When you publish anything on your website, you’re not only putting the information out there for people to see, but for search engines as well. However, search engines don’t understand content the way humans do and if search engines can’t understand your content, it isn’t going to reach the right audience. Because of this, you need to do everything you can to ensure that search engines can understand what your content is about so they can recommend it for the most relevant searches. To do this, you need to include structured data in your web pages.
Structured data can seem overwhelming, but it can make a big difference in how search engines understand your content and present it to users. Learn more about structured data and why you need to use it.
What is Structured Data?
Structured data is essentially translating your content into a language that search engines can understand better. This involves a set of vocabulary that breaks down different aspects of your content to explain it more thoroughly to search engines. Fortunately, most of the major search engines, including Google, use the same set of vocabulary for structured data – schema markup.
Schema markup is a code that you can include on your web pages that gives your content an extra edge. There are many different types of schema markup that apply to different categories. Some of the most common include the following:
- Creative works, such as books, movies, and recipes.
- Events, such as business events, festivals, and sports events.
- Organizations, such as airlines, library systems, and corporations.
- People, such as actors, founders, and producers.
- Places, such as local businesses and landmarks.
For example, a law firm can use structured data to list that they’re a local business offering legal services. There are even more properties listed under legal services they can use to describe themselves to search engines in more detail, such as their business hours, awards, employees, and contact information.
Within schema markup, there are also different formats. These include JSON-LD, microdata, and RDFa, although JSON-LD is Google’s recommended format.
What Are the Benefits of Using Schema Markup?
Many people are naturally going to wonder if including schema markup in their web pages will directly affect their search rankings. Using schema markup isn’t a direct ranking factor, but that doesn’t mean you should dismiss it. Ranking factors are important to help bring in more traffic to your website, but they aren’t the only things that can make a difference.
Of course, you want search engines to fully understand your content so that it can be crawled and indexed correctly and show up in as many searches as possible. Structured data allows for faster and more accurate crawling and indexing, which can only help give you a better chance of appearing for more searches and improve your rankings. However, adding structured data to your web pages can help do even more to enhance your content’s performance in the SERPs.
The better search engines can understand your content and its context, the better results they can give you. Most importantly, using structured data gives you the opportunity to have your content appear as rich snippets in the SERPs. There are more ways of appearing for users’ searches than only the traditional organic listings. These rich snippets can be even more effective than landing one of the top positions in the SERPs. A rich snippet is visually different from other listings, which can help you take attention away from your competitors. With the potential to get a rich snippet, you can do even more to bring in traffic than getting the #1 position.
If you want to earn these enhanced listings and stand out amongst your competition, you absolutely need to use schema markup.
Optimize Your Website with ENX2 Marketing
Not implementing structured data is a huge missed opportunity. This is something outside of many people’s skillset, and since structured data is meant to be seen by search engines and not people, some might not realize the importance of having it. Adding structured data to your website on your own can be a major challenge, which is why you need an experienced team that can handle this and more for you.
Contact ENX2 Marketing to find out how our digital marketing services can help your business.