How to Use Schema Markup to Outrank Your Competitors

Updated January 25th, 2019

The world of SEO is evolving at a rapid pace, and now there is one more tool available to web designers to get your page to the top of Google’s rankings. Schema Markup is a relatively new language that is hidden within the coding of your webpage. It is used to define important elements of your webpage so that Google knows what to display when a search query comes in.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema Markup refers to a handful of designators that are used to tell Google important facts about your content. For instance, there is a designation for Title, Author, People, Places, Events and much more. These designators are written into the HTML of your web page, and Google uses them to pull specific details out of your content rather than just matching keywords.

How Does Schema Markup Really Work?

Imagine that you are searching for upcoming events at your local convention center. In the past, you could search for something like “convention center events.” This query would pull up your local convention centers, and might even pull up their event pages if their web page is well built.

However, in the Google search results, you will only see their designated snippet for that page. This is usually fixed text that shows up whenever that keyword is searched, regardless of relevance.

With structured data for SEO, your Schema Markup language takes your search one step further. If the convention center has designated certain items on the page as events, then when you search for events, you will see a customized snippet of upcoming events right on the search results page.

When this happens, the page with Schema Markup shows up higher in the rankings and gets significantly more click through because readers can see exactly what they’re looking for on the page.

Why Is Schema Important to SEO?

Implementing schema markup can help your websites ranking greatly increase. Most internet users believe that your business ranking is only associated with your browser’s search, but in reality, each piece of content in your site can have its own ranking through different avenues.

Now, what do we mean by different avenues? A search query on google will have different results depending on what method you are using to search.

Google Maps, Images, News, Videos, etc. will have different results based on the ranking of the content associated with the method searched. Schema Markup would help Google search bots display the content you wish to focus on as well as communicated it to the proper search queries, giving it more relevancy on SERP.

Some of the content that can easily take advantage of schema markup are:

Products, Software applications, Events, Book Reviews, Movies, TV Episodes and ratings, Restaurants, Articles, Local Businesses, and even other social media accounts. These are just a few as there are hundreds of markup types.

How to Increase Website Traffic By Using Schema

Schema markup can be used effectively to increase website traffic in any industry. By telling Google that some text is more important than others, and the value of its significance to the searcher, you are showing that you want to provide valuable information to your audience.

The Primary Markup Languages

JSON-LD

JSON-LD is Google’s preferred markup language. JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data is a method of encoding Linked Data using JSON. It was a goal to require as little effort as possible from developers to transform their existing JSON to JSON-LD. This allows data to be serialized in a way that is similar to traditional JSON.

Microdata

Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

RDFa

RDFa is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The RDF data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents.

There Are 6 Types of Primary Structured Data Enhancements:

1. Breadcrumb – Allows you to mark up the breadcrumbs on your site to generate rich snippets for your pages in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). This also helps indicate the page’s position in your site’s hierarchy/
2. Corporate Contact – Contains corporate information such as phone number, CEO, languages spoken, area served, and types of contacts.
3. Carousel – Rich results that display in a sequential list or gallery. Most often used with articles, recipes and courses.
4. Logo – Easily lets search bots display your logos image.
5. Sitelinks Search Box – Gives the user the ability to easily search the information on your site directly from the SERP.
6. Social Profile – Allows you to display other social media profiles you may have with other directories. Example: Google +, Yelp, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more.

Currently, it is thought that less than one percent of websites are taking advantage of this technology, but companies that do use it have been shown to rank an average of four places higher in Google searches.

There Are 16 Types of Primary Content

• Article
• Book
• Course
• Dataset
• Events
• Fact Check
• Job Posting
• Local Businesses
• Music
• Occupation
• Podcast
• Products
• Recipes
• Reviews
• TV & Movie
• Videos

It is possible to modify and alter schema codes to fit your business needs, selecting to have a schema markup for ‘Local Businesses’ does not mean you can not have schema markup for ‘Events’. Below is an example of Facebook, Inc., their social website as well as listings that are utilizing Schema Markup.

Schema in the Wild

Here is a great example of a business not properly using structured data:

Here is a great example of a business properly using schema:

Confused? V Digital Services Can Assist With Your SEO

Schema Markup is still in its early stages but it has gained the support of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If you are looking for ways to stay ahead of your competition and boost your page rankings, this is a great way to add context to your content for easier searching.

To learn more about how structured data can help boost your organic search results contact V Digital Services today to schedule your first consultation. We look forward to working with you.