Why You Should Have Your Website Structured Data Sorted Out

Structured data included on your website helps Google understand your content better. It provides the opportunity to display highly relevant content in a highlighted format on search engine results pages. As such, it has become an important factor if you want to increase the visibility of the website in search results.

Some businesses may feel like they have no use for structured data, but there are rich snippets for any type of business and a list for specific products and services. Structured data is an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) as it forms the foundation for crawlers and robots to understand your content.

Benefits of Using Schema

Higher CTR

Showing up in search results with a rich snippet for your product or brand is an outstanding way to improve click-through rates. Coupled with positive reviews, your product listings will get a lot of attention on search engines, leading people to check it out more often.

More Conversions

Rich snippets also lead to an increased conversion rate. Appearing as a featured snippet in search results is perceived as a seal of approval from search engines for the relevancy of that product or content. Naturally, products and services that appear as featured snippets will have a higher likelihood of converting people into customers.

Featured Snippets for Voice Search Queries

Getting featured snippets is the ultimate reward for your SEO efforts. Your website will appear at the top of the search engine result page, before organic listings. In order to get featured, structured data is now already a requirement.

Furthermore, voice search results are mostly sourced from featured snippets. When you get a featured snippet, you have a high likelihood of receiving a lot of traffic from voice queries, often from mobile devices.

Structured Data Tips

Don’t become spammy when using your structured data. There are a lot of formats for structured data, but you should only use what is relevant to your product, brand or content.

If you abuse this, you may receive a spammy structured data manual action from Google. This could lead to your structured data not being shown in the search results until you have optimized the mark-up on your website and the manual action has been lifted.

Whether you’re the one adding structured data to your e-commerce site or the one making recommendations, it can be overwhelming to think about all the schema mark-up needed across the many pages of your site. Rather than thinking about this page by page, approach it from a template level: product categories, products, contact, about, and so on.

Finally, make sure your structured data is updated. Things change all the time and new things are constantly coming out from a structured data perspective.