Author: Ryan Walsh

Date: 17/01/2025

 

Any business could improve its search engine optimisation in about a million different ways. To do so, it must stay on top of the latest and best methods to improve its website’s ranking on Google.

The ever-changing algorithm

Anyone who’s ever taken the time to look at the evolution of Google’s algorithm will know that it’s ever-changing.

Yet one thing has remained constant: Google rewards good quality work. If you supply a detailed and well-thought-out answer to a question, you often get rewarded with a higher page ranking on Google.

The business landscape in every industry you choose is hyper-competitive. It doesn’t matter if you run a plumbing business with just a few employees or you employ an army of workforce, say, to provide a service here in the U.K.

So, businesses such as ours are always looking to give our clients the edge.

How can we improve the on-page and off-page technical SEO to give our clients the edge?

One way to do this is to implement schema markup. As we will explain a little bit later in this article, schema is a form of structured language.

It’s a language that search engines, such as Google, understand and can quickly decipher what products or services are for sale on that page.

What is Schema Markup?

Yes, but what exactly is schema markup?

Schema markup is often referred to as Google’s Structured data. Without getting overly technical, it simply provides Google with a strong message about the content.

Therefore, schema markup is like code that you can add to a page, let’s say, the homepage. It clearly spells out what that page offers.
For example, if the business is, say, a law practice, you can label exactly what legal services you offer.

 

Featured snippets

Imagine the first page results on Google are like walking through a crowded market.

Although market stalls are not generally considered in the same way as Google’s SERPs, they are similar in many ways.

You and your competitors are all trying to grab the attention of a potential shopper.

Here’s the thing: some businesses place millions into their digital marketing spend per year.

This could be to get to the first page of Google or simply to maintain a good place, say, in the top 4 results in Google’s SERPs.

But even when a business gets there, even when it gets to the top of Google, it is still competing with its direct competitors for their attention.
You sometimes compete with businesses in the Google Maps and Google Adwords results and with the 10 other companies in Google’s organic results.

So, how do you stand out?

Well, one way is using featured snippets. Many SEO agencies generally believe that implementing schema markup greatly increases your business’s chance of being used as a featured snippet.

 

What Are the Benefits of Schema Markup for SEO?

What are the main benefits of using schema markup to improve a business’s organic search engine optimisation?

SEO is a pot of different methods that all need to come together to produce a fine dining experience.

What do we mean by that?

 

Well, you’ve probably experienced eating something in a restaurant, and one of the ingredients overpowered everything else. Perhaps too much salt? Or overdo it on the chilli powder.

Well, this is the same with SEO. The top, and I mean the cream of the crop, SEO consultants know the blend and the recipe needs to be put together with some care.

If not, the whole mix is incorrect, and Google wants to rank that page high.

So, the technical SEO needs to be written; you need content marketing, which cuts the mustard, and high-powered backlinks are the name of the game.

So, schema—yeah, sure, you need it, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. It’s something that can be thrown into the SEO soup to help you improve the dish, but don’t think for a second that you’re going to wake up the next morning and be on page one of Google after implementing it.

It doesn’t work like that. The mix needs to be done right, and the recipe needs to be perfected and constantly worked on to ensure it’s just right.

 

What are the positives that Schema can bring?

Standout with featured snippets

As mentioned earlier, correctly implementing schema can make your page stand out in the SERPs. For example, average star ratings can stand out in the SERP pages.

The CTR could improve.

The CTR could improve, meaning more clicks, and the click-through rate could improve as your featured snippet in Google’s SERPs catches the eye of more shoppers.

Are there different types of schema markup?
There are many different types of schema a business can use. Roughly speaking, we think that there are 35 different types of schema that you add to your company’s website.

What types of businesses use schema?

Product mark-up

 

Many businesses, especially large e-commerce businesses, use schema to mark up the product name, such as “Nike Airforce One,” the price, and also the customer reviews. Again, this increases the chance of the business being featured as a featured snippet.

 

Can schema markup be used to improve a business’s local SEO?

Businesses can use schema to mark the company’s address, phone number and opening hours.

This makes it much easier for Googlebot to index that information. So, if someone were to use voice search on Google and ask, “Hey Google, what time does ABC gym close this evening?” Google would be able to better answer that question if the website owner had marked up the opening hours using Schema markup.

Put yourself in Google’s shoes.

We always think of it like this…

Google has difficulty deciphering the different products and services and what a blog post is about.

A blog post in itself could be 3,000 words, which is talking about something technical and complex, like answering a legal question.

So, our SEO agency’s job is to clarify what that page is about.

What sort of questions is that page answering?

What products or services is the page selling?

Good on-page SEO is important, and it’s really important, for example, splitting the page up using a lot of titles.
Adding alt text.
Adding a good page title
That’s always important.
But schema helps Googlebot, and therefore Google’s algorithm, better understand the exact product, for example, that’s for sale, the star rating that the customer has provided, and the price of that item.

 

Product reviews

Some businesses sell a ton of different products.

A massive amount of the products must have their star rating marked up using schema.

Google may then use that information as a featured snippet. Let’s say you’re about to buy a new pressure washer, and in Google’s SERPs, that product has been sold over 1,700 times, and the average customer review is 4.7 stars—this could encourage a higher CTR from Google’s SERPs, which helps you sell more products.

 

FAQ schema

If you were to use schema markup to mark up questions in your FAQ section, this could increase the chances of that question appearing as an answer directly in the search engine results.

This is called a direct answer, and many SEO consultants believe that more of these “zero-click searches” will happen as Google offers a direct answer to the question in the SERPs.

A business can benefit from this because many shoppers may click on the featured snippet and visit the company website to read a more detailed answer.

 

 

How do you go about adding schema markup to a WordPress website?

Use the Google structured data mark-up helper tool.

The Google structured data mark-up tool is free and can help you easily add structured data to your company website.

 

Paste the URL

When using Google’s structured data mark-up tool, paste the URL of the exact page to which you wish to add schema mark-up.

 

Google’s structured mark-up tool will create the HTML

Google’s structured mark-up tool will then create the HTML for you.

 

JSON LD markup

We would say that one of the most commonly used types of structured markup is JSON LD markup.
Ask your web developer to add it to the page.

You can then ask your web designer to add the structured markup to the page.

 

Click run test

Then, you can press the “run test” button to see if everything works.

 

Use https://schema.org

We recommend visiting https://schema.org to learn about schema and how it could help your business.

 

Does your business need help to improve your organic and local SEO?

We are a local SEO agency with over 10 years of experience helping companies climb Google’s ranks. We have literally taken many businesses from nowhere on Google, that’s outside the first 10 pages, to page one.

If you would like a free quote, contact us today.