The Importance of Having Schema and Structured Data On Your Site

The need for finding relevant and recognized results in the search results is a vital need of the hour, at least from a digital marketing and SEO perspective. With the available content increasing on a daily basis, major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more have come together so as to make a proper labeling system. Before we proceed about learning the importance of having schema and structured data on your site, it’s worth knowing a little more about it in general.

What is Schema?

Schema, also known as schema markup is a requirement at present. It helps any website development company or a site owner in general to have an idea of the context under which the content will be placed and helps visitors make a beeline for the same. If you imagine the business card as letting your potential clients know about the job title, schema markup is equivalent to convey the search engines about aspects so that they’re well indexed.

If we come down to the fundamentals once again, the schema is often misconstrued that augments your specially designed website SEO. While there’s no denying how schemas actually optimize the presence of your site on SERPs and if the content synchronizes with the contents, it is not essential to increase the rankings.

What is Structured Data?

Earlier, no one really gave much of a thought about online content publication and how HTML coding is important. People were content with how the information got rendered in the browser. Sadly, search engines had little role to play there. Since no explanatory details were present in HTML, making sense of the data and selecting important sections was out of the question.

Using structured data, there is a certain level of value that gets added in HTML so as to make sense to search engines. Also, it stays viewer-friendly after this. In the current world, multiple formats have emerged and their varied versions that you can choose from. Thankfully, search engines have decided to make the process a rather easy one. Yes, Schema.org is the one that most reputed engines like Google and Yahoo keep backing up. But there are options galore like RDFa, Microformats, and so on. But most website development companies say that the unification of search engines on the chosen Schema.org and also an add-on from Google called the Structured Data Dashboard are worthy picks. These somewhat show that microdata indeed has a large role, bearing, and influence upon the rankings.

So what benefits lie in store for the future with these?

Here is the list of advantages that you or your website developer would gain as a result of having these:

1. Think of business results

Most enterprise customers vouch for the fact that a large number of improvements occur and all these are large because of schema markup. On average, 26% more clicks, 20% high CTR, 35% more impressions, close to 150% extra time spent on pages that display rich results, and about 3.6% more interactivity with clients have been found, all because of the data. And frankly speaking, this definitely casts a substantial impact upon the rankings of the site.

2. Richness in results guarantee a safe place in the organic search

So if you aim to be ‘seen’ and ‘found’ online, the basic three aspects are more than enough which are the title, URL, and meta description. If ‘richness’ is your target, it pays off after you outsource website development projects to experts in the industry that have SEO experience and ensure to add some more visuals that would render you a place of your own in the search options. By adding schema markup on the website code, you indeed qualify for rich results. And opportunities will only increase in the upcoming days like ratings, reviews, stars, actionable links, images, breadcrumbs, and more.

3. Good brand control

How would it feel having a perfect customer experience from the beginning itself? Schema markup is a great way of allowing you to have control over the way you are working to represent your brand. The moment you are in control, it implies that you want the brand content to be featured, publicized, spoken of and definitely, understood. Your website developers can test the different strategies and also control the schema markup distribution on the websites.

4. There is optimization for voice search

Presently, close to 20%-25% of searches made is via voice. Estimates say this will increase to 50% in this decade. So if you’ve optimized the site yourself or taken the help of experienced website development companies for organic search via schema markup, there are also voice assistants to help you out. Google will ensure that speech recognition is taken care of and there’s ample scope for NLU (Natural Language Understanding). In fact, Google stated in clear terms that the primary motivation for the markup was only to allow website developers and others to optimize the content and then for voice search.

5. ‘Findability’ goes several notches higher

Maybe you don’t realize this but understanding a webpage is no mean feat for machines and search engines. The context of a page matters and by adding schema markup, you attach a tag to let these engines know the intricate details about them. And improving your ‘findability’ quotient means you can witness new heights in terms of interacting and collaborating with others.

So now you know the heights you can attain by simply incorporating the elements of structured data and schema markup on your website. If you haven’t yet, get started and see the differences in results!