If you are a business owner and want to market your brand online, you must thrive with your SEO implementations. SEO helps boost your ranking over search engines, making you more visible to your target audience.
Now, there are many pillars to strengthen your SEO tactics for successful organic marketing results. But structured data is one pillar that most business owners miss out on. But to give you a general understanding, structured data is referred to as the search engine language. It is technically known as the schema markup.
Structured data is the authoritative vocabulary that enables search engines to understand your content better. It contextualizes your website content and checks if it is relevant to the users’ search queries.
Let’s dive deeper into the concept of structured data and how it is essential for SEO and your brand’s organic marketing approach.
Understanding Structured Data
Structured data is a simple way of describing the website and its content to make it easier for search engines to understand. When you are defining your website for Google or other search engines, you will need a vocabulary to learn how to present your brand’s website among the users.
The vocabulary that popular search engines use is, namely, schema.org. It translates the content into a specific code they can quickly process. Search engines will read that code and then use it to display the search results in a particular manner. You will then be able to use that code in your website’s database structure.
To help you better understand, imagine having a website that has a lot of food recipes. When you add structured data to your web page by adding one of those recipes, the results within the search engine might just change. It will become more relatable for the search engines than other content pieces available around the same topic.
Thus, this is the reason why SEO experts call the structured data or schema a rich snippet for your specific webpage. Besides your title, URL, and webpage description, the users will be able to see how many calories the dish will contain, alongside the ratings and other such information. Such structured data will create a significant impact on the minds of the users who are looking for a recipe that you have posted on your website.
The Importance of Structured Data in SEO
As the internet is thriving at a constant pace, the complexity of staying ahead in the crowd of competitors is becoming difficult. But, Google continues to streamline its mission of providing required information to users in the easiest ways possible. And structured data in SEO is one crucial element helping Google and other search engines do the needful.
Adding structured data to your website content allows you to present more valid information on the SERPs. As search engines understand your content better, they will rank it in the top positions, giving you the maximum opportunity to increase your web traffic.
By adding structured data to your website, you are not just helping the search bots but are also enhancing the user experience quotient. The users will be able to find relevant results faster, helping them resolve their problems without having to wander across Google’s search result pages.
You used to add your snippets before structured data, but by adding this schema, you will be upscaling the way it appears and the information it conveys. Moreover, many brands are already using this technique to surpass their competition over Google in terms of SEO.
So, if you are missing out on integrating structured data, you are losing out on opportunities. You can check out some structured data examples while surfing general queries over Google to relate better.
Why Do Businesses Refrain From Using Structured Data?
The perks of structured data are inevitable in your website content. So, why is it like some businesses are repelling themselves away from this SEO pillar? Here are some reasons that are mainly being highlighted concerning companies not preferring structured data in their content:
- Businesses lack the required resources in-house and rely on some third-party agency to add structured data to their content while publishing over the website. Thus, it gets expensive in the long run.
- Brand owners lack technical knowledge, which is why they don’t understand the data schema code. Thus, they avoid marking up their contents with it. Even a single error in the code will lead the structured data of your web page to fail in validation.
- The CMS platforms of the businesses don’t support the inclusion of structured data.
- Lack of understandability with respect to the benefits of structured data.
Today, there are outsourcing agencies who can take up the responsibility of adding schema markups to your website content and making them rank higher over SERPs. Thus, this is all about helping the business that is refraining themselves from adopting this important SEO pillar.
What Perks Can Structured Data Bring in For SEO Enhancements?
Some of the benefits that you can expect to attain upon changing your mind and using structured data in your website are:
Index Your Website Content Faster
It is difficult and not possible for Google to crawl through billions of web pages over the internet. As crawling is expensive and time-consuming, Google doesn’t even want to crawl through all those web pages to find the relevant results for the users. What Google does is it keeps duplicated or poor-quality web pages out of indexing considerations.
When you have structured data in your website content, it makes Google find your content more easily and quickly. Not just that, but Google will also be able to understand your content better to index it above the competitors or websites with poor-quality content.
Experience Higher Click-Through Rate
When you have informative details on your webpage, paired with structured data, your content will be ranked higher in the Google SERPs. The snippet of your webpage will be attractive and resourceful for all users. Thus, higher click-through rates are a mandatory perk.
For instance, if your structured data highlights the high ratings of your products right in the snippet area, more and more users will be attracted to it. Higher click-through rates are directly proportional to increased conversions.
Leverage the Potential of Voice Search Technology
As Google and other search engines are now encouraging voice search over their platforms, it is vital to scale up your content to meet those evolutions. With rich snippets, your website appears above the organic results over search engines. Voice search capabilities also demand rich snippets to pull our results for users.
Thus, when you use structured data, there will be a higher chance for search engines to pull your website content as a relevant result to a voice query.
Controllability Over the Information
Structured data is a popular foundation where machines are made to understand your website’s content. Thus, it allows the brands the ability to control how their respective information is being defined and put up across the web. Not just that, but you will also be gaining control over how the machines understand your business offerings.
When you are using structured data as your SEO pillar, it will help you save time and bandwidth as you are providing information directly to Google for analyzing and understanding it.
How Can the Structured Data Be Implemented Onto Your Website Content?
Structured data might not be a documented ranking factor to date. But, Google developers recommend brands use it, as this helps their websites boost their rankings. So, with this ideology, here are some tips or ways, using which you can implement structured data onto the website content:
- The structured data markup you use must describe the content of the webpage and must include quality information that would entice the users to click your website URL.
- JSON-LD is the recommended format that is designed for search engines and is used for implementing structured data. JSON is the format of the text, and LD stands for ‘linked data.’ It allows you to present the data in a precise way for the users and search engines.
- You can use microformats to add subtitles or make transcriptions to content and then hide it within the HTML for Google to extract it and decipher it.
Conclusion
Structured data was earlier considered as an optional inclusion. But now, Google is very much responsive to webpages that have structured data within. It might be indirect, but it is still essential for improving your SEO rankings on Google and other search engines.
Enhanced discoverability, more clicks, and rich results are what structured data can help you achieve. If you are not aware of how to code structured data into your website content, you can always use plugins available over dedicated CMS. You can also create custom plugins to facilitate structured data integration into your content.
Using it might sound complex, but almost everyone can do it easily. The plugins you choose for the purpose might have limited features, but you can always take the help of experts to scale your adoption of structured data in the content pieces.
