What exactly is schema and how can help to improve my businesses SEO?
Introduction
If your business has just started to invest in SEO, well you’ve probably now got a long list of things that need doing to help improve your website.
Yet, all those various pieces of SEO work normally have rather confusing names, that’s to say often they are described using marketing jargon.
But do not worry, as we are here to help. Within this article we going to explain what schema is and how it can help your business.
Unstructured data
Let’s say for example we are looking to purchase a holiday abroad, but first we want to learn more about the destination.
So, we may read about the local area, things you can do when your there and various places you can eat. This information will normally be very descriptive, often written in a text format.
Yet all this information will be written for us humans, and sometimes the search engines can therefore have a hard time figuring what that particular blog post is all about.
However, with that said Google is now very clever at deciphering what a website is about. The Google Hummingbird update in particular allows Google to understand the meaning of a website a lot better.
The reason being is many SEO consultants believe that Hummingbird and Google’s Knowledge Graph now allow Google to extract meaning a lot better. The reason being is Google knows how things connect.
For example, if your researching a trip to certain part of Spain, Google will know that certain tourist attractions are popular at that location, and that a lot of people visit certain restaurants.
So, when these attractions and restaurants are mentioned in a blog post, Google will understand the different places, which we in SEO we call “entities”. Therefore, Google will know that you are talking about an area in Spain.
Yet, there’s ways that we can still help the search engines further, and that’s by marking-up certain elements of your website using schema.
So, for example, many businesses mark-up using schema the following information on their website:
· Businesses address, phone number and name (NAP information)
· Star rating in terms of how positive the customers reviews are
· Opening hours
Using schema allows you to mark-up unstructured information and make this information structured using schema mark-up.
This can help your businesses SEO, the reason being is that Googlebot will be able to instantly know key information regarding your business if it is marked up using Schema.
Then say for example the restaurants star rating may show up within the serp’s. Plus say someone was in Spain at that location, and they ask Google where is a local traditional Spanish restaurant, well Google will have greater confidence in where a the local businesses are if the website uses schema.
Schema is just one part of the seo process
Sometimes on some seo companies’ websites they describe schema as something that can dramatically boost your businesses seo to another level.
However, in reality Google, and some other search engines take into account over 200 pieces of information, called “ranking signals” when working out how important your website actually is.
So, in a nutshell schema is just one part of the seo puzzle.
This means if you want your business to get onto the first page of Google, many other ranking signals will need to be optimised as well.
Schema, rich snippets and helping your business to standout
Even when your seo agency gets your business onto the first page of Google, you still have to try and make your business standout.
Most business owners know that the business listings that get clicked the most on Google are the ones right at the top.
But say someone is searching for a hotel, and they want to find one that has really good reviews, well a business listing at the bottom of Google, that has a good star rating in the SERP’s, well this is likely to stand out from the crowd.
So, you got it, schema can be used to make your business stand out from the crowd, and sometimes obtain more clicks on your businesses listing because Schema allows your business listing to display more information, in this case the businesses star rating.
CTR, click through rate
Therefore a lot of marketing agencies use schema mark-up to improve how many people click on the business listing.
Sure, it’s all well good having a well written meta title, and meta description, yet having schema added so you can display say your businesses star rating for example, well this may well give your business the edge over the competition.
How do you add schema mark-up to a website?
Adding schema to your website has never been so easy, that’s because Google’s Structured Data Mark-up Helper makes it super easy to add schema to your website.
Local SEO
As any good seo company should tell you, it’s important that your businesses NAP information is clearly written on your website.
For example, you should mark-up your businesses name, address and phone number using schema.
Then you should create plenty of good quality business citations with the help from a white hat agency.
If this seo work is implemented correctly, then it can really help your businesses seo.
