Online Marketing | SEO

How to Use Structured Data for SEO

Structured data is an important element of successful search engine optimization (SEO). It helps search engines to better understand your website and make your content more relevant for potential visitors. In this blog post, you will learn why you should use structured data and how it will benefit your website’s SEO ranking.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data (otherwise called Snippets) adds additional information in a standardized code format (markups) to your website. Search engines can read these markups and potentially will show your website content as “rich snippets” in the search engine results pages (SERPs), for example with an additional picture or a review.

The following example shows the rich snippet (search result) of a recipe with structured data. This result stands out: it includes an image, the recipe rating, the time of preparation and ingredients because the publisher provided structured data in the webpage.

 

Structured snipped Recipes Advance Metrics Blog

 

 

Why is Structured Data Important for SEO?

There are two reasons why structured data has a positive impact on your search engine rankings:

  • Search engines can identify the type of content provided on your website. It can then be displayed accordingly, for example video results are shown with a thumbnail image and a play symbol. As a result the user immediately recognizes that the result includes video content. In addition, there is a higher possibility that the search result is shown in the different Google search categories (verticals), such as videos in the video search and news articles in the news search.
  • Snippets are tendency wise larger than the normal search results because they are often accompanied with an image, a map or even extended pieces of text. This means that your website has a larger visibility simply for taking up more space in the SERP. This can increase the click-through-rate and therefore positively impact your website ranking as a whole.

How to create Structured Data

Creating structured data requires advanced HTML knowledge.

Schema.org provides very detailed information about how to markup different types of content. These schema.org markups are recognized by the major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex.

Once the structured data is implemented, Google provides a tool to test it.

Applications of Structured Data for SEO

Google currently supports different types of structured data and rich snippets. The relevancy of each type depends on your business area and your website content. Below you can find examples of possible rich snippets:

 

Products

Structured snipped Product Advance Metrics Blog

 

 

 

 

Events

Structured snipped Events Advance Metrics Blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Software App

Structured snipped Software Advance Metrics Blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

FAQ

Structured snipped FAQ Advance Metrics Blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In short, the implementation of structured data requires some effort, but it is worth it because it really increases the search engine visibility of your website.

At Advance Metrics, we are happy to advise you on which Structured Data is suitable for your business and guide you through the implementation process.