Case Study: The Importance of Schema Mark Up

By Dave Ashworth on 4th May 2020

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Table of Contents

TLDR: Schema Mark Up is Important

In February I was asked by a client to perform a website SEO audit on their site who felt, whilst established in its competitive niche with good page one rankings across key terms, that there was scope of more traffic and wanted to know if the overall health of the site was as good as it could be.

The initial audit gave an organic performance score of 64%, with great potential for schema mark up, which only scored 45%:

There were opportunities in other areas too such as crawl rate optimisation, though the “quickest win” and highest priority was deemed to be the issues and opportunities identified with the existing schema implementation.

The opportunities and issue were:

Organisation / LocalBusiness to populate the knowledge box associated with brand searches
The site uses breadcrumbs for navigation but didn’t apply schema – from previous experience, we know that optimising breadcrumb schema can have a positive impact on click through rate
Product and Offer schema was in place across product pages, but were missing the required attribute “name”. In addition to this, products on category pages had schema implemented also, and whilst the site has 18k products, because of this 153k products were detected – the use of product schema on category pages goes against best practice:

The developer then added the recommended schema and fixed the product issue – and we saw a fairly quick turnaround in performance:

Breadcrumb Schema

This was first picked on March 5^th, and spiked on March 12^th:

LocalBusiness Schema

The same occurs with the localBusiness data (although this only really needs to go on the home page which will be addressed moving forward):

Product Schema

Whilst the removal of invalid product schema was processed at the same time:

The Impact on Organic Visibility

On March 11^th, we started to see an increase in visibility and CTR:

If we compare March 11^th-May 2^nd with the same time period previously, we see:

An increase in average position
An increase in Click Through Rate
An increase in impressions
An increase in clicks

This impact can be seen across most pages on the site, suggesting a high number of pages and their associated keywords/rankings have benefitted from this:

There will be other factors at play here – for example, this niche is one which has benefited from lock down and an increase in demand for its products as seen on a key term via Google Trends:

The increase in average position and CTR would suggest that these changes were made just at the right time – and to see the processing of schema in GSC tie in with an increase in visibility would suggest there are great benefits to be had from applying schema to your site, particularly if it already performs well.

In Summary:

Schema Mark Up is Important. Optimising and enhancing your site’s snippets can lead to an increase in CTR and in turn, average position, impressions and clicks.

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About The Author - Dave Ashworth

I would describe myself as an SEO Expert and a specialist in technical optimisation with a professional approach to making websites better for people and better for search engines.

When I'm not blogging, I deliver website optimisation consultancy and organic SEO solutions by addressing a website's technical issues and identifying opportunities for growth