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Is Schema the Future of SEO?

As an SEO Agency, we know the approaches to SEO is ever-changing and the internet marketing landscape is continually evolving. That means if you’re not keeping up with the latest trends, tactics, and techniques, you’re already behind. And that leads us to today’s topic—schema.org.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema.org, usually called schema markup or schema for short, came about through the combined efforts of Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex so they could give their search engines enough information to better understand any given piece of content and provide their users with improved search results.

When you or an SEO company add schema markup to your HTML, it will improve the way a web page is displayed in the search engine results pages. Additionally, schema enhances what is called rich snippets which are then placed underneath the page title adding more clarity and a deeper understanding of what your website or content is all about.

For example, if a search engine sees the word “SEO” and you haven’t used schema to tell it the deeper meaning of your website, it will read it as just that—SEO alone, which shows as just one topic. However, if you use schema markup around the word “SEO,” you can tell the search engine that your site is about SEO, as well as internet marketing, quality content, or anything else you want to include. Now that search engine can provide their users with better results because they have more in-depth information about what your site is all about.

How Schema Markup Plays into SEO

There are plenty of great reasons for you or your SEO Agency to use schema markup with your content, but the two reasons below are of particular importance and can mean the difference between meeting or exceeding all your goals.

  • Higher SEO Rankings: As we mentioned above, the schema will help your website rank higher in the search engines because you’ve now given them a deeper, more in-depth understanding of what your website is all about. That means because you have used schema markup, your site will rank higher than those who are not using it. The good news is you can use schema on a wide variety of content. It can be used on anything from articles, book reviews, software applications, events, products, local businesses, and just about anything really.
  • A Beacon for Organic Voice Searches: Another reason it’s becoming even more important to use schema.org is due to the increasing use of voice search because it acts as a beacon that points digital assistants to the information in your content. This helps the digital assistants provide their users with more accurate answers to the questions they are searching for and you more traffic to your business.

Effectively Using Schema Markup

Knowing how to effectively use schema markup and when to use it is imperative if you want to get the best results from this marketing technique. Because the more markup you use, the better results you will get, but only if it’s done right.
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  • Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to add structured data markup to a sample web page and create the HTML.
  • Input the code into Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to see what the page will look like with the schema markup code added to it.
  • Go to schema.org to find the most commonly used types of schema markup. You can go to the Organization of Schemas to do that. This will give you the different types of schema markup that is most suited to your particular business. And as we mentioned earlier, the more content you markup up the better, so you will want to take advantage of this.
  • One caveat to the above. You only want to markup the content that’s visible to people visiting the web page and not any of the content in hidden divs or any other type of elements that are hidden within any given page.

Biggest Challenges Implementing Schema Markup

Schema markup can help improve your rankings and overall brand exposure. However, unless you know how to code, it could be a bit challenging for you, even with some of the tools such as the Structured Data Markup Helper we mentioned above. Because just like anything else, all tools have their limitations. That means you need to thoroughly understand how markup works so you can fill in the gaps when faced with those limitations.

Some of the biggest schema markup challenges people face are:

  • How to properly implement schema markup.
  • Finding the schema resource guides not clear enough to follow.
  • The lack of an in-depth understanding of schema markup.
  • Maintaining the schema codes when Google makes changes.
  • There are only a limited number of resources available.
  • Sometimes the Google tool doesn’t parse correctly.
  • Developing a proper schema strategy.
  • Understanding the schema markup vocabulary.

SEOs and Schema, The Bottom Line

A study performed by Bing and Catalyst found that only 17% of marketers are using schema markup. That means if you or your SEO company uses schema on all your content, you will have a much higher chance of outranking most, if not all, of your competition, which, in turn, will generally result in increased revenue. Not to mention more brand recognition, which leads to consumer trust and a more loyal brand following. And who doesn’t want that!
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If you would like more information about adding schema markup to all your content, please Contact Us today. We’d love to show you how cost-effective implementing a schema markup strategy can be and how it could take your business to the next level.

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