In this day and age, your company’s website is in the nutshell the identity of your business. We are accustomed to quick results and inputs of knowledge, and it has become quite customary to check what the internet has to say about a company (or a person) in order to verify their validity. So what does that mean for your website? Well, if the website doesn’t come up on the search engines’ first page, then your customers might find themselves checking out your competitor. Being visible on the internet and having your company’s website come up among the first results is essential!
Before we go any further, do you know what schema markup actually is? Sure, it might sound a bit too techy for pretty much everyone’s taste (unless you are a programmer), but perk your ears, schema markup can help get your website on Google's map!
What is Schema Markup?
Back in 2011 top search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex) started collaborating on creating Schema.org - a semantic vocabulary of tags that once added to your HTML can improve the manner in which search engines will crawl and present the information on your website to the search engine results pages (commonly referred to as SERPs). This can be done through RDFa, Microdata, and JSON-LD languages of code.
This is what Schema.org says:
“Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means — “Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.”
In layman’s terms, it is a piece of code that you can place on your website. This will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing or Yandex understand the meaning of the content on your page.
Let’s say you’ve implemented schema markup on your website, what happens then? What is a notable difference in implementing schema markup on your website?
Here it is: Once add schema markup to your website, search engines will display better information on your website to the users searching a specific term. This means that your website can come up as an answer to ‘people also ask’, known as a type of a rich snippet.
Therefore: Implementing schema markup will help you feature the contents on your website in a structured way, either by displaying page links underneath a search result, or featuring your website as a part of rich snippets.
Schema markup is most commonly used to show articles, events, products, people, organizations, local businesses, reviews, recipes, medical conditions.
Why is Schema Markup Important?
Some time ago, we’ve spoken about how to optimise for featured snippets. There, we’ve explained that Google leaves less and less room for organic results on its SERPs. Before, just by typing the term you’d like to search, you’d get 10 organic results. Then the ads came, followed by featured snippets and position zero. Only position zero is no longer just that. Instead, what used to be a position zero, now is position one, but differently displayed.
Why is it important that you are aware of this? You (and everyone else) wants their website to show up as higher as possible on Google’s first page. By implementing schema markup, you have higher chances of being featured as a part of rich snippets.
As rich snippets help your website appear more prominently on the SERPs, this has shown to influence click-through-rates (CTR). Not only that but also:
- 35% more impressions
- 26% more clicks
- 20% higher CTR
- people will spend 150% more time on pages with rich results.
Since schema markup doesn’t only say what a webpage says, but what the contents on its page also means, it improves the chances of people finding your website. In addition, schema markup helps:
- optimise your website for voice search
- people can play your video from SERPs
- enhance the number of visitors on your blog
- build a knowledge graph
- use your knowledge graph for chatbots
How can Schema Markup Improve Your Website’s SEO?
Although from what is stated above, it would appear that schema markup can directly improve your website’s search rankings, this is not the case. Or, better yet, there is yet to be evidence that schema markup has a direct impact on improving the website’s search rankings. However, what is definitely for certain, is that schema markup helps your website appear more prominently on the SERPs.
Before You Go
Google's John Mueller, back in 2015 said that "over time, I think it [structured markup] is something that might go into the rankings as well." He also added that “But I wouldn’t assume that using structured data markup with make your site jump up in rankings automatically. So we try to distinguish between a site that is done technically well and a site that actually has good content.” Even though this was stated back in 2015, quality content is as important (if not more) today as it was back then. Schema markup can be your way to reach the audiences with your amazing content and all you have to offer!
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