Improving Website Rankings With Schema Markup

Schema Markup For Website Rankings

Today we’re gonna talk about Improving Website Rankings Using Schema Markup

To improve website rankings and grow more traffic and leads for your business your site needs to help search engines better understand your content.

What is schema markup and how does it work?

Schema markup is a code you can place on your site that speaks to search engines in a language they can understand.

In 2011, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, and Bing agreed to use a set of uniform definitions called Schema Markup to make it easier for their systems to know more about the data and content on websites.

Examples of schema markup that are helpful to your business are:

To specify what type of business you are, provide a description of your business, and identify its logo, exact location, service area, hours open, who the founder is, and provide your contact information.

Describe the products and services you offer along with their prices, special offers, and the customer reviews they’ve received.

Describe the subject, content, and author of your blog posts plus the copyright date published and keywords that apply to it.

Provide the aggregate customer reviews your company or its products and services have received which can qualify you for those rich snippet review stars you see on some listings on a search results page.

Provide your FAQs and associate them with your content, products, and services.

Provide relationships between your company and its products, services, contact info, blog posts, FAQs and more.

Benefits of using schema markup for SEO purposes:

• Increases the likelihood of appearing in search engine results pages because they can better understand your content.
• Can help with indexing by improving crawlability of content, which can lead to more visibility and higher rankings.
• Increases the likelihood of appearing in rich snippets, such as reviews and ratings.
• Increases click-through rates for content with FAQ, review, and ratings-rich snippets.
• Identifies the content, copyright holder, and publisher of your blog posts and website content.
• Schema markup helps users share your content on social media sites in a more visually appealing way.

How to create schema markup:

We recommend using the Schema App at schemaapp.com. It’s the most complete schema markup tool available and provides for every one of the hundreds of potential schema markups and their related fields.

They have a free version and a paid option. We use the paid option for our site and our client sites. They don’t have an affiliate program so there’s no special link you need from us to give us credit.

Schema App also updates all schema that gets changed by Schema.org, which the creating and managing the organization.

Other options include:

• Code it yourself using schema.org as a resource to create structured data from scratch. Good luck with that if you’re not already a skilled coder and even then it’s an entirely new language you’ll have to learn.

So maybe now you’re saying, wait, what the heck is structured data code?

The structured data code is the actual code you’ll be creating and placing on your site, and it follows the schema markup guidelines.

It can be confusing, just know that the two go together, one requires the other.

A final option includes:

• Adding schema via the Structured Data Markup Helper tool Google provides. Here again, this tool is very limited and not recommended but it’s better than nothing.
• Find it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3069489?hl=en

Schema markup tips:

• Create schema markup for each page on your site. The schema tells Google what the content is about, and how to categorize it in search results.
• Create FAQ schema for each product and service page wherever possible.
• Test your schema code and the URL using Google’s structured data testing tool:
• Test your page to see if it qualifies for rich results in search results pages using the Google Rich Results testing tool:
• Update existing pages and then submit your XML sitemap file to Google Search Console in order to get them re-indexed faster.

Common schema markup mistakes are listed below:

• Schema markup should be included in the head of a website’s HTML document, and not within any inline style sheet or JavaScript script tags.
• Schema markup cannot be inserted into an image file name.
• Schema must be declared with “itemscope” and “itemtype“, respectively to identify items as either person, place, organization, or product.

As you can see, schema markup is a powerful tool that can help search engine optimization and improve website rankings.

With the Schema app, you can get started in minutes without any coding knowledge! You can integrate it with your site using their WordPress plugin.

The best part is they have a free version that offers limited options to get you started. You can find it on WordPress.org or go straight for the paid option and all schema markup options at schemaapp.com.