Enhance Your Search Rankings with Schema Markup: Learn what it is and how to Use It to Make Your Webpages Shine.
Schema.org is a collection of vocabularies (or schemas) used to apply structured data markup to web pages and content. Properly implementing schema can enhance SEO outcomes through rich snippets.
Platforms like Google and Microsoft interpret structured data markup to generate enhanced rich results (or rich snippets) in search engine results pages or emails. For instance, you can markup your e-commerce product pages with variants schema to help Google understand product variations. Schema.org is an independent initiative that has promoted structured data consistency across the internet since it began collaborating with search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex in 2011.
The Schema vocabulary can be applied to pages using encodings such as RDFa, Microdata, and JSON-LD. Google prefers JSON-LD schema as it is the easiest to apply and maintain.
Does Schema Markup Improve Your Search Rankings?
Schema is not a direct ranking factor.
However, schema markup makes your webpage eligible for rich snippets in SERPs, enhancing your search visibility and increasing CTR from search results.
Schema can also help build a knowledge graph of entities and topics, aligning your website with how AI algorithms categorize entities. This assists search engines in understanding your website and content. Structured data provides context to otherwise ambiguous web pages and clarifies entities with multiple meanings. This means that search engines should have additional information to help them figure out what the webpage is about.
You can link your entities directly to sites like Wikipedia or Google’s knowledge graph to build explicit connections. Using schema this way can have positive SEO results, according to Martha van Berkel, CEO of Schema App:
“At Schema App, we’ve tested how entity linking can impact SEO. We found that disambiguating entities like places resulted in pages performing better on [near me] and other location-based search queries.
Our experiments also showed that entity linking can help pages show up for more relevant non-branded search queries, increasing page click-through rates.
Here’s an example of entity linking. If your page talks about ‘Paris,’ it can be confusing to search engines because there are several cities named Paris.
Suppose you are talking about the city of Paris in Ontario, Canada. In that case, you can use the sameAs property to link the Paris entity on your site to the known Paris, Ontario entity on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” By helping search engines understand the content, you are assisting them in saving resources (significant when you have a large website with millions of pages) and increasing the chances for your content to be appropriately interpreted and ranked well. While this may not be a ranking factor directly, schema helps your SEO efforts by giving search engines the best chance of analyzing your content correctly, giving users the best chance of discovering it.
What Is Schema Markup Used For?
Schema markup is widely used across various types of content to enhance search engine visibility. Some of the most popular uses of schema, supported by Google and other search engines, include:
- Businesses and Organizations
- Events
- Profile Pages
- Products
- Recipes
- Reviews
- Videos
- Job Postings
- Datasets
- Articles
- Discussion Forums
- Carousels
- Local Businesses
These schemas help search engines understand and display your content more effectively, often resulting in rich snippets that improve click-through rates.
Even if you have an object type with a schema.org definition that is not currently supported by search engines, it is still advisable to implement it. Search engines may start supporting these schemas in the future, giving you a head start with an already implemented and optimized structure.
Types of Schema Encoding: JSON-LD, Microdata, & RDFa
There are three primary formats for encoding schema markup:
- JSON-LD
- Microdata
- RDFa
The SEO Impact of Structured Data
This article explored the different types of schema encoding and the nuances of structured data implementation.
Applying schema is easier and is a best practice you should incorporate into your web pages. While schema implementation won’t directly boost your SEO rankings, it can:
- Make your pages eligible to appear in rich results.
- Ensure your pages get seen by the right users more often.
- Avoid confusion and ambiguity.
Although the work may seem tedious, properly implementing schema markup benefits your website and can lead to better user journeys through the accurate information you supply to search engines. If you still need help finding it, check out our monthly SEO packages and let the experts help you.
