The Effect Of Structured Data On Visibility

Published in

BoostRoas

6 min readOct 26, 2022

What Is Structured Data?

Structured data is as simple as the name seems any sort of data that is organized in such a way that helps the search engines in better understanding what the website is about. Using the Schema Markup helps in telling more than what the data says, the Structured data communicates the meaning of your data to search engines.

Let’s go for an example, you’ve provided the contact information of your business in the Website’s footer, the visitor can come and utilize that information to reach out to you — Perfect. But, the search engine has to work a little bit more to understand what that Raw Data means. So, for that, Schema Markup is used to tell search engines that the Contact Information is Contact Information rather than some random data.

Schema Markup (schema.org) is a semantic vocabulary of tags that is added to the HTML to make it easy for search engines to read your data & improve the representation of your page in SERPs. This is one of the basic resources at our end, that we use to structure the data and is considered as the acceptable way by Google.

Importance Of Structured Data

Google, Bing & other major search engines support the usage of structured data, and not only that they encourage, but they also incentivize all those websites that have incorporated this practice.

The structured data can be helpful in Increasing the click-through rate & enhancing the chances of increased traffic as the search results have been shown against the user’s intent. Query, and if we get one step ahead, search results have been shown regarding the user’s Intent which can help in improving ranking as user behavior signal.

Google is continuously updating its algorithms & trying to hyper-personalize the search results and we must say, that’s the future of search.

When implemented properly, structured data implementations are likely to bring some extra traffic to your website with rich results. Here are the most common ones;

Knowledge Graph

Whenever you search for a query, a section appears on the right side of the SERP for branded queries, that’s called a knowledge graph. Having a personal or business brand, one can always add the information most relevant to the brand.

Rich Snippets & Rich Cards

This Markup provides you with an opportunity to implement additional context for articles, recipes, products, product reviews & videos. Utilizing this markup provides you with an opportunity to show up in the SERPs Rich Cards & Snippets. As mentioned, Google is stepping up the SERPs features, so in that arena, Google is Introducing the action markup which would allow users to take the action right from the SERP like booking an appointment.

Social Cards

If your brand is implementing all-round marketing on social media platforms, then you might as well utilize the social markups for each respective platform:

Facebook — Open Graph
LinkedIn — Open Graph
Twitter — Cards
Pinterest — Rich Pins
Instagram — Open Graph

Common Structured Data Mark-ups

Google supports many types of Schema mark-ups appearing in the SERPs result. We’ve drafted a list of items that are mostly used that can be shown as rich snippets as per the structure data.

Product

Adding this markup to the Product Pages would help Google provide the detailed information as rich results against the query, including the Google images as well. The user would be able to see the price, review ratings, & product availability in the search results. Here is shown how adding “review” and “aggregate rating” elements to “Product” structured data mark-up can be beneficial on the image below.

Article

Adding the article structured data in the blogs or news would increase the chances of showing up in SERP as a rich snippet. It is further divided into AMP with structured data & Non-AMP web pages with structured data.

Breadcrumb

A breadcrumb trail would highlight the page’s position in the Website’s Hierarchy, which would help the users navigate the website in an effective & mannered way by one level at a time.

FAQ

A Frequently Asked Question contains a list of different questions and answers to those questions covering the specific topic. A marked-up FAQ would increase the chances for showing up against the question entered by the user on a search engine as a rich result and an action on Google Assistant.

Recipe

This can be utilized in helping the users find the Recipe Content by structuring the data of the Recipe for Google. It can include — ratings, cooking time, ingredients, nutritional information. When you cover all the aspects, it would help Google present it in an attractive way.

Here are some other rich result types you can gain with a proper structured data implementation:

Some Myths

Structured Data Is A Ranking Signal!

Is structured data A ranking signal? NO! The use of structured data is encouraged as it helps Google in understanding the content much better, and might even give a relevancy signal. If your content got into a rich snippet, It might improve your CTR which can be an Indirect signal for ranking.

Implemented The Structured Data — I’ll Get The Rich Snippet Now!

NO! Implementing the structured data is encouraged as it makes you eligible for rich snippets & rich cards, but there’s no guarantee that your content would get incorporated for it. Sometimes, it may show up & it may not, you can never know what Google is looking for.

Structured Data Syntax Types

In terms of SEO, structured data refers to the schema markup vocabulary is a computing language that helps Google understand the content of a website in an organized manner. This language is universally supported & utilized by all search engine platforms.

Structured data can be implemented through these three mentioned formats that are supported by Google.

JSON-LD

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the leading markup script in terms of popularity that can be used in structuring the data. As per the statement of John Muller, when it comes to structuring data “Google prefers “JSON-LD”.

The main feature of JSON-LD is that It can be used as a block of code without hurting the rest of the HTML document — you just have to simply copy the code & paste wherever you want to (<head> or <body>). But, if we check what Google prefers, it is the <head> section for the JSON-LD.

JSON-LD structures the data by annotating the elements on a page, which is then used by the Search Engines to remove uncertainties & give shape to the entities through facts, which further proves fruitful in creating a more mannered, organised web.

Microdata

Microdata is based on the concept of tagging. A set of tags is used to specify the items or values on a webpage for the data individually.

Items or values of the structure data are tagged via item type and itemprop HTML attributes. The main issue with microdata is the manual practice. Every tag has to be placed individually within the HTML body as compared to JSON-LD in which a block of code can be used.

RDFa

RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes) is an extension to HTML5 that is used for tagging the content for structure data. Same as Microdata, RDFa uses pieces of content within the HTML body through the type and property of HTML attributes.

Advantages of Working With BoostRoas

BoostRoas with its extensive experience in the industry is capable of handling the practical implementation of structure data in your content with its solid audits & devising the strategies to optimize the pages accordingly.

We’re capable of identifying structured data opportunities for your site, figuring out ways to implement and run testing procedures for the markup correctly. So, take a step towards optimizing your pages with us & grab this major advantage.