We often get asked about schema at Candidsky, and it’s usually because people believe it is complicated and hard to implement. But it isn’t, and there are some really quick and easy ways to implement schema on your website to improve search performance.
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is added to a website sitewide or to a specific page on a website. This gives search engines more insight into a webpage in a structured format, allowing them and website crawlers alike to understand the context of the website/page.
Schema markup is a really good way to optimise a website as it allows search engines to further understand the website, what you’re trying to achieve, and where you want to be found within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Implementing structured data on your website can lead to improved visibility and also improved Click Through Rate (CTR), depending on the type of schema you use.
In this blog post, you’ll learn what schema markup is and how your website can benefit from it. We’ll also walk you through the different types of schema and where to use them, providing a step-by-step guide on how to create, implement, and test your schema to ensure it’s working correctly.
What Is Schema Markup, and How Can It Help Your Performance Within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
If you’re reading this blog post, it means you already have amazing content on your website, and you’re at the stage where you’re looking for ways in which you can fine-tune your webpages for them to perform even better!
Content is created for humans, but search engine crawlers aren’t human. While Google’s bots are getting smarter, they’re still just reading code and raw text. They can’t interpret content with the same nuanced understanding that a person can.
Also, with the rise of AI models such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, there’s still not enough data and understanding about how these search engines process content. Adding schema to your website gives it clearer signals about your pages. You have nothing to lose, but a lot to gain.
How Schema Markup Can Benefit Your Website
When schema markup is used correctly, it can significantly benefit your website’s performance within the SERPs as it allows crawl bots to further understand your pages and gives them information in an easy-to-understand format, which can lead to an array of performance benefits.
Here is a list of the different types of benefits you can receive from using schema markup:
Featured Snippets
For most Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialists, rich snippets are probably the best outcome you can receive when using schema markup. It not only showcases your website in position 1, but also proves that it answers the user’s search and the intent of the SERP.
Rich Results
Rich results are similar to featured snippets but are not always present at the top of the SERPs. A good example of rich results is when a website has used the FAQPage schema, and within the SERPs, there is a dropdown of FAQs listed under the domain.
Star ratings from customer reviews
Star ratings from customer reviews are a powerful way to build trust with both users and search engines. By implementing local business or product and review schema, you can display your customer ratings directly within the SERPs. It provides instant social proof, builds credibility, and helps your website stand out from competitors who don’t have schema. The presence of positive star ratings can significantly increase a user’s confidence and encourage them to click on your listing.
Operating hours
When you use local business schema, you can showcase your business’s operating hours directly in the search results. This is a great trust signal because it provides a critical piece of information upfront, allowing potential customers to instantly see if your business is open and when they can visit or call. It’s a simple detail that removes a point of friction for the user and builds confidence in your business.
Metrics which benefit from Schema Markup
Schema markup is more than just a technical detail; it can directly impact key SEO metrics. Let’s explore how implementing structured data can improve your website’s performance, from visibility and click-through rates to crawlability.
Improved Click-Through Rates (CTR):
Schema markup is a great way to improve CTR as it gives search engines more information about the webpage, which can then be relayed in the SERPs. A good example is using product and review schema. When star ratings and reviews appear directly in the search results, they act as a strong trust signal to users, making your listing more appealing and encouraging more clicks than those without schema.
Improved Visibility
By providing structured data to search engines, schema markup helps your content be visible in more places. This includes rich results like the Google Maps Pack, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and Knowledge Panels. It ultimately adds to your online presence in the search results and boosts your overall visibility, leading to higher impressions and clicks.
Conversions
While schema markup doesn’t directly drive conversions, it can definitely help. By displaying details like positive reviews, product pricing, and availability directly in the search results, you attract users who are already in a converting mindset. These small, but impactful, tweaks can bring in more qualified traffic that is more likely to convert once they land on your site.
AI Optimisation
As search evolves, schema is more important than ever for AI models. It provides them with structured data, allowing them to quickly understand the context of your website. This is essential for getting your content featured in new AI-powered search results and for being found in voice search.
