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What is SEO Schema and How To Implement It
Schema markup can help you reach your potential customers exactly where they’re looking for you. By giving your site that extra SEO power to outrank your competitors. Let’s dive straight into ‘What is SEO Schema?’
What is SEO schema?
SEO Schema is the process of using Schema Markup alongside your SEO strategy to enhance your SEO results.
Schema Markup or structured data is code added to your website to give further context about your content for non-human readers like search engine crawlers. Crawlers use this information and context to help rank your content appropriately for the right search queries and display styles.
Is Schema Markup Important?
Schema can benefit your site in a whole load of ways.
The markup allows search engines to better understand your website. Schema markup uses a standardised semantic vocabulary that helps search engines categorise sites using similar language. This means that your site has a better chance of ranking highly for your crucial pages and content.
By highlighting specific elements like reviews, images and price ranges, search engine crawlers can then create informative, rich snippets that appear above other organic search results. These snippets often help to improve user experience right from the major search engines they search from.
Schema can also help you future proof your SEO efforts ahead of algorithm updates from the likes of Google and Bing. With Google updates like EEAT and the Helpful Content Update, it’s clear that the search engine is focused on high-quality and informative content. Schema only further supports the value and gives a better understanding of your content.
In our previous blog, we covered ‘Why Schema is Important for SEO.’ Check it out to understand more about why you should use schema markup.
Types of Schema
30+ different types of schema are accepted by Google’s search engine. But not all of them are useful for every business, so let’s breakdown which ones your business needs.
General Business Schema
This is the schema markup that we recommend all businesses use to maximize search engine visibility.
- Local Business Schema
This one goes hand in hand with your Google Business Profile.
Local business schema markup takes information like logo, opening times, location, and phone number and then displays it in the Google Knowledge Panel for searches for your business name.
- Organisation Schema
This is similar to local businesses with slightly less information.
This includes information such as the organisation’s type, legal name, address, and contact information for different connections within the business. This schema supports the knowledge panel but can also feed into other visual elements.
- Review Schema
A review snippet adds an average star rating and a brief snippet from a review below your product in search results. Review snippets can be about books, movies, products, recipes, software and local businesses.
- Article
You can use article schema for news, sports or blog content to support it being displayed in any rich snippet features. These features highlight your article above other organic content which puts you in a better position for users to choose you.
Business Specific Schema
Some types of schema markup are created with specific businesses and benefits in mind. We’ve compiled a few popular ones you may have seen if not used previously.
- Product
Product schema provides information about a product in the search engine for users to see before they click. This can include price, availability, and reviews so users can see if they can afford it, if it’s in stock, and what others think before even clicking onto your site.
- Job Posting
When you search for jobs on Google, an interactive rich result appears with jobs related to your search and some brief information about them; this comes from a job posting schema. Enhancing the job-seeking experience by featuring your logo, reviews, ratings, and job details.
- Events
Event schema is great for anyone in the entertainment industry. This rich result feature shows users a list of organised events available to attend in a particular location. Perfect for holidays, festivals, pop-up events or even recurring events.
- Dataset
If you have a large data set or research data set, then the Google Dataset Search is where you want to be. The dataset schema optimises your results to appear on this side of the search.
Creating and Implementing Schema
Now that you’ve reviewed and selected the schema type perfect for your site and content let’s look into how to create, validate and implement your schema.
Creating schema markup
If you’re gifted enough to understand and write code, I’m impressed! But for the most part, even as an SEO, you don’t need to know how to write schema and JSON-LD markup, although it’s definitely a benefit if you can.
We’re lucky enough with the rise of AI and some incredible tools. There’s actually a lot of tools that can help you write the schema markup if you feed it the right information.
My number 1 tool to use for writing relevant and effective schema is the Google Structured Data Markup Helper, because it’s pretty straightforward.
Select the type of schema you want to use, input the URL or HTML of the page you’re optimising, and start tagging. This tool is great because it allows you to highlight text, images, and features on the page that match the schema criteria.
We’ve already discussed AI, and it would be wrong to move on without mentioning Chat GPT 4. With the right prompt and data input, Chat GPT 4 can write schema markup for you.
We’d recommend you check out Itamar Blauer’s talk about ‘Generating complex schema markup at scale with AI’ to build your knowledge of the ins and outs of using AI to create schema.
Validating schema
So, now that we’ve used the tools we’ve got to write the relevant schema, there’s one step we highly recommend you consider before popping it straight onto your website.
Validating your markup. This step uses a testing tool made by Google to read your code and highlight any minor or major issues.
The Rich Results Test works in two ways: by inputting a URL or the code;
By inputting a URL that’s already live on your site, selecting the smartphone or desktop inspection tool and letting the tester highlight any schema markup they find on your site and then any issues with it.
The second way of using the rich results test is to input the schema code into the code section of the site, select the desktop or smartphone inspector, and run it. This will highlight whether the schema code is valid and, again, any minor or major issues within the code itself.
Implementing schema
Here we are, the final step! Implementing your schema markup and adding it to the site.
You have a few options here; adding the code directly to the site or using a third party system.
Adding code directly to the site is great if you know where to add it and if you have valid permissions on your site’s CMS. With this method you take the code you’ve generated straight into the header of the page related to your schema. This is great for review, article and product schema types.
Your other option is using a third party system. By this we mean Google Tag Manager, this what we use predominantly. Some guides will say that these systems work best when you go for a sitewide schema like local business, organisation or breadcrumb list schema. This option means that you don’t need specific access to your site’s CMS and you can see it all in one place when you open the Google Tag Manager Workspace.
Our final thoughts
- Schema can boost your SEO in a multitude of ways, but all of them help you outrank competitors.
- You don’t need every type of schema to be successful, just the ones that are relevant to you.
- There are so many tools you can utilise to support your schema creation, even ones from Google.
- Always, always, always validate your code before implementing it – it can save you a world of headaches.
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