Schema markup is one of the biggest digital marketing solutions in SEO. It is basically the code associated with a website that helps users get more informative results from the search engines. Schema achieves this by telling search engines what your content means, not just what your content is. The purpose of using schema is to enhance the presence of your website in the search engine results page or SERP by being more definitive about what your website content truly means.
Schema can help business owners in the following ways:
- With the usage of schema, a portion of content is returned in a different, more relevant way. For example, if there is data that pertains to a specific place (say, for example, Costa Rica), then schema lets the search engine understand that the data entered is the name of the place.Without Schema, the search engine may just read the data as “Costa Rica” and show you generic information about the country. With Schema, however, The search engine can display much more varied and relevant data to you. Its may show you a local pack of the best tourist destinations or places to eat in Costa Rica, you might even be able to search travel agencies and relevant plane tickets with discounts just by typing “Costa Rica” into a search engine.
- Schema supplies users with a whole bevy of information. Users can get to know a lot of facts such as what a company does, what they’re about, where they’re located, what the average costs of their services are, and much more.
- It provides data markup for local business, media, restaurants, movies, events etc.
- It is used by almost all of the commonly used search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex.
- Schema elements and attributes can be directly added to the HTML code of a page, providing additional information to the search engine to return information that users might be more inclined to act on.
- With the implementation of schema, crawlers in search engines can interpret data in a better way that, in turn, helps to increase the visibility of a website if your site provides the right type of content and information to users’ queries.
- It helps in the proper categorization of website content, providing a much more organized SERP.
- It also helps in defining and displaying the rich snippets of the contents in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). These snippets help in increasing click-through rates of your business quite significantly.
- With the addition of more and more properties to schema’s micro-data collection, the purpose of your content will become clearer than ever.
- You can also establish a conjunction between schema and your social media tags so that search engines can get an even better idea of what your site and your services offer. Social media integrations are also one of the most used properties of Schema to reel in users to your relevant social media outlets so they can consume more of your content.
- Inclusion of the schema markup, along with open graph tags, helps in making the content significantly more shareable by being optimized to fit certain queries.
Now let us get introduced to the four different schema markups available and how exactly you can use them:
- Organization Schema Markup: This type of Schema helps in increasing brand signals and also the presence of your website snippet in the SERPs. Adding a simple confirmation of who you are may seem marginal. But remember, Microsoft and Google employ machines. If there is one thing that machines love, it’s confirmation of the information in the structured language (their mother-tongue, if you like). Far from being marginal, Schema Structured Markup on your “Home” or “About” pages is vital. If you are in any doubt, please contact us and we’ll explain further how an organization Schema Markup can improve your site’s visibility.
- Website Schema Markup: This helps in increasing the presence of your site name among the search results. It provides semantic tags (or microdata) that tells search engines what your content is all about.
- Breadcrumb Markup: This helps in generating breadcrumb-rich snippets in your site.
- Site Navigation Schema Markup: This helps the search engine to understand your site and its navigation in a better way. Site navigation Schema can also help in influencing organic site-links, further driving site click-through and conversion rates.
Schema also supports the other data types. The data types featured in RDF and other formats are now compatible with schema. The schema type hierarchy contains some existing varieties of item types. However, you could also add item types on your own according to your convenience.
With the release of Google’s recent updates, including the recently-released BERT update that uses neural network-based techniques for natural language processing or NLP, Semantic SEO and Schema have become more relevant than ever. Schema factors in search engine results much more heavily than even just a year ago. They can even be used to pre-qualify traffic and gain SEO benefits directly.
These are some of the types of content that Schema Markups have seen a significant boost in use for over the years.
- Articles – articles benefit greatly from Schema markups as articles comprise the largest fraction of all online content. Schema can help classify articles and provide context to what they mean. Backstories for newsletters, an abstract that summarizes a creative work, or a description of an item are just some uses for Schema in articles.
- Local Businesses – local businesses benefit greatly from Schema Markups as it can make it much easier for search engines to identify what type of business you are and what services or products you offer.
- Restaurants – Schema can tell search engines if your restaurant accepts reservations. It can show users a summary of restaurant menus, and Schema can also allow your site to show what currencies it accepts.
- Software Applications – aside from articles, software applications have also become a dime a dozen. Schema can help distinguish software applications based on type, OS compatibility, countries where the software is supported, and the permissions the software needs to run the application.
- Movies – Schema allows users to maybe see a trailer of a movie when it’s title is searched, it may show a list of similar movies based on the director or the set of actors, it can even show ratings from different sources such as Rotten Tomatoes.
- Products – Schema Markups can also greatly benefit product listings especially for visibility. It can help your products by showing ratings, brands, awards won, product details, and related products from the same store, further increasing your CTR.
- Books – Schema can indicate the edition, format, illustrator, ISBN, and even a short summary of the book.
- Events – events are a special kind of web content. Of course you want people to attend or stream your events, and one of the most effective ways Schema can help you with this is by setting automatic alarms that send invites to all attendees.
- TV Episodes and Ratings – Schema can show a lot of information on TV shows. These include average ratings per episode, episodes within a season, the cast per season (end even per episode), the position of an episode in an ordered list, and other media you might find interesting.
If you would like a consultation on better understanding schema and how it works or would like to hire us to optimize your current schema please contact us here and we will be happy to help.
