What Is Schema And What Are The Benefits To Your SEO Strategy?

Stephen McCance May 27, 2021

During lockdown, more and more businesses have been moving their efforts to their online visibility. If there’s one good thing that has come out of lockdown, it is that people are understanding the power of the internet more than ever. With us not being able to get out and go about our normal day to day business, sales and conversions have risen exponentially online. 

With that said, many businesses are missing big opportunities due to a lack of knowledge in digital marketing. If you are wanting long-lasting, organic online visibility, then SEO is the best way to go.

One key feature of SEO is schema, which is a technical label made up of code that shows important information about the pages, adds more context to the site and also gives a better representation of the site on SERP’s. Many businesses can benefit from utilising schema if done correctly. In this article, we will go through what schema is and how it benefits your SEO strategy.

What Is Schema Markup?

Schema markup is a label made out of code that shares the most important pieces of information about a website’s pages, as well as adding context to your website’s content. It signposts spiders, whilst crawling a site to outline the key parts which need to be indexed. The Schema is simply added to the HTML to make rich snippets stand out in Google SERP’s. 

When people are scrolling down search engine results pages, they like to have information easily readable and presented in a way that allows them to retain the information. Well, that’s exactly what schema does for search engines. 

Examples:

A Local business: What is the name of the company, where is it located, what are the price ranges.

A Review: What is the product, what star rating is the product 

A Recipe: What Is the name of the product, the steps given to make it and also the recipe.

Benefits of Schema

• Helps Search Engines Understand Site Content Easier
• Improves The Brand Presence With A Full Knowledge Graph
• Gets The Attention Of Users, Increasing CTR
• Become Eligible For SERP Features, Allowing More Real Estate
• Get A Call To Action In Google Search Results
• Can Optimise For Alexa and Google Assistant
• Get Better Video Reviews

Types Of Schema Markups

There are multiple formats in which a schema can be used for structuring data for a range of things, people and places on the web. 

Schema markups are commonly used for a range of features including:

• Articles
• Events
• Products
• People 
• Organisations
• Local Businesses
• Reviews
• Recipes
• Medical conditions

Once these are added, they will allow the search engine to understand what the site is about which is then shown as rich snippets. 

Here is an example of a review schema where you can see the star rating at the bottom of the SERP.

Here Is an example of a recipe schema that includes ratings, ingredients, the number of calories and also how long it takes.

As you can see, no matter what type of site you have, you can use schema to make your listings stand out and entice more users to click on your site.

Schema vs Rich Snippets vs Structured Data

In Digital Marketing, we hear technical terminology all the time such as schema, rich snippets and structured data, but what do they actually mean? 

• Structured Data: This is simply providing a clear and organised piece of data about the content so search engines can understand what the site is trying to target. 
• Schema: This is the type of structured data and is the only type of structured data which Google will pay attention to.
• OpenGraph: OpenGraph is only used for social media but it is also another form of structured data.
• Rich Snippets: These are the widgets that Google creates using the data from your site. We don’t have any control over this but schema increases the chances of Google using our data. An example of this would be when you type a movie and Google uses the reviews from a range of different sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.

What Are The Effects of Structured Data On Ranking

Structured data in recent years has had many discussions and experiments to test whether schema affects your search engine rankings. As of yet, there has been no evidence to prove that they help with rankings directly, but they do help indirectly as it makes Google’s job easier when crawling the site to outline what the site is trying to target which may, in turn, get you better rankings for some certain terms. 

So, why should we bother using them then? Well, it doesn’t help with your rankings directly, but it is proven that search results with better rich snippets will have a better click-through rate as they look more professional, they stand out and also give you more information than regular SERP’s. So while you won’t  get higher rankings throughout the site, you will start to see more traffic coming from search. 

If you are wanting help on improving your visibility on Google, then please don’t hesitate to contact us today and we can discuss an action plan best suited for you.