Google uses hundreds of signals to rank websites in their search engine results page (SERP). However, there are clearly certain high priority factors that influences the result. Knowing these factor can facilitate the whole process of promoting your business website. For Google, the most important is that users find responses and information relevant to their search queries. If you have noticed recently, the concept of Zero Click has been heavily used in Google search results. This means Google wants users to get answers directly from the SERP, without the need of clicking different links. This has become possible due to the introduction of structured data or rich snippets.
How Crawlers Use Structured Data?
Structured data and the markup system have been used since 2011. Their importance continues to grow as search crawlers are using these data for two major purposes:
- To understand what a web page is about.
- To generate expanded search results.
Markup and Site Ranking
Embedding markup on the site is not essential for website owners. Besides, this is not considered as a ranking factor by search engines. Thus, you will be wondering why so much attention is paid to it. Thanks to the structured data, robots understand the content of pages much better. Then, the search engine will automatically generate rich snippets or expanded search results. This can be displayed visually in one of the formats:
- Review
- List
- Carousel
- Snippet
- Calendar of events
- FAQ
- How-to, etc.
Below is an example of a list showing as a featured snippet in Google search results. It is clearly evident, users will get get the answer from the list or go to the site to get more details.
Taking this into account, it becomes clear that the presence of the correctly embedded and optimized structured data helps search robots understand what type of platform and content you have got. For example, the page is an ecommerce product, digital eBook , recipe, news or announcement of an event. As a result, the link in the SERP looks more visually appealing, which leads to the increase of a click-through rate (CTR), as well as improves conversion.
This all means that the more useful, relevant, and catchy information site owners include in the code, the more chances that the search engine will generate expanded results. This will have a positive impact on the CTR and conversion.
What to Include in Structured Data?
Taking into account the concept of Zero Click, it is now important to provide users with as much information on the SERP page as possible. For example:
- Culinary blogs should add the cooking time, main ingredients, and number of calories for dishes;
- Trading sites, let’s say of appliances, should inform users about the price, availability of a product in stock, as well as add crucial technical features and warranty information;
- Restaurants or cafes should provide contact details, opening hours, ratings, and the type of cuisine;
- For an event announcement, the time and place, as well as speakers/bands/musicians should be stated, as well as contact details.
In addition, you can provide the content in FAQ, How-to or Q&A format. Google also will show your content in questions and answers snippet like below.
How to Add Structured Data to Your Page?
Now that you know how structured data can impact your business. Schema.org is a community driven platform that maintains and manages structured data for various schema type. For example, you should have added all the details mentioned in the review schema page for showing product review snippets on Google search. You can check the examples mentioned at the bottom of that page to make sure the implementation is done properly on your site. Microdata, RFDa or JSON-LD format can be used for embedding the schema data on webpages.
Since this is technical in nature, many site owners do not implement structured data as they do not understand the schemas. Good thing is that platforms like WordPress has lot of free and premium plugins for inserting schema without the need of understanding technical aspects. For example, you can use Schema Pro plugin to insert popular schema types like reviews, events, book, course, recipe, etc. by providing basic details. It will hardly take few minutes to insert a required schema to your page.
Most of the ecommerce platforms also offer in-built schema types. If your site building platform does not support schema, you may need to hire a developer to implement this on your site’s pages.
Testing Structured Data On Your Pages
After implementing the necessary schema, it is important to test your page to find any errors and fix them. Google offers two tools for this purpose:
- Schema Markup Validator from Schema.org – use this tool to validate whether you have correctly embedded the structured data as per the specifications.
- Rich Results Test from Google – use this tool to test and find how Google can generate results from your structured data.
Final Words
Google continues to improve the search algorithm in order to provide the most relevant results to users. Therefore, site owners should make use of all the possible means and tools that can influence the site ranking positions. Structured data is the most effective way, since showing a visually appealing result in the SERP is a crucial step in attracting the attention of users.
