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With over 4.5 billion indexed web pages on the internet, nearly half the size of the global population, standing out in search results isn’t just important, it’s essential.
Think about Google; the poor guy (and the rest of the search engines) has to interpret the content of million web pages to give you the most relevant results.
To curtail this problem, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex came together to develop a standardized vocabulary.
This collaboration gave birth to Schema.org and schema markup.
By adding schema markup to your HTML, you make Google’s job easier by telling it clearly what your page is about; in return, Google rewards your page with better visibility.
Schema markup is a form of structured data that uses a standardized vocabulary provided by Schema.org to help search engines better understand the content of your web page.
This improved understanding enhances your page’s visibility in search results.
You add schema markup by adding code to your HTML, which gives search engines context about what your content precisely means.
Schema markup makes search engines' jobs easier.
Instead of figuring things out from scratch, semantic markup tells them the content’s purpose, whether it's a recipe, a product, a review, or something else entirely.
It is a common misconception that implementing schema markup boosts your rankings on the SERP.
It doesn’t guarantee higher rankings, but without it, search engines would fail to interpret your content’s purpose, which, on the contrary, will harm your chances of ranking higher.
A clear context of your content is just one of the many benefits of adding structured markup to your HTML. Let’s explore several benefits of schema markup and why it is important for SEO:
Search engines like Google are heavily relying on AI and machine learning to understand web content and provide searchers with highly relevant results.
Adding schema markup allows AI like Chat GPT and Gemini to understand, categorize, and match the user intent more effectively.
Also, AI enables your page’s content to be displayed in rich results, such as knowledge panels, FAQ boxes, ratings, breadcrumbs, etc.
In the last point, I emphasized how schema markup enables rich results. These rich results get you more clicks.
This extra context in the rich snippets makes your page look more appealing, engaging, and informative than non-schema web pages.
Additional details, such as event dates and locations, immediately catch the user’s attention and make your result stand out from standard sites, hence bringing in more clicks.
Structured markup gives you the authority to decide what your page is about, whether it is an article, a recipe, a product, or an event.
Exercising this control is important for SEO because when you let Google or AI decide your page’s meaning, it can seldom mix up information or get confused, leading to an inaccurate display of your page’s content.
In short, structured data protects you from misrepresentation. It ensures users and AI assistants get the facts straight, leaving no space for confusion.
The schema type specifically made for voice search is called the Speakable Schema Markup.
This schema markup enables your content to be read aloud by voice assistants.
To implement this, you need to mold your content, and for all this work, you will ask, “Are there any benefits other than just getting heard?”
Yes, indeed. There are plenty of benefits to adding Speakable Schema Markup:
How to mold your content for voice-activated search?
Make sure that the content marked by the speakable schema markup has concise headlines and summaries.
Rewrite the intended piece of content and break it into individual sentences to make it easy to digest for voice assistants.
Note: Currently, Speakable Schema Markup primarily supports news and other topical articles, but it will soon expand to cover multiple types of content as it continues to improve.
Only 17% of marketers use schema.org markup. That means the majority of the websites still rely on search engines to interpret their content.
This presents you with an opportunity to surpass your competitors in the SERP.
Your result will outshine that of your competitors, as it’ll display rich enhancements like star ratings, pricing, event dates, and more.
Currently, there are over 800 types of schema markup. One for Movie reviews, one for FAQs, and many other schemas to help the search engine understand the motive of your page’s content.
For a Blog, important schemas to implement would be “How to schema markup”, “FAQ schema markup”, or even a “Video schema”, which will do great to provide useful context to Google.
Similarly, there are a plethora of schemas for various webpages with diverse content.
The reason to state the obvious is that not every schema is SEO-fruitful for you.
You need to implement only those types of schemas that actually influence how your page appears in the search results.
Below are the most common types of schema markup that you can add to your HTML:
1. Article Schema:
Article schema helps search engines understand that a piece of content is an article.
It is applicable to content that is written to inform, educate, or update the readers. This includes blog posts, news articles, and editorials.
Accurately marked-up articles can appear as rich results, such as the top stories section or in Google News.
Use this markup to display rich elements such as the headline, author, date, and a thumbnail image.
2. Product Schema:
Product schema is essential for online stores and e-commerce sites that offer products.
It displays useful details about the product’s price, color, size, star rating, name, delivery, and more.
For E-commerce sites, the Product schema is extremely beneficial in increasing CTR, product visibility, voice search compatibility, and sending trust signals to the searcher.
3. Review Schema:
The increased reliance on reviews before buying, eating, and deciding whether to spend or not has made review schema a key factor in user decision-making.
Review schema enables the eye-catching star ratings in the search results. Similar to a product schema, it signals Google about your offering, and this time, it signals reviews and ratings.
Businesses such as E-commerce stores, local service businesses, travel, and hospitality greatly benefit from review schema. Perfect for building trust and standing out from competitors.
