Businesses of all sizes are preparing to find new ways to enhance their SEO, and the end of the year is a great time to look for innovative solutions. Content, keyword building, and website management are all crucial for every successful SEO campaign, but there are more advanced techniques and technical optimizations businesses could benefit from. Specifically, we’re going to dive into the world of technical data and schema data for users.
As a refresher, schema data is technical data that can be applied to either your whole website or specific pieces of content to highlight crucial business information for search engine users. When adding schema data or looking to implement, it is important to follow Google’s Developer rules and guidelines for schema data:
Implement schema data on websites by following Google’s instructions
A great resource to get started on implemented schema data is Google’s Developers Console that outlines all the general and specific details.
High-quality pages that meet either general or specific schema guidelines are crawled for technical data highlights, but only when the technical rules are followed correctly. Any schema data code you create should be carefully reviewed and tested before being added to the backend of any content pages or websites.
Pages that improperly use schema data are not only less likely to benefit but could even recieve a penalty for structured data spam by Google. Always test your schema data on Google’s Rich Results tester, which you can find here.
When should I use schema data?
Schema data is great for both wide-reaching technical optimizations and highly-specific pieces of content. Below, we’ll highlight some of the key schema data use cases for businesses of all sizes. Here are the breakdowns from Google Search Central:
LOCAL BUSINESS SCHEMA: When users search for businesses on Google Search or Maps, Search results may display a prominent Google knowledge panel with details about a business that matched the query. When users query for a type of business (for example, “best NYC restaurants”), they may see a carousel of businesses related to the query. With Local Business structured data, you can tell Google about your business hours, different departments within a business, reviews for your business, and more.
FAQ SCHEMA: A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page contains a list of questions and answers pertaining to a particular topic. Properly marked up FAQ pages may be eligible to have a rich result on Search and an Action on the Google Assistant, which can help your site reach the right users.
RECIPE SCHEMA:Help users find your recipe content by telling Google about your recipe with structured data. When you provide information such as reviewer ratings, cooking and preparation times, and nutrition information, Google can better understand your recipe and present it to users in interesting ways. Recipes can appear in Google Search results and Google Images.
PRODUCT SCHEMA: Add markup to your product pages so Google can provide detailed product information as a rich result in Google Search — including Google Images. Users can see price, availability, and review ratings right in search results.
Scale your current SEO campaigns at Boston Web Marketing
DIY digital marketing can be extremely difficult since there is so much to consider when effectively optimizing your digital properties and websites throughout the year. Let the team at Boston Web Marketing recommend technical SEO improvements as well as other ways to scale your search engine presence.
Simply call us today or learn more by visiting our “Contact Us” page for SEO consultations!