated into the page title of your content.
Look at the example below:
As you can see, the first result contains almost all the information that a user may be interested in – this is only a demonstration of how a rich snippet looks so much better than the second result, which only contains Google’s metadata.
By using structured data markup, you can display the exact information that you want your website visitors to see in the rich snippets of your pages.
Schema Markup Drives Organic Click-Through Rates
From the sample image above of search engine results about inbound marketing, which one would you click? I’m sure it’s the first one that has an extensive rich snippet, the result of a structured data markup on the web page.
In search engine results pages, extensive rich snippets that have the user’s attention will cause a higher click-through rate.
Besides this, schema markup for rich snippets is also beneficial because it gives you more accurate metadata than just keywords to provide easy indexing of your web pages.
Most importantly, behavioral data such as click-through rate, time on site, bounce rate, and such are believed to be significant ranking factors.
Schema Markup Boosts Your Website SEO
Yes, I said that Schema Markup isn’t a direct ranking factor; however, it is one of the best practices that can improve your website’s ranking in the search engine results pages.
Earlier I talked about structured data markups helping you enhance your rich snippets and ultimately boost your click-through rates. Data markup can also improve search engine understanding of your web page content, making it easier to index than sites without schemas.
Studies have found structured data markups can boost rankings of web pages up to four positions higher than those without them.
Searchmetrics
Using Schema Markup
The world of SEO and schema markup is vast. However, this should not keep you from starting to build a trustworthy website that appears authoritative in search engine results.
To get richer results, make sure to find and use the schema types relevant to your niche or business.
Make sure you use all the various markup types that exist ‘“ there are plenty of them. Although some may not be commonly used, if they apply to your website, go ahead and use them. As a general rule, the more you do schema markup, the better your search engine results will be.
Using Rank Math In WordPress
For Tatum Digital Agency, I rely on and recommend the WordPress plug-in Rank Math to help generate the proper schema for blog posts, services, FAQs, etc.
Here is a short tutorial on how you can add schemas to your WordPress pages & posts:
Using Schema In .NET Core
Adding Schema to .NET Core Applications is relatively straightforward using a NuGet package called Schema.NET.
Here’s an example piece of code:
var website = new WebSite()
{
AlternateName = "AJ Tatum Digital ~ Digital Presence Management Strategist",
Name = "AJ Tatum Digital"
};
var jsonLd = website.ToString();
The code above outputs the following JSON-LD:
{
"@context":"https://schema.org",
"@type":"WebSite",
"alternateName":"AJ Tatum Digital ~ Digital Presence Management Strategist",
"name":"AJ Tatum Digital"
}
Conclusion
I hope I helped you understand the importance of using schema for your website and its role in search engine optimization. If you have any questions, please comment below!
Thanks for reading,
AJ