Crawlability and Indexing
Another key benefit of schema is improved crawlability and indexing. By providing search engines with structured data, you give them a deeper understanding of your website’s content that they would not otherwise gain from your headings and raw HTML text. This helps ensure your pages are indexed correctly and efficiently, which is especially helpful for new or recently updated pages.
Types of Schema and When You Should Be Using Them
Knowing which type of schema to use is key to effective structured data. This section will walk you through the most common types of schema markup and explain where to implement them on your website to achieve your SEO goals.
Organization Schema
Organization schema is a very common top-level schema, and it is a parent schema for other specific schemas, such as local business, corporation, and many others. It includes basic information about your business, such as your official name, website URL, logo, and contact information.
The schema allows your business details to be displayed to users in the knowledge panel, which gives you control over what is visible, such as your logo, social profiles, and contact information.
By implementing Organization Schema, you can effectively build trust and authority. This structured data signals to search engines that your website and social profiles are all part of the same entity, which strengthens your brand’s presence. In addition, it is highly beneficial for citations, as ensuring the citations you build are an exact match to your schema is an excellent way to further build credibility across the web.
Local Business Schema
Local Business Schema is structured data you use to tell search engines about a business with a physical location. Think of it as a digital business card that helps website crawlers understand key details like your business name, address, and phone number. You can use it on your contact or homepage, especially if your business relies on local customers.
Benefits
- Improving Visibility: It helps your business show up in the Google Local Pack and on Maps.
- Enhancing Search Listings: It enables rich results like star ratings, hours, and phone numbers to appear directly in search results, making your listing more appealing.
- Increasing Traffic: Richer listings can lead to a higher click-through rate, driving more qualified organic traffic to your website.
- Optimising for Voice Search: It gives voice assistants the precise information they need to answer user questions about your business.
Product Schema
This is used to provide search engines with structured data about an item on an e-commerce site, helping to optimise your product pages for SEO. It tells search engines specifics like the product’s name, price, brand, and availability. By implementing it on your product pages, you help users find your items and see key details before they even click on your listing.
Benefits:
- Rich Product Listings: It enables rich results in search, displaying crucial details like price, availability, and product images directly on the search engine results page (SERP). This makes your listing more informative and visually appealing.
- Higher Click-Through Rate (CTR): When users see the price and stock status upfront, they’re more likely to click if the product meets their needs, leading to more qualified traffic.
- Shopping Features Eligibility: Product Schema is essential for your products to appear in special Google Shopping features, carousels, and visual product listings.
Review Schema
This schema is used to mark up reviews and ratings for a product, business, or service. Its purpose is to show users what others think of your offering. You should apply it to pages that feature customer reviews, testimonials, or ratings, such as product or service pages.
Review Schema turns a simple review summary into a powerful search result. Instead of just a line of text, you can tell Google, “This product has a 4.8-star rating based on 750 reviews.” This provides a strong form of social proof, which gives potential customers immediate confidence in your offering and makes them more likely to click on your listing.
Benefits:
- Star Ratings in Search: It allows search engines to display the coveted star ratings directly under your page’s title in search results. This visual element immediately catches the user’s eye.
- Increased Trust: Positive star ratings build immediate trust and credibility with potential customers, making them more likely to click on your result.
- Improved CTR: The combination of a strong title and a positive star rating significantly increases your click-through rate.
FAQPage Schema
FAQPage Schema is a type of structured data used on a page with a list of questions and answers. It helps search engines understand that the content on your page is organised in a Q&A format. You should use it on a dedicated FAQs page, or on any page that includes a clearly defined list of frequently asked questions and answers, such as blog posts, service pages, or product pages.
Benefits
FAQPage Schema helps you stand out in the search results by:
- Enabling Rich Results: It allows your content to appear as a rich result directly on the search engine results page (SERP), often as a drop-down list of questions and answers.
- Improving Visibility: Your content can be displayed in a prominent position, potentially as a featured snippet, giving your page a greater presence in search results.
