What Is Structured Data & Schema Mark Up?
Structured data is a standardised code format which provides context to search engines for the information on your website relating to, such as:
- Organisation information
- Business address(es)
- Product information
- Site structure / architecture - e.g. breadcrumbs
- Articles, News & Blog Posts
- Events
- People
- FAQs
Each type of information has properties that can be used to describe items in more detail:
- Define your organisation data by specifying your name, logo and link to your social profiles.
- Define your business details by specifying your postal address, geo locations and link to a Google Business listings.
- Define your products by specifying product name, price, availability etc.
Optimising site data this way helps search engines categorize and index your content. It can also help enhance your search result listings (which is why we really do it).
How Do I Optimise Content Using Structured Data?
You optimise by implementing a data vocabulary called "Schema" - there are various approaches such as Schema.org and Microformats.org, though the former is by far the most popular.
Further to this, there are various approaches to applying schema - you can optimise code directly using "Microdata" or "RDFa", or you can use JavaScript and JSON-LD to create scripts to sit alongside your HTML.
My preferred method is to use JSON-LD as this can be created and placed separately into your pages without editing existing HTML, and can also be injected easily using Google Tag Manager.
The following is used on this site to give information on my business to assist with brand and local search:
"@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "LocalBusiness",
"name" : "Organic Digital",
"url" : "https://organicdigital.co/",
"logo": "https://organicdigital.co/images/logo-dots.webp",
"image": "https://organicdigital.co/images/dave-ashworth.webp",
"hasMap": "https://goo.gl/maps/kEoztaTfDZC2",
"address":
{
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "40 Heathbank Road",
"addressLocality": "Cheadle Hulme",
"addressRegion": "Cheshire",
"postalCode": "SK8 6HG",
"addressCountry": "UK"
},
"geo":
{
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": "53.373027",
"longitude": "-2.194046"
},
"sameAs" :
[
"https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidashworth/",
"https://twitter.com/dave_ashworth",
"https://www.instagram.com/dave_ashworth/"
]
How Does Schema Markup Enhance Search Results?
Once schema is added to a site's pages and crawled/indexed, you will start to see enhanced search results such as:
Breadcrumbs
You will see the category pages within your navigation stand out in the green URL section:
Products
You will see the information such as price and availability:
Events
You will see the information such as date and venue:
Does Schema Markup Help SEO or Organic Performance?
Whilst schema is not a ranking factor, you can enhance your Click Through Rate by applying it to key pages and information on your site. In turn, search results which receive high click through rates can see their rankings improve over time.
Conversely, if you get it wrong or deliberately try to spam your page and search results with irrelevant schema, the page / site may be subject to a penalty.
How Can Organic Digital Help?
The audit process will identify any issues your site may have with any existing schema mark up and resolve errors / warnings that prevent your site from having enhanced search results. In addition to this, I will identify any content on your site that provides opportunities that have yet to be have taken advantage of.
Depending on your site configuration, we can do this by editing your site's code templates directly, providing your developers with the code and actions required, or it can be done using Google Tag Manager.
Useful Structured Data & Schema Mark Up Resources
If you want to find out more about structured data, the following resources are a good starting point, alternatively, if you want any assistance fill in the contact form below:
Latest Testimonials
The following are genuine testimonials left by actual real life people on Organic Digital's Google Business Listing. To read more, visit the testimonials page.
"Dave recently helped us with SEO crawl issues on our site and was of great assistance."
Jack Neville
yundies.co.uk
"Dave is a well seasoned SEO professional with great experience in his craft. He's always on hand when you have questions or require his advice and is willing to integrate into the business like another member of the team to ensure SEO can play a central role in the business strategy."
Jay Lau
lullabellz.com
"If you're looking for someone to help get your Analytical reporting in order, on time, to budget with a common sense approach - look no further. Dave is excellent at what he does, patient and efficient. We'll be working with him for many years to come."
Roly Peto
fullingmill.co.uk
"I've worked with Dave on a GA4 project with numerous potential hurdles and he's been nothing but brilliant. Dave provides well thought-out solutions to challenges and is a fantastic communicator, sharing clear and concise instructions."
Nick Le Chat
riseatseven.com
"We've worked alongside Dave at Organic Digital to deploy GA4 tracking on our custom Shopify Plus store for Tatti Lashes. Dave is very knowledgeable in all areas of Google Analytics and has been a pleasure to work with."
Dave Speake
madebyfield.co.uk
