How To Boost Your Organic Traffic By Using Schema Mark-Up? A Complete Guide.

Schema mark-up is one of the latest and effective features of SEO. The basic idea behind schema-markup was introduced in 2011 and this has today been adopted by many leading search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. In the past few years, schema markup has gained a lot of popularity. This feature was particularly acclaimed during the implementation of Hummingbird and RankBrain.

Schema mark-up is quite technical; however, it is very easy to understand. In this comprehensive guide, we have discussed in detail about how you can use schema mark-up for boosting organic traffic.

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What Is Schema Mark-up?

Schema Mark-up can be understood as the data or information about a website’s content which helps the search engines to understand that website better. Although the search engines have the content about a website, however, they might not be able to understand what the website wants to convey.

Thus search engines might look for specific terms and try to match those terms with the search query. With the help of schema mark-up, search engines can explicitly tell what is being conveyed by the website. This also makes it easy for the search engines to show relevant search results for a specific query.

How To Use Schema Mark-Up On Your Website?

It is quite easy to implement as well as use schema mark-up for a website. You just need to follow the below-given steps and you would be able to use it easily on your website:

• Select the type of content in Google’s Structured Data Mark-up Helper: First of all, go to the Structured Data Mark-up Helper of Google and out of the given options, choose the content type which best suits your website’s content.
• Enter the URL of the Website: Provide the website’s URL in the text-box that is given on the bottom of the form and subsequently, click on the ‘Start Tagging’ button. This would open the workspace of the schema mark-up tool.
• Choose the website elements which need to be marked: Next, highlight the website elements which need to be marked. You can also include a tag for these elements such as the name of the author, ratings, publish date, and so on
• Select the tag type: After you have highlighted the website elements, choose the tag type out of those present in the right pane.
• Include tags: Once you are done, repeat the above two steps for adding tags until all the necessary elements have been marked.
• Create HTML: After you have added all the tags, just click on the ‘Create HTML’ button. A new HTML script would open that would have the same data as the website. This would also include metadata of the elements that have been included in the above steps.
• Include the code in the website: You now need to add the script to your website so that the changes are reflected. This way, schema mark-up is added to your website.
• Testing: Lastly, you need to ensure that the schema mark-up has been added correctly or not. This can be done by testing the website with the help of the Structured Data Testing Tool. You need to open the tool and select one option out of Fetch URL or Code Snippet. While the Fetch URL allows you to test a live running website, the Code Snippet option gives a preview of the schema mark-up. This tool also recommends more tags that might be required or any other tags that might be incorrectly added. It also displays errors as well as appropriate warnings.

What Are The Different Types Of Schema?

Several different schema types can boost the website reputation and increase the visibility of a website to its target audience. These schema types are as follows:

HowTo Snippet: This schema type talks about a particular theme using a tutorial video, a step-by-step guide, or an image series. It helps in understanding how to finish a particular task.
FAQ Snippet: FAQ refers to Frequently Asked Questions. This type of schema contains a list of questions that are related to a particular topic. It also discusses the answers to those questions.
Recipe Snippet: The recipe snippet gives information about how to make a specific dish. This information can be about the ingredients, caloric contents, preparation time, or any other details related to a dish.
Person Market Snippet: This schema displays the basic facts about a person. The information can be about a person’s name, birthday, educational attainment, family background, achievements, milestones, and similar other information.
Video Snippet: Search engines can also list video results. For ranking such videos higher, one just needs to go through the detailed guidelines on schema.org or Google’s developer guide.
Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs schema puts focus on the path links which guide the users to the current page. The users can easily look at the location from the website directly. It can also help in decreasing the bounce rate of a website.

How Does Schema Mark-Up Impact SEO & Search Engines?

The website gives data to search engines regularly. Having schema-markup tells the search engines what the website is all about. Different ways in which schema mark-up impacts SEO, as well as search engines, can be understood below:

• Improves Click Through Rate (CTR): Although schema mark-up is not a ranking factor, however, it can indirectly affect the ranking of a website. Any change in data or website content can impact the CTR of the website. Having a higher CTR can result in a higher ranking in the search engine results page (SERP).
• Enhances Visibility and User Experience: Schema mark-up also affects how a website is indexed. A website has a higher chance of being displayed within the top page of search results if it has implemented schema mark-up. This also makes the website more user-friendly and hence improves the customer experience. This way, users can also find what they are looking for easily and quickly. It also enhances the trust of the users on your website and ultimately helps you in getting a higher number of leads as well as loyal customers.
• Prioritizes your Website: Google tends to understand a website as well as its content on its own. Hence, if you do not address the more important issues such as content optimization, keyword research, etc., you need not go for schema mark-up. However, once you have addressed that, you should implement schema markup so that search engines can clearly understand the content and give more priority to your site.
• Increases SEO Ranking: Since schema mark-up helps search engines in understanding the website and its content quickly and clearly, there is a good chance that it would result in an improvement in the overall SEO ranking. The website would also be ranked higher in searches which can lead to higher traffic to a website.

Key Takeaways

In SEO, if you can get even a little edge above your competitors, it can ultimately make all the difference. Thus, it becomes all the more important to include features such as schema mark-up to a website. Schema mark-up can also result in rich snippets that can give an immediate boost to the organic search traffic.

The above article was a detailed guide on schema mark-up, how it can be implemented, and how it impacts SEO as well as search engines. In case you do not have the time or resources for implementing it, you can take the help of an SEO agency and increase organic traffic to your website.