All businesses want their websites to rank well on search engines. The thing is, it can be really difficult to get those first page rankings. With so many different businesses and websites out there, how does one compete?
There are many different strategies involved in helping your website's search engine ranking improve, and one of these strategies is something called schema markup. This form of search engine optimization (SEO) is a new and fairly underutilized digital marketing tactic, but it doesn't have to be overly complex.
That means that your business should absolutely take full advantage of this strategy. Here's what you need to know to put this strategy to work for your website.
What is schema markup?
As mentioned, schema markup is a relatively new SEO strategy designed to help your business website rank higher in search engine results. Basically, it's a form of microdata, code that you input on your website pages that tells the search engines explicitly what to share in their results.
Search engines are designed to understand what a webpage is about, but why not make their job even easier? Schema markup essentially speaks the search engine's language and tells them more accurate information about what's on a webpage, and what to include in rich snippets and how to turn up in search results. So schema markup tells the search engines what the information on the page means, and not only what it says.
Why is schema markup important?
It's simple. You want higher search engine rankings for each of your web pages, and you want to make it easier for the search engines to give them to you. By including schema markup on your web pages and blog articles, you can let search engines know what's on your website more easily, enticing them to rank your content higher than more complex web pages and blog articles.
Although this tactic might sound a little complicated (inputting code on each of your pages?! Really?), it isn't as difficult as you might think. Because marketers sometimes think it is more complex than it is, many businesses and websites aren't including this method within their SEO strategy.
You want to get ahead of the trend so that your website is given higher reputation and authority with the search engines, and therefore ranks higher on search engine results pages.
Not only that, but results with schema markup help to further inform the user before they even click-through to your webpage. When you see search engine results with more information than just a basic meta description, it's because those pages utilize schema markup to help search engines further understand what the page is saying, so they can communicate it with the end user.
Sharing more information about search results upfront, before a user even clicks through to a webpage, increases the likelihood that they'll click over to your link rather than others. In fact, your website could see a 30% increase in click-throughs just by implementing schema.
How do you use schema markup?
Implementing schema markup into your website doesn't require any advanced knowledge of code; however, a basic understanding is certainly helpful. You'll just be adding microdata to your existing HTML code based on the extensions dictated at schema.org.
There are several different types of schema markup depending on what information is living on your page. Here are a few to choose from.
1. Organization: This type of schema markup tells search engines information about your company/organization. You can specify your business's official logo, contact information, location, social media links, and more.
2. Person: This type of schema markup shares information about an individual, and can be useful on your team member pages.
3. Product: This type of schema markup offers up product information like customer rating, cost, and availability.
4. Article: This type of schema markup makes it easier for search engines to understand the content within your articles and where the headline, publish date, featured images, and more lie.
5. Event: This type of schema markup helps the search engine to learn more specific information about your events such as date, time, location, and price.
Each of these different types of schema markup helps to improve your website's search engine results, making it even more likely that users searching for your content and business will click to your site over other results. By adding these pieces of microdata to your webpages, the search engines are alerted to specific types of information, like organization, product, event information, and more.
The schema markup consists of small pieces of HTML code that you'll input right alongside the existing HTML within your webpage. Here's an example of what this looks like.
A typical piece of content will be wrapped in a <div> tag. In order to markup that specific content using schema, you'll add <div itemscope> to the beginning wrap. You'll then need to dictate what type of content it is by adding <div itemscope itemtype="person"> (fill in the item type area with the type of post, whether it's an event, tech article, etc.). We're focusing on a team member page in this example.
You'll then wrap schema markup around your pieces of content:
<h2><span itemprop="givenName">First Name</span> <span itemprop="familyName">Last Name</span></h2>
<p itemprop="jobTitle">Job Title</p>
<p itemprop="email">Email Address</p>
You can find even more examples of microdata and item props at schema.org.
If this looks like it might be a bit time-consuming, we're not going to say you're wrong. But if there's one thing to know about SEO in general, it's a time intensive strategy. There is no version of search engine optimization that will quickly and immediately improve your search result rankings. There are only paid search options that allow you to bid on first-page ad spots.
We highly recommend including schema markup methods within your own SEO strategy. If you're interested in learning more, contact us.
Written By: David Carpenter
