structured data

Structured data is a standardized method for providing information about a website. It helps search engines like Google better understand the content and thus improves search results. Schema markup offers one such widely accepted format for structuring data on the web.

What is structured data?

Structured data are content tags used by search engines to understand and categorize the content of websites.

The various vocabularies can be found in schema.org, an open community founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. The result is a catalog of standardized data tags that can be understood by many different search engines.

Certain structured data elements can appear as rich results in search engine results, which is why they are important for SEO are relevant. The user receives improved results in the SERPs in addition to the title, link, and description. Common examples include data such as recipe preparation time or shop ratings that appear in the snippets.

In other words, schema markup doesn't always appear as a rich result in organic search engine results. In Google, Bing, or Yandex, structured data markup won't necessarily lead to rich search engine results, even though it could.

Nevertheless, adding comprehensive markup to your own content is the best way to achieve rich results, as this helps search engine crawlers process your content. Databases like the Google Knowledge Graph also use data about entities from the schema markup.

Types of markers for structured data

The following are some of the most important markups in structured data storage:

• Organisation: Company information is important because it ensures that this information is displayed by the search engine in flagged search queries. This also includes company logos.
• Local business: For local businesses, it's important to add structured data to their business listing to improve their ranking in search results for relevant queries. This might involve adding opening hours or business type. Reservations can also be made using the "Reserve with Google" feature.
• Event: Structured event data is a great way for online and brick-and-mortar businesses to generate additional customer base, whether for a concert, a Pilates session, or an online conference.
• Articles: If you regularly publish articles on your website, this can be a good way to gain better visibility in search results. This type of structured data helps the search engine crawler to perform a better evaluation and ranking – for example, in the Google News widget.
• Product: To achieve better, richer search results, e-commerce companies can add additional information to their products, such as price, availability, or ratings/reviews.
• Aggregate rating: The five yellow stars that appear in Google or Bing search results are probably the most well-known type of schema markup. Separate schema markup types exist for ratings of books and movies. schema.org.
• Breadcrumb navigation: This type of markup is added to a page to show the click path visitors follow. If the search engine supports this type of structured data for displaying rich snippets, users will see only the hierarchy in the search results instead of the entire URL and can navigate directly to the relevant categories.
• FAQs, instructions, questions and answers: If you typically have questions and answers about a specific topic on one of your web pages, you can add structured FAQ data to that section. How-to schema markup is ideal if a page contains instructions with multiple individual steps. Q&A schema markup is another effective tool for SEOs.
• jobs: The job market is another area where structured data can be an effective SEO tool. Here, it offers schema.org Various schema elements that can be added to job postings, estimated salaries, or employee reviews. This information is used, for example, by Google for its Google Jobs widget.
• Cooking recipe: Structured data plays a crucial role here. Adding structured data to recipes, preparation and cooking times, or nutritional information is an effective SEO technique for recipe content.
• Video: This schema is used to add information to a video that has been embedded in a website. This includes descriptions, thumbnail URL, upload date, and length.
• Speakable: Here, information is added indicating which text section on the page is suitable for a voice response. Digital assistants, such as Google Home, then read the text aloud.

Advantages of structured data and its impact on SEO

Structured data helps search engines better understand the content of a website.

With some structured data markup schemes, search engines display additional elements in the SERPs, known as rich snippets, which can increase the click-through rate for a search result.

A better understanding of the website and a higher click-through rate can ultimately improve the website's ranking.

Structured data helps Google's algorithms to work better and index your data.

Google finds structured data easier to understand compared to unstructured and semi-structured data and recently recommended that web users use structured data in the JSON-LD format. SEO professionals have long used structured data, such as structured XML data.

Caution with unstructured data:

In summary, if your XML sitemap is poorly coded, Google won't crawl your website correctly, leading to a negative search engine ranking. Structured data adds a structure to your website's architecture, independent of its design.

Unstructured data that leads to duplication is a no-go for SEO, as it results in multiple URLs for the same product. However, using structured data ensures a clear and unambiguous website for both search engines and users.

In other words, by using structured data you have an internally consistent website that is preferred by search engines and has a positive effect on your website's search engine ranking.

How does structured data work?

Search engines only understand code, so we use structured data. This means that structured data is code. Structured data is metadata that is stored on the website but is invisible to the user.

Google, Bing, and Yandex understand the same syntax, which simplifies the creation of structured data for all search engines. We can use the same vocabulary on Schema.org found in schema lists.

This website is like a reference book where we can find different schema types. A schema type is hierarchical; for example, we can find the schema for a car as follows:

• Object
• Product
• Cars

Because of this schema organization, a car is a product, and the product is a thing. This is how we organize data for search engines and the basis for using structured data.

For example, when we search for recipes on Google, Google shows us an image and the recipe steps next to the results. This type of data is called "rich cards." This is because we have schemas for recipes on Schema.org have. In this case, a recipe is a set of instructions, and instructions are a type of creative work, and a creative work is definitely an object.

A single schema type has schema properties, and some schema properties are inherited from the parent schemas; for example, "Name" is a property because everything in this world has a name.

Unstructured data is simply HTML code without metadata, but search engines need structured data to understand it. The recommended format for representing structured data is the JSON + LD format, which is also recommended by Google.

The final step is to integrate the schema syntax into our website, which can be done by writing code or using plugins like SNIP. The latter requires no code at all and therefore saves time.

• Object
• Creative work
• Instructions
• Recipes