- Increasing Click-Through Rate (CTR): By providing direct answers to a user’s query, your listing becomes more valuable and appealing, which can significantly increase your CTR.
Article Schema
Article Schema allows you to tell search engines a specific page of written content, such as a news story, a blog post or a report. It also includes information such as who wrote the content, when it was published, and what the main topic is. Using this information, search engines can understand that the content is from a reliable source, and if you’re writing content in a YMYL industry, article schema becomes extremely important.
Why It’s Important for YMYL Industries
Google holds YMYL content to a much higher standard because it can significantly impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety. By using Article Schema, you give search engines clear signals about your content’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). This structured data helps Google’s algorithms verify that the information is from a credible, qualified source, which is essential for ranking highly and building user trust in these sensitive areas.
Benefits
By providing key details like the author and date, Article Schema can:
- Increase Visibility: It enables your content to be found in high-visibility placements, such as Google News, or when a user searches for the author’s name.
- Boost Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your content becomes more prominent and credible in the search results, which can significantly increase your CTR and overall organic traffic.
- Improve Indexing: It helps Google’s crawlers index your content more efficiently—especially crucial for time-sensitive information, such as news articles.
Person Schema
Person Schema is a type of structured data that gives Google an understanding of who they are and what they do. In short, it tells search engines why they should listen to you as an author and if you know your stuff.
This structured data includes things such as their name, job title, and affiliations. Its purpose is to help search engines understand who a specific individual is, particularly if they are an author, an established figure within the industry, or an employee of a business. You should use it on an “About the Author” page, an employee directory, or a personal profile page to provide information about the individual.
Benefits
Person Schema helps you build authority and trust by:
- Establishing Credibility: It allows search engines to better understand the author’s expertise, which is a key part of Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines.
- Improving Search Visibility: By providing details on who an author is, your content can rank for brand terms and be displayed for specific authors, which boosts your visibility and brand recognition.
- Building a Personal Brand: This schema links an individual’s work across the web, strengthening their personal brand and signalling to search engines that they are a trustworthy and authoritative source in their field.
How to Create Schema Markup
To get started, you have two primary options for creating schema markup, both of which are surprisingly easy to use. The method you choose depends on your comfort level and the complexity of the structured data you need to generate.
Schema Generators
The easiest way to create schema markup for your website or webpages is to use a schema generator. One we use is the Technical SEO structured data tool by Dentsu.
How to use the Technical SEO Structured Data Tool by Dentsu
Step 1: Choose Your Schema
First, go to the schema generator tool. In the dropdown menu, select the type of schema you want to create. For example, if you’re marking up your business information, you would choose Organization or Local Business.
Step 2: Fill in the Fields
Next, you will see a series of fields for you to fill in. Simply input your business’s information. This will include details such as your business name, address, phone number, website URL, and social media links. The tool will use this information to build your schema.
Step 3: Generate and Copy the Code
After you’ve entered all the necessary details, the tool will automatically generate the corresponding JSON-LD code on the right side of the screen. This is the code you will be adding to your website. Simply click the “Copy” button to save it to your clipboard.
Step 4: Test Your Schema
Before adding the code to your site, it is crucial to test it for errors. Copy your code and paste it into Google’s Rich Results Test or Schema.org’s Structured Data Tool. These tools will validate your code and show it’s working correctly.
Adding Additional Information to your Schema
If you want to go even further and give search engines even more structured data about your website or webpage, you can visit Schema.org to find other relevant information to add to your structured data.
For example, for Organization Schema, you can include things such as acceptedPaymentMethod, actionableFeedbackPolicy, award and many more bits of information which could be relevant to your organisation.
