What is schema markup, and why do I need It?

Google’s search algorithms are amazing. They deliver results that — a high percentage of the time — meet our needs with precision.

But technology is not always a substitute for human insight. Sometimes, we need to give the search engine a few more details so it can fully understand our content and display what’s most important to users in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Say, for example, you run a theater where you want to show upcoming events. This information is added by using Schema markup:

Essentially, schema markup is a way to manually tell Google you want to highlight or clarify certain content on your page. The main idea is that it will display useful information directly in the SERP, improving the user experience.

The major search engines came together to create schema.org, which offers protocols for creating schema in the HTML code.

When should I use schema?

Here is the list of schemas from schema.org that breaks down what you can use, including the most common:

• Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries …
• Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
• Event
• Health and medical types
• Organization
• Person
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant …
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
• Review, AggregateRating
• Action

You can look at these categories, and when you have content that pertains to one of them, you can add schema markups.

For example, a restaurant can add menu items:

Again, use schema when you want to clarify what certain content is and how you want search engines to interpret it.

Also, each category has properties that can be used to describe items in more detail.  For example, events can break down into concerts, business events, movies, plays, etc. Menus can be broken down into individual items and menu sections:

Does schema help my SEO?

The official stance from Google is that schema markup is not a direct factor in improving search rankings. However, when the search query relates to info included in the schema, this is clearly not the case.

For example, I did a search for “concerts in Boulder in July.” The top four results all have schema markups:

Likewise, the search for “Thai food menus in Denver” put the Swing Thai ranking in the top spot with its schema information.

Also, schema that matches the searcher’s intent tends to improve click-through rates, which is a factor in SEO rankings.

The real idea behind schema is to provide a seamless, accurate user experience, not to give sites a backdoor to higher rankings.

For this reason, it’s not worth it to mark up pages where the schema data is of no real use to searchers, or when it’s basic info the search engines are already accurately indexing.

Websites built with the Marketing 360® Websites app come with common markups, like location, hours and contact information, already completed. Likewise, if your content’s meaning is already unambiguous and well optimized for keywords, schema markup probably won’t do anything to help your rankings.

How do I set up schema?

If you are comfortable with basic HTML, you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to generate the schema:

While this is not complicated, it can get confusing when you try to get the code in properly. For this reason, we offer schema markup as a service for our Marketing 360 clients.

If you apply it properly, schema markup will do a better job of presenting your content on SERPs, which in turn, can help ranking factors, like click-through rates.

Test it on pages where the markup fits the content you’d like to amplify, and test your rankings over several months. When you find it valuable, you can add it to other pages that would benefit.

Need help mastering schema markup or any other aspect of SEO on your website? Learn about content marketing with Marketing 360 and see our plans and pricing.

Originally published on 7/6/17