How Important is Schema Markup for SEO

Have you ever wondered how SERPs display such accurate information? How can search engines come to know whether the results shown are valid? If you search for an actor’s date of birth; How is it possible that age comes automatically on top of the web results? Do Google bots have some magic potion? Indeed, it is the Schema!

At times you search for things like your favorite recipe, a book, or a restaurant to visit. Do you know that Schema helps display the reviews of a book possible on search result pages? Not only this. Your business’s target areas, services option, and how many popular votes of a product. Schema Markup takes care of all of these features.

Implementing schema markup may seem a dreadful task for webmasters initially. In this article, we will simplify the process. Let’s begin the journey of Schema with what is Schema markup, its importance, how to use it, and write Schema markup.

What is Schema Markup in SEO?

Schema markup is the form of microdata or structured data. It is the code, or semantic vocabulary added to your HTML. The markup tells the search engines how to read and represent your information.

You must be familiar with the rich snippets on SERPs; this is precisely what markup relates to. For instance, the rating schema gets listed below the website link when someone searches for a query “hire a Magento developer.”

Clients can quickly notice your reviews and ratings. Accordingly, they will visit your website and look for contact information for availing desired services.

Some interesting facts about Schema markup:

# How did the markup Schema come into the picture?

Famous search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex collaborated to form schema.org. However, what could be the purpose behind these search engines coming together? Simple. It provides search engines with detailed knowledge about the web page.

For a coincidence, schema.org was designed a year before the introduction of knowledge graphs. And, Yes. You predicted it right. Schema formed the foundation for the information source of knowledge panels and entities. Search engines fetch information from resources like rich cards, rich snippets, and knowledge graphs.

# Is structured data, Schema, and microdata the same?

No. Indeed, we apply all of the above in the same context. But, how we use three formats is not the same.

Structured data assigns value to the place, name, or thing. It helps search engines in classifying and indexing your data.

Microdata is a form of structured data that works in HTML5.

Schema follows the microdata syntax, and we allocate them values according to preassigned definitions in schema.org.

How important is Schema Markup for SEO?

Schema is an advanced SEO technique. Schema empowers search engines to provide rich features to the user. However, less than one-third of the website doesn’t use markup coding. Companies of all sizes and ranges can exhibit themselves and reach their customers.

Search engines map your data with schema markup. We’ll illustrate you better with the example of a bike manufacturing company Harley Davidson. Google will link up tagged information about Harley Davidson.

Endpoints of the flowchart are Nodes containing data like the parent organization’s name, and arrow marks imply the properties of those nodes. It comes up beautifully with rich information in the form of a Knowledge Graph.

This way, connecting the dots of the whole company setup helps in:

❖ Search engines understand the actual context of the mentioned text in the website.

❖ Visitors get to know the desired results in one go.

❖ Websites can become entities for the knowledge graph. And thus even challenge the appropriateness of the data on SERPs.

❖ Webpage getting rich snippets can see exponential shoots in their rankings.

Besides this, you can land on the first page even for general queries related to your industry.

Properly structured data enhances your online presence. Before purchasing a book, almost everyone looks at their reviews online. For example, in the image below, we can see a clear

difference between another site and a site containing a reviews schema, popular votes, author name, and publish date.

Similarly, people prefer blogs and journals with the blog’s main categories or journal and its brief description.

The e-commerce sector is emerging at an amazingly high pace. Let’s consider the famous site Amazon. Its schema generally includes the product’s main features, category, price, the best deal for you, ratings, and reviews.

So, it leaves no stone unturned for users to get what the product is all about at a glance.

The whole purpose of Schema is to communicate better with search engines and users. Thus, it makes semantic search possible on the internet.

How to use schema markup for SEO?

Before starting with using Schema, it’s essential to understand its basics. Google Developers guide is the ultimate station for getting introduced to Schema. Brief description of the type of content to which you can apply tags:

1. 1. Article: Top Blog or Journal displayed with Image carousel, headline, and main text.
   2. Book: Ratings, its authors, along with best buy sites.
   3. Breadcrumb: Position of a web page in the website hierarchy.
   4. Event: Major happenings occurring at a specific place, time, and type of people invited.
   5. FAQ: FAQ Schema Queries related to a topic along with their answers.
   6. Logo: company Logo appearing in the knowledge panel.

Books, Articles, Movies, TV series, Recipes all come in creative works. Other than that, there are Math solvers, Podcasts, practice problems, product ratings, lightning offers, and reviews. Place, Restaurant, and Local Businesses come in the category of location. In addition, there are embedded non-text objects in the website like video elements, audio clippings, and pictures.