Local Business Markup is a type of schema that provides brief information about a business to the search engines.
It includes the address, name, phone number, business hours, website, and more.
Local Business schema primarily consolidates your Local SEO.
Other than that, it also enhances user experience, increases visibility, and, to some extent, offers a competitive advantage.
4. How-To Schema:
When you post content that is a tutorial or a step-by-step instruction, the How-to schema markup helps Google understand that your page is not just an informational blog but also a detailed instructional guide with specific steps.
And in turn, Google displays these steps on the home page as a list of steps or a carousel.
How-to schema works best for DIY guides, home improvement, recipes, and technical repairs. At the same time, keep in mind that you should only apply it to genuine tutorials, not to product reviews or opinion pieces.
5. FAQ Schema:
FAQs, other than quenching a user’s thirst for information and keyword stuffing, are a rich feature that can be directly displayed on the SERP beneath your meta description with the FAQ schema.
FAQ structured data signals search engines that the content contains a set of questions and answers. With the help of it, Google displays it as collapsible FAQs, which grabs more attention and space on the result page, driving more CTR and improving user experience.
6. Event Schema:
If you’re organizing a webinar, event, conference, or even a concert, Event schema is a surefire way to gain awareness and organic visitors.
It is incredibly useful for ticket companies in enhancing their search visibility, ticket sales, CTR, and making the ticket-relevant content eligible for Google Event Features.
Regarded as the future of SEO for events, Event schema creates a striking difference between a plain event result and a rich event schema marked result, which can appear as a card or carousel, with extra details in Google Maps and Google Calendar.
Now that you know the types of schema markup, it’s time to address the elephant in the room.
How to Implement Schema Markup?
You can add schema markup to your HTML with two methods.
Method 1: Using Plugins or Tools (No Coding Needed)
If your site runs on a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress, you can use plugins to add structured data.
This is comparatively easy, and these CMS equip your site with basic schemas from the start.
If your site uses WordPress, you can use Yoast SEO, which will add basic schema types like article, breadcrumb, FAQ, etc.
Here is a list of a few popular schema tools:
How to add it:
First, install the plugin (Yoast, Rank Math, etc.)
Second, choose the page you want to add schema to.
Third, select the schema type that accurately defines your content from the available options.
Fourth, fill out the blanks like product name, rating, date, author, etc.
And at last, save and update.
Method 2: Manually Adding Schema:
The benefit of adding schema manually is unrestricted customization. It gives you more flexibility over the properties but also demands constant attention, which plugins don’t.
If you’re familiar with coding or HTML code, I recommend seeking advice from an experienced developer or an SEO expert.
Here’s how to do it simply:
First, go to Google’s structured data markup helper, just as I explained in the plugin method, select the schema type, enter the URL of your page, and click the start tagging button.
After a few seconds of loading, you’ll see a new interface where on the left side is your page, and on the right are the blank fields that you need to fill by selecting the content of your page individually.
Now, it's time to mark up your page.
Highlight the content of your page that you intend to mark.
In the image, I am marking an article, so I selected the title of the blog and marked it as the title.
After you’ve marked and filled all of the blanks, you can generate the HTML.
Click on the “create HTML” button, and after that, you’ll be given two options for Format (JSON-LD and Microdata). Google’s preferred format is JSON-LD, and if need be, you can go for Microdata as well.
And Voilà, you’ve successfully generated the code.
Now, simply copy the code and add the schema markup to your webpage’s HTML <head> section.
Validate Your Schema Markup:
It's pretty easy to check if you’ve implemented schema markup successfully or not. You can validate it for free on Google’s Rich Result Test.
Validating your hard-earned schema is crucial as it flags invalid or missing elements, and confirms whether your code uses valid schema types and properties.
Schema Markup Best Practices:
Although Google allows multiple formats such as RDFa and Microdata, JSON-LD is what Google actually prefers. So to avoid unnecessary problems, simply stick to JSON-LD.
You might think that more schemas would mean more clarity for the search engine, but no.
If you stuff unrelated schemas, Google will not recognize the markup altogether, which means NO RICH RESULTS.
Schema markup isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it” element. You have to monitor it often to unravel any errors or missing elements.
When you update any aspect of your content, let it be new product details, event reschedules, limited offers, or FAQ additions, you have to update the relevant schema simultaneously to avoid failure in generating rich results.
After implementing the schema, you should validate it for mobile friendliness, as most of the searchers today use mobile phones. Although all standard schema types inherently support mobile optimization, websites can seldom fail to recognize it.
Before you take Your Leave:
Congratulations on climbing the schema markup mountain.
Now you have all the information needed to implement, optimize, and enhance your page with schema markup at your disposal.
And the best thing about all of this hard work is that implementing the schema won’t cost you an arm and a leg. So go on and optimize your webpages to win your audience’s attention and trust.
If you'd like to expand your SEO horizons further, feel free to explore my other in-depth blogs.