If you wanted to add an award that your organisation had won to your schema to boost trust and authority, you would then add the following:
“<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “Organization”,
“name”: “Candidsky”,
“url”: “https://www.candidsky.com/”,
“logo”: “https://www.candidsky.com/wp-content/themes/candidsky/img/logo-white.svg”,
“award”: “Global Search Awards Winner 2024”,
“contactPoint”: {
“@type”: “ContactPoint”,
“telephone”: “0161 956 8963”,
“contactType”: “customer service”,
“contactOption”: “TollFree”,
“areaServed”: “GB”,
“availableLanguage”: “en”
},
“sameAs”: [
“https://en-gb.facebook.com/candidsky/”,
“https://twitter.com/candidsky?lang=en”,
“https://www.instagram.com/candidsky/?hl=en”,
“https://www.linkedin.com/company/candidsky/”
]
}
</script>”
How to Implement Schema Markup
Once you have created and tested your schema code, it’s time to add it to your website. The implementation method you choose will depend on your Content Management System (CMS) and your technical comfort level. Here are the most common ways to get schema on your site.
WordPress Plugins
If your website is on WordPress, then this is a great way to start if you want to add basic schema markup in a quick and easy way. From our experience, Rank Math is the easiest plugin to implement schema, and they have lots of information on their website to guide you through the process.
In addition to Rank Math, there are other great plugins like YoastSEO, AIOSEO, and Schema Pro. These plugins simplify the process by allowing you to add schema directly from your WordPress dashboard without needing to write or edit code. This makes it more straightforward for website owners to implement structured data correctly.
Code Injection Tools
For sitewide schema, like Organization Schema, you can use code injection tools within your Content Management System (CMS). These tools allow you to paste the schema code into a designated field, and the tool will automatically add it to the <head> section of every page on your website.
This is a great option for schema that needs to be present across the entire site without manually adding it to each page. For example, platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, and many WordPress themes have built-in options for adding custom code snippets to the header or footer of your site. It’s an efficient way to implement schema without having to edit your site’s theme files.
Manually Coding
This method is for more advanced users and involves adding the JSON-LD script tag directly into the HTML of your website. We have touched on this briefly, but it is worth mentioning again.
Depending on your CMS (Content Management System) and your theme’s structure, this can be relatively complex and carries the risk of breaking your website if done incorrectly. For this reason, it is always worth speaking to a developer. They can ensure the schema is added correctly to the <head> of your page without causing errors and can implement the code in a way that won’t be overwritten by future website updates.
Testing Your Schema:
Testing your schema is a non-negotiable step before you add it to your website. It ensures that your code is working correctly, free of errors, and that search engines can read it correctly. To help you with this, we will walk you through the tools available for validating your structured data.
Google Rich Results Test
Before adding schema to any website, it is vital that you check it on this tool to make sure it is working correctly and there are no errors in the code. Once you have created your schema, simply copy and paste it into the code section of the tool, and if it is correctly pulling through, you can then add this to your website.
After implementing, also make sure to test the URL. Exactly the same as testing the code, but instead, test it in the URL section.
Before testing the URL, make sure you have cleared the cache on the website to ensure the tool is testing the newly updated URL, not a cached page without the new schema added.
Conclusion
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a powerful and surprisingly simple way to give your website a significant SEO boost. Far from being a complicated technical SEO task, implementing the right schema can be done with a few quick steps, and the benefits far outweigh the time it takes to implement the schema on your website.
From enhanced visibility and improved click-through rates to preparing your content for the future of AI-powered search, schema is a no-brainer. If you’re looking to improve your website’s visibility, you should definitely try to implement schema on your website as soon as possible.
As search engines and AI models become more sophisticated, they rely more heavily on structured data to accurately understand and showcase your content. By adding schema to your pages, you’re not just optimising for today, but you’re also future-proofing your website.
Now that you have a comprehensive guide to what schema is, the different types available, and how to create and implement it, the next step is to get started. A great way to start is by testing what schema is already on your website by simply using the rich results test above, and from there, you can look to find out what is missing.
Remember, implementing the schema is just one part of a solid, comprehensive SEO strategy. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your SEO, regularly monitor your performance in Google Search Console’s reports and make adjustments as needed.
Need Help Getting Schema on Your Site?
Is your website more intricate and needs more work to implement schema? If so, our team of experts is here to help. We can handle the implementation and ensure you’re getting the most out of structured data. If you’re ready to boost your website’s visibility, please fill out our contact form, and we’ll help you get schema implemented on your website.