Schema Markup, or Structured Data as it is commonly known, may be one of the most important pieces of your SEO strategy, but it is often ignored or overlooked by many companies. Structured data allows search engines like Google to understand more about your website, allowing for increased search visibility with rich results and expanded data to consumers about your business.

A recent study by Semrush found that 56 percent of Fortune 500 companies were not using any type of structured data on their websites. Odds are, many local businesses in your area are missing structured data from their website as well. This provides your business the opportunity to provide search engines with more data than the competition, which can help improve how Google and others understand your website, connections between pages, and your company’s products and services. It is also possible for search rankings to improve as well when using structured data.

How structured data works can be a little confusing at first glance, but it is actually fairly straightforward. Simply put, structured data is a large set of tags or microdata that can be used to improve the way search engines understand your business, your website, and individual web pages. Schema.org provides these standardized tag categories, and is a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo.

When you add the correct tags to the code of a page using one of a few different formats (such as JSON-LD), search engines can easily read and understand the content contained in the tags. Then, search engines like Google can choose to show enhanced search engine result pages with your structured data. These enhanced search results are called Rich Results, and they offer more information than a standard link and description. Rich Results include items like drop-down FAQs, recipe cards with images, star ratings, product listings, and much more.

The tags Schema.org supports and how search engines use this data is constantly changing as well, with new items being added fairly frequently. Search Engine Journal reports that more opportunities to enhance voice search using structured data are on the horizon as well, which is quickly becoming the preferred way to search by many people. Staying on top of the latest structured data features is one of the best ways to ensure your website remains at the top of search results.

If you have any questions, or want to learn more contact the 10TH DEGREE team at contact@10thdegree.com today.