We have covered all the basic types of Schema. Additionally, you can explore more types of hierarchies, subtypes, and data types with a Full hierarchy.

Furthermore, there are three types of structured data format, namely:

• JSON-LD

JSON-LD is a Javascript entry that stands for Javascript Object Notation for Linked Objects. Google highly recommends using JSON-LD for beginners. It uses @type, @context attributes.

• RDFa

RDFa stands for Resource Descriptive Framework in attributes. You can add it to any source like HTML, XHTML, or XML.

• Microdata

Microdata needs to be inserted into already existing HTML code. Microdata uses elements like item scope, itemtype, itemid, itemref, and itemprop elements to the HTML tags.

We can understand how structured data works with the example of microdata elements:

Itemscope: SuperNova could be anything, a NASA space place or event name unless we specify its itemscope as a party event. Itemscope allows us even to mention the video link of the past events.

< a href =” … / events/ recent clips. html”> Highlights </a>.

Itemtype: Next, itemtype allows us to declare its type as a movie.

< div Itemtype = “https: //schema.org/ events” >

Itemprop: Then, itempro needs to be enclosed within <span> …. </span> tags. It helps you to mention properties of an item as

<span> Event Manager: <span itemprop= “event manager” > Marcy Blum </span>

Further, you could be using the same image on your website and social media accounts. For making Google get the idea about the image use:

“Image”: “url”

Same as: [ “Twitter url”,

“linkedIn url” ],

It implies that various resources are confirming the presence of an item. Thus, it helps in reinforcing the knowledge panel and entity formation.

How to write schema markup?

The good news is that you can create your code with the Google Markup helper tool. It’s a convenient tool to understand how you can write code for sample websites or emails. It uses JSON-LD. Other code generators are:

1. Half analysis schema markup generator: It uses JSON-LD format.

2. Microdata Generator.com: It uses Microdata format.

3. Merkle Schema Markup Generator: It uses both JSON-LD and Microdata formats.

Step 1: Enter the page details.

You need to select your categories from the listed options. Further, paste the desired URL or HTML source.

In the above example, we have selected an Article Review.

Step 2: Add relevant tags

The next step involves tagging the required data. Google Tool asks you to choose words that you want to tag.

In the image above, the word or an embedded item that you choose gets highlighted. Further, you can assign titles, Images, Authors, or other suitable tags for them. Similarly, you can opt for events. Then, give a name to the event, location, start time, date, pricing, and all.

Step 3: Generate your code.

Then, you can generate HTML code.

Once the HTML code gets generated then, you can download it. Finish the procedure. You will see the “next steps” on the screen.

Step 4: Checking your website with a testing tool.

Finally, add structured data to your HTML code. But are you sure that your site runs well or not? Yes, it’s easy to test your website Schema with Google-rich results. Put either URL or code. The test will run, showing whether your website is eligible to display rich results or not.

Other testing tools are:

1. SEMRush Site Audit Tool

2. Bing Markup Validator

3. Yandex structured Data Validator

4. Microdata Tool

Does schema markup help SEO?

Schema markup is a determinant factor for optimizing your web pages for both Google and users. Schema markup can help you by:

Increase customer’s curiosity

When users see the required data before clicking the website itself, they become curious to see further details. Schema markup gives sense to the text. Schema enables the presentation of rich information. Search engines make sure that the extraction of data from most official sites and error-free data. Thus, Schema acts as an excellent aid for users. And it improves the conversion rate tremendously.

Guide to Search Engines

Search engines come to know about the relevance of data with the help of schema markup. Schema proves to be the ultimate guide for Google. Search engines no longer focus on just matching the text with the query. But also, it sees if the data matches the search intent. So, Schema markup paves the way for meaningful retrievals from the web.

Increase in Click-Through Rate (CTR).

Google can absorb your data completely, and it can present anything searched by the visitor. According to a study, there is a direct correlation between using schema markup and website rank. Structured data improves the visibility of your site on SERPS and gives a boost to genuine traffic. Thus, superior schema can increase CTR by almost 30%.

Final Conclusion

Schema Markup is quite a significant part of SEO, yet its potential remains underutilized. Schema has immense capability to improve your business and to reach your target customers. Whether educational, social media, eCommerce, blog, or portfolio, all sorts of websites can benefit from Schema.

If you want to design a new schema for your website or facing some issues in the Schema, feel free to contact us. SEO experts at webomaze will give you the proper guidance. You can hire our SEO professionals with years of experience designing appropriate schema markup for your website and fixing any problem.