We like to impart this information to our clients – and to you if we’ve never met! – because it helps keep you in the loop of what we’re focussing on. Today, we’re looking at Schema Markup, which we’re thinking will be playing a bigger and bigger role in the SEO world.
So Guys, What Is Schema Markup?
We’re so glad you asked! You might or might not have heard this term before, but not everyone’s across it. It’s effectively a piece of code that you put in your website’s backend that gives search engines like Google more information about, and more context to, your website and business.
Because of that, SERPs will display more information for users, and as you’ll see below there are numerous ways that this will improve your rankings, your click-through-rates, and – we’re thinking – your conversions.
What Is It Though? How Do I Do It?
At the moment, the schema project is still growing, and there are currently 10 options developers can choose from when coding categories into the markup, at WOLF we use JSON-LD. However you can use Google’s helpful Schema tool, which will allow you to choose out of the following categories relating to your content/page:
- Articles
- Films
- Restaurants
- TV Episodes with Ratings
- Book Reviews
- Local Businesses
- Software Applications
- Events
- TV Episodes
Via this simple tool, you’ll select website or email or both as your structure, and select a category. You enter your URL or paste some raw HTML and hit ‘start tagging’. After this, you follow the prompts as Google gives you different options to use for the schema markup on your page using relevant tags.
As we said, though, his is all through Google’s digital helper, (make sure you are logged into your Google Account) to aid those who can’t code. But you’ll have greater flexibility, and better results, if you learn how to (or get your developer to) code Schema directly into your site yourself. This can be learnt over at Schema.org.
Why Is Schema Markup Important To Your SEO Strategy?
Schema is not something thrown together by a third party hoping to wade into the search industry. Google, Bing, Yahoo! – even Yandex – all collaborated to bring this to fruition, meaning they’re all not only taking it seriously: they’re pushing it. They want websites to mark up all the content on every page with this new method.
What does this mean in the schema of things (if you’ll excuse the pun)? Well, it means it’s a ranking factor which impacts your entire SEO strategy. What content goes where and how you mark it up using schema. This is a game changer, and we’re only just coming to grips with it. So get on board early and you might see results soon.
Apart From That, Why Bother With It?
I think the above says enough to make it worth your while to at least look at for now. However, there are a number of reasons to do so.
- This may help get your website (or answer to a question from your website) featured as a rich snippet right at the top of the SERP.
- You may earn organic Google Stars, which are the rankings that some sites in a SERP have that most don’t. This is proven to get more clicks off the search by users who deem those sites as more trustworthy.
- You give Google better context about your site which, as seen in our post about Local SEO, is what Google really wants.
All of these require different uses of Schema Markup code. But they’re all good reasons, on top of what’s above, to be looking into this sooner rather than later to reap the rewards.
This All Seems Massively Confronting
Never fear – we’re experts here! Get in touch with us at DMJ for a friendly chat about how to move forward with schema.
