What is structured data and why should you use it?

What is structured data?

Structured data in the context of SEO and web development is a standarized way of adding machine-readable information to a webpage that helps crawlers like search-engine interpret and classify content easier.

While HTML tags serve a similar role, they do not necessarily give precise information on what their content is referring to as the following example, taken from schema.org, demonstrates:

<h1>Avatar</h1> shows the text "Avatar" in the "Heading 1" format. However, it is unclear if "Avatar" refers to "Avatar" the movie, "Avatar" the Swedish metal band or "Avatar" as in a type of profile picture.

Giving that additional context and/or information to crawlers can be done by adding structured data in the form of schemas. Schmemas are a set of hierarchical 'types', each associated with a set of properties.

In our example that additional information/context could be:

• type: Movie

• name: Avatar

• director:

  type: Person

  name: James Cameron

  Birth date: August 16, 1954

• genre: Sci-Fi

• Date Published: December 18, 2009
  
  

By providing this structured data, we can precisely inform search engines about what we are referring to: the 2009 science fiction film "Avatar," directed by James Cameron (born on August 16, 1954). This helps search engines, to deliver better or more relevant resultsMore relevant results mean better leads.

In addition to SEO improvements, structured data offers another major advantage: it makes a website more visible. Rich Results (extended search results) qualified.

What are Rich Results?

Rich results enhance the user search experience and can therefore improve the. Quantity as well as quality Increase visitor numbers. They make it easier to reach potential customers/readers/members by either the Expand native search results or special sections displayed above or within the search results list. A well-known example is Google's "Short videos" or "Product lists".

Google and Bing provide detailed documentation on the supported schemas for Rich Results.

What types of schemas are there and which ones should be implemented?

On Schema.org, a collaborative website founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, schemas supported by those search engines are listed and extensively documented. The amount of available schemas is overwhelming. Therefore it is important to create an implementation strategy and focus on schemas most effective for individual projects. In our experience, schemas potentially leading to rich results have the highest impact and should be tackled first.

However, even schemas not resulting in rich results are still worth implementing. Rich data are used to interpret a webpage's content more efficiently. This results in less crawl budget used and therefore faster indexing and updating SERPs. Additionally, it increases the likelhood of a website being used for AI overviews, leading to even more leads.

We use 2 schemas as a base line for most projects::

• Breadcrumb

• Organization (LocalBusiness)

Other important schemas we recommend:

• Products (for E-commerce websites)

• Articles (for company news or blogs)

• Events (for event application or sale)

• Job Posting (for job advertisements)

• Contact Page

• Frequently Asked Questions Page

• Video and image metadata

How structured data is implemented?

There is. 3 common ways to add schema to your website:

• JSON-LD

• Microdata

• RDFa
  

JSON LD is recommended by Google and became the standard around the web. We recommend it as well since it is structured, developer-friendly and the easiest to add and maintain.

Adding Microdata and RFDA to an existing website would require extensive changes to the HTML-code of your website. Thus more complex to add to an existing website and harder to maintain as your schema is spread across the whole code of the website.

Most CMSs like WordPress support structured data out-of-the-box or via 3rd-party plugins which might come with extra costs. Also, this is less flexible than custom solutions for your specific case.

Alternatively, Google Tag Manager allows directly injecting JSON LD snippets into webpages.

Sidenotes:

• AI tools like ChatGPT are great at generating JSON LD, but from our experience sometimes "invent" properties and sub-schemas. Therefore proper validation is needed.

• jsonld.com offers useful JSON LD snippets and examples.

• json-ld.org offers a useful playground to test and develop JSON LD schemas

Testing, analyzing, and validating structured data.

When implementing JSON LD, it is crucial to test and validate the schemas implemented. The following questions need to be answered:

• Are all the schemas implemented correctly?

• Are all the schemas valid?

• Are the schemas missing any important or even required properties?

• Do the schemas contain the correct data?

To answer these questions we highly recommend Google's own testing-tool: Google's Rich Results Tester

The tool is free to use and takes either a URL to check or a code-snippet as input.

We implemented the following schemas for our blog-articles:

• Article (Blog Posting)

  • Author (as sub-schema)

• Breadcrumb (available on all pages)

For quick inspection of schemas available on any website, there are browser-extensions for all major browsers available.

Conclusion

Structured data can increase click-through rates via rich results, increase the quantity and quality of leads and support your SEO efforts by helping search engines understand your content better and therefore make the crawl process more efficient. Structured data might be overwhelming at first sight, but in the end it is just data provided in a machine-readable form added to a website. Developing an implementation strategy that focuses on "high-impact schemas" for the individual cases is crucial.

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Adding structured data will increase search-visibility or influence crawling-behaviour, but measurable effects need time. Also, just because a website (with structured data) is elidgeable for rich results, does not mean it will show up in rich results.