Schema.org (often called Schema Markup) is one of the latest evolutions in SEO. Schema is a type of microdata and when it is added to a webpage, it can greatly enhance the way search engines interpret and display a website’s page in SERPs. Schema.org is the brainchild of Google, Yahoo, Yandex, and Microsoft. Schema.org’s vocabularies are utilizing the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list and through GitHub. Along with visual marketing, utilizing schema markup on a website could prove to be an amazing tactic to improve your search ranking.
The Goal Behind Creating Schema.org
One can argue that there are lots of schemas out there, so what was the reason behind creating another one. The motive behind creating schema is to provide common support benefits to the end-users, search engines, and webmasters. Schema.org works like a common platform, a site where major search engines document schemas and other websites not necessarily search engines can join later. Digital marketing experts are of the opinion that by adding schema markup to your website, you can cash in full SEO benefits.
Using Schema in your Website
Adding Schema markup to your site is a highly-customizable process. Surprisingly, there is no need to have in-depth knowledge about the schema in order to use it. Knowing a few fundamentals would be enough to take the full advantage of schema markup. There are particular ways of implementing schema and the implementation primarily depends on the platform of a particular website. For instance, there are many plugins that developers can install for implementing schema on a WordPress website. Although microformats don’t support schema, schema can be used with JSON-LD and RDFa.
Businesses that are Using Schema Markup
The use of schema markup has been popularized by US businesses. All types of businesses in the USA use schema for generating rich snippets for them. Taking inspiration from their success, businesses from all over the world start using a schema on their websites. When utilized in the right manner, schema markup can bring limitless value to the website as well as to the user of the website. Try to make full use of various effective elements with schema such as the URL of your website, social profiles and Google maps location for getting outstanding results. You need to make sure to adhere to Google’s guidelines before implementing schema markups on your website.
Here is a List of Businesses that are Heavily Using Schema Markup:
Restaurant Owners
Doctors
Sandwich Shops
Attorneys & Legal Advisors
Tax Consultants
Electronic Sales Locations
Small Eateries
Repairing Shops
Grocery Shops
Improvements that Schema.org Brings to the SEO
The proliferation of devices with widely varying form factors has made it essential to create web pages that can be easily read by the search engines. Placing schema microdata in the HTML code of a website can assist search engine crawlers to interpret the content of the web pages more comprehensively. A website could get a 30% hike in click-through rate by implementing schema said Search Engine Land.
This will result in bringing searchers to the right website and this may greatly increase user experience. The joint collaboration of the major tech companies shows the importance they have placed in this project. For many years, there was a need for a language that can provide information to search engines to better understand the content of a website so that they can represent a webpage page in SERPs in a more accurate way for the searchers. Even if a website is not at the top of search results, using schema will likely bring a higher amount of clicks and improve SEO.
The List of Items that Schema Markups Can Define-
TV Episodes with Ratings
Creative Work
Events
Organization Business Details (Type, Description, Logo, Website)
People (Founder, Owner, Sales Contact, Support, Specialties)
Reviews
Videos
Place
Food Recipes
Products & Offer
Final Thoughts
Feeding search engines in a structured manner will greatly improve the search performance of any website. Schema Markup is the most under-evaluated and underutilized on-page SEO technique. If you can come up with an excellent strategy of using schema on your website, you can be sure of having great results. It is always good to try something new instead of not trying anything new.
Author Bio
Rajdeep Bose is a new-age entrepreneur with immense expertise in a wide range of IT-related services such as ERP solutions, Mobile app development, and internet marketing. He is the director of NATIT Solved Pvt. Ltd. and the co-founder of CBNITS.
Rajdeep,
great guide and overview on Schema. I love how it looks in the SERPs but recently had my review stars stripped because of recent Google schema review update.
It wasn’t a penalty, but simply I needed to go in into the page and plugin and change something to have it comply with new Google guidelines.
Rajdeep,
Excited to the list of businesses that highly use schema. Obviously, as much as we are transparent to the online users – better the ranking performance, as well as the click-through rates, will be. Thanks for the quality article.