Boosting Your Website’s Engagements With Structured Data

What happens when my site goes live?

Once your site is published on the web, search engines work hard to analyse it to ensure that they continue to provide relevant search results to their users. They use crawlers to gather all sorts of information on your webpages, so they can better understand them. These crawlers visit the links on your pages, download web content, parse HTML, and look for a special type of information that is often referred to as structured data.

Structured data informs search engines about your pages’ content

Schema.org—in collaboration with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex—provides the most popular vocabulary for structured data. This vocabulary utilises specific schemas to classify and define page content for search engines, making it easier to contextualise the available information on your website. There are currently over 800 types provided: commonly used types include CreativeWork, Organization, and Product, just to name a few.

Having these different schemas on a website makes it much easier for search engines to understand the context of your content, and in turn, makes it easier to display your content in a more relevant and engaging way.

Structured data can help grow your audience

Several case studies have shown that websites experienced an increase in interactions after having implemented structured data. After implementing the VideoObject schema, Indonesian video streaming service, Vidio, reported a 3x increase in video impressions, and a 2x increase in video clicks. Japanese IT giant, Rakuten, saw a 2.7x increase in traffic to all their recipe pages after adding the Recipe schema.

The growth in impressions and user interactions observed by these companies can largely be credited to something we refer to as rich results, a distinctive format of search results that can only be achieved if structured data is implemented correctly.

Structured data enables engaging search results

Why don’t we try a little experiment? Try to put yourself in the shoes of a person trying to look for a recipe for… let’s say apple pie. Between the two sets of search results below, which are you more likely to click on?

Group A

Group B

Chances are, you picked the second group of search results. Perhaps the pictures caught your attention. Perhaps you were drawn by the number of ratings, or the neatly-formatted lists of ingredients.

This is an example of how rich results might appear on a search engine results page (SERP). Rich results include other non-textual elements that make them stand out a lot more, and this information is displayed in a way that is engaging to you—all thanks to structured data.

The presence of these rich results can boost your webpages’ organic click-through rates, helping your website perform better in search engine rankings, and the great news is that structured data is quite simple to implement.

How to implement structured data on your page

Let’s give a go at implementing structured data in the JSON-LD format, which is Google’s preferred method of choice. We can use this very article that you’re reading as our sample page.

When filling in the structured data for the Article schema, it’s recommended to add values for the properties:

• headline
• image
• datePublished
• dateModified
• author

Notice how the "author" property in the example below even has its own Person type? Structured data supports nested types, so you can specify when properties themselves correspond to certain structured data types.

Once complete, you can double check if your markup is valid using Google’s Rich Results Test. Simply paste your code in and run the test.

If you get a “valid item detected” message, you can review the details of the detected item.

Looks like everything’s good to go here, since the tool detected all the details correctly. We can proceed by embedding the code snippet we wrote on our page, and our article should then be eligible for rich results on Google. Neat. 😎

Next steps

Remember to ensure that your structured data isn’t misleading and that your content complies with your search engine’s content policies and guidelines. It’s also important to note that while having good content and implementing the correct structured data on your pages makes them eligible for rich results, their actual appearance on the SERP still depends on search engine algorithms. Nonetheless, it remains good practice to implement and maintain structured data alongside other SEO strategies.

Moving forward, you may want to consider exploring other implementation strategies, like utilising a CMS to manage structured data instead of manually setting the values on each of your pages. You might also be interested in looking into the other types of structured data markup supported by Google and optimising your website accordingly.

Wishing you the best of luck in your SEO endeavours! ✨