Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO?
Search engine optimization has become one of the most crucial aspects of managing and promoting an eCommerce website, blogging website, or an online service provider. While one of the factors that can help your website do significantly better in terms of rankings and traffic is structured data, around 56% of top brands still don’t use it to their advantage.
If you’re not quite sure about what is structured data, then simply put, it helps Google’s systems understand your content more accurately. This helps users get more relevant results. If you implement structured data then your pages might be eligible to be shown in Google search results. However, if you want how it can be useful, you need to know a bit more than that.
What Is Structured Data For A Website?
When a set of data is presented in an organized or structured way on a webpage, it is referred to as structured data.
This kind of data is useful in search engine optimization as it helps search engines better understand the context of the information when the data is properly tagged to certain text groups. Thus, with the help of structured data, search engines can display accurate results as per the searches.
Nowadays, you can find structured data in just about any type of content and that includes event listings, restaurants, and even products to name a few. Big brands usually test the waters with dev time and resources and because of this, they were able to tie the results back to business value, such as improving traffic or generating conversions.
When you structure your data with schema.org, you not only get great search benefits like reusing the information to enhance analytics or onsite search, but you can also get voice benefits, like informing chatbots.
Major Differences Between Structured Data Vs Unstructured data
The way any information is displayed on your website not only impacts your SEO but also how your audience interacts with your web pages. For instance, you find it more convenient to look for a specific contact number on your phone when all contact numbers are saved in a specific order. Taking this into consideration, the following are the ways in which structured data is different from unstructured data.
Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO?
Almost every business is making an online entry using an eCommerce website, and for every blogging website, there are thousands of others competing for the same audience and keywords. While the internet keeps getting more complex and bigger by the day, search engines can only rank a handful of web pages on the first page of their search results. This is where structuring the data on your website can be extremely useful as an SEO strategy.
Structured data helps search engines understand your content better, and this, in turn, helps search engines rank your content based on this better understanding of your content. When you use structured data, your content is more organized, and search engines can present your content in the form of rich snippets.
Structured data is important for SEO as it not only makes it easier for the search engine bots to crawl through your content but also enhances user experience by providing them with more information.
According to Google themselves, brands like StyleCraze improved their site CTR 1.2x simply by leveraging How-to structured data. Likewise, with Rakuten, the use of structured data drove 2.7 times the amount of traffic to all Rakuten Recipe pages from search engines with the average session duration being 1.5 times longer than before. Adding these improvements can help users match with more items related to your business, and spend more time enjoying what you have to offer.
What Are The Benefits Of Structured Data
Presenting your data in a structured manner can offer several benefits in terms of SEO and overall rankings for your web pages. With that said, here are several advantages of structured data.
How Does Structured Data Enrich The Search Engine Result Page?
Before displaying a search result as per the search term that a user enters, Google needs to run a thorough check and ensure that the pages that are displayed on the search results page are as accurate, informative, unique, and useful as possible for the audience.
Structured data adds to this process as, when a webpage has structured data, it displays information in an organized form. This makes it easier for search engines to understand your content and what your products, blogs, services, and website as a whole are about.
When you use structured data on your website, you get to talk to Google about your web pages in a way that it understands your website, which helps in boosting rankings. In terms of enriching the search engine pages, structured data helps Google or any other search engine in displaying the most accurate and informative search results.
Most Common Structured Data Types Used Widely
The types of structured data can be listed based on types of schema markups. Schema markups are what you need to add to your website in order for the data on it to be structured. There are three common structured data types based on the schema markup formats, which are as follows-
JSON-LP, which is the abbreviation for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, helps in creating data that is machine-readable. The data created using JSON-LD is comparatively more indexable, which helps the Googlebot to crawl the web pages more easily. JSON-LD achieves this by annotating elements on a web page. When this happens, data is structured and this helps in establishing facts around different elements of the page and distinguishing every element in a way that that webpage looks more organized.
Microdata is used for highlighting useful metadata in web pages for web crawlers to pick important information by processing and extracting the microdata to provide relevant results. Microdata functions in a way that can be compared to directly speaking to the search engine and letting it know what the most important elements of a page are. The search engine then highlights these elements which are in the form of marked-up content in the search results.
Resource Description Framework, or RDFa, is yet another type of structured data that is useful in embedding rich metadata in web documents. With RDFa, you can mark up places, events, reviews, people, etc. Like the other two schema markup formats, RDFa also helps in generating better search listings. As a result, your website or webpage has better visibility and your website can be found more easily by your audience.
Best Structured Data Generating Tools
While the act of adding structured data to websites gradually gained momentum, people now realize the benefits of doing this. There are countless tools that help generate structured data and assess if your page has all the structured data elements that can help it rank better on search engines.
With structured data testing and generating tools, you can easily spot errors. Even the slightest and tiniest error in organized data can make it impossible for the search engine to understand it. When you use a structured data generating tool, you can generate accurate and error-free structured data. The following are some commonly used structured data-generating tools –
TechnicalSEO’s schema markup generator is used for creating JSON-LD markups for websites, along with their other types.
This schema markup generator by RankRanger is useful for creating FAQ pages and markups for local businesses, job postings, products, and events.
This easy-to-use schema markup generator offers multiple markups to choose from and allows quick testing to spot errors in the structured data. You can also copy your markups with a click of a button, which adds efficiency to the process of generating and testing schema markups.
Structured Data – Frequently Asked Questions
A good example of structured data for businesses is name, addresses, geolocation, contact information, etc., which is displayed in an organized manner in the search results.
When you use a tool for generating structured data, you can give Google or other search engines detailed information about the web pages on your website. With this information, search engines generate rich results in the form of snippets that are more engaging for the audience.
When you implement the code of FAQ structured data on your website, you can present the FAQs on your website in an organized way that increases the likelihood of their ranking as a SERP-rich result.
There are certain steps that need to be followed to add structured data to your website. To begin with, you need to open the structure data markup helper on Google and select your data type and enter the URL. You can then assign data tags to certain elements after highlighting them and creating the HTML. This is followed by adding schema markups to your page and testing these markups using a structured data testing tool.
While structured data is not yet a ranking factor, it is a major contributor to better ranking because of the way it functions to make your data and content crawlable. This is why the Google developers highly recommend using schema markups to create structure data, which indirectly yet efficiently helps improve the rankings of your website.
That was all about what is structured data and how it can benefit your website in different ways, ultimately leading to better rankings.
Google and other search engines focus on providing their audiences with accurate information, and any strategy that you adopt to get closer to this can help your website have a wider reach. While structured data SEO strategies are not yet mainstream, it has evident advantages not only for your website in terms of better appearance on the search results page but also for users who look for informative content in an organized fashion.