What is a Schema Markup and How Does it Boost Your SEO?

Introduction.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of improving your site to increase organic visibility for specific search queries. The goal of SEO is to improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through onsite changes.

So you ventured into the world of SEO, got familiar with terms commonly used in SEO, and only discover that you still have a lot of our learnings to do. Yes, we never stop learning till we die is it?

One concept that you would find quite new is “Schema Markup” maybe you might have seen this somewhere online or had it suggested to you by an SEO expert as a means to optimize your SEO game.

Schema markup or Schema.org is one of the tools that support SEO. It represents the semantic vocabulary (also known as microdata) of your website. Schema markup helps search engine robots understand your content better.

This article is going to be in-depth details on how you can upgrade your SEO game using Schema Markup.

What is a Schema Markup?

In Layman’s terms, Schema Markup is the official language of the search engines. Once added to a webpage, Schema Markup will create a unique, enhanced description for search results.

These markups (formerly known as rich snippets) enable search engines to easily interpret the meaning and relationship of your webpage content and serve it up as a rich result for search queries.

What are the Types of Schema Markup?

Schema markup is a type of microdata that can be applied to your website to help search engines understand your website and web pages.

Who wouldn’t love to be rich? Think of your website as a person wishing they were rich. Here are the various kinds of Schema markups concerning how they can be applied. Schema comes in various forms, and below is a complete list of some of them.

1. Organization Schema Markup.

The organisation schema markup clarifies your company introduction, including the official logo, contact info, location, and social profiles.

This helps give you the shorts and skinny of a company right? It also makes it easier for people to find the information they need to contact you.

2. Person Market Schema Markup.

The Person Market Schema shows information about an individual, such as name, birthday, address, education, and family members.

Google assumes that if you’re searching for someone by name, you’re likely looking for some basic information such as social media profiles, websites, etc.

3. Local Business Schema Markup.

The Local Business Schema Markup is great for local companies or a local branch of an organisation.

It helps consumers find the company’s location and other information such as the address, opening hours, contact info, etc. This schema is used in Google my business to show the location and description of companies.

4. Article Schema Markup.

Schema Article Markup is most commonly used for news and blog posts. It makes it easier for search engines to understand the content pulling in the headline, the time it was published, and the featured images.

There are, however, different types of Article Schema Markup for the different types of articles, such as Blog Post and News Articles.

5. Video Schema Markup.

Video Schema Markup is an excellent way to help Google crawl and index videos on your website; as we all know, it is tough for search engines to do so. It also helps your video appear in the Google Video Search, alongside those from YouTube.

6. Event Schema Markup.

Event Schema Markup provides additional information for scheduled events (i.e. webinars, concerts, lectures, etc.) such as date, location, and price.

This helps make it easier to draw people to the specific events they’re looking for and gives them the essential information they need to want to make a purchase.

7. Rating/Review Schema Markup.

Review schema is one that you see when searching for a product review. This will help get useful buyer information right out front without the user digging deeper. It comes with a star ad a yellowish emblem in each query displayed on the SERPs.

Benefits of a Schema Markup.

Schema markup sometimes referred to as schema or structured data, is among the essential SEO tactics you need to improve technical SEO performance and increase your site’s search engine positioning.

In other words, schema enables Google, Bing, and other search engines to navigate user search queries, decipher the information on your website, and come up with the best and most relevant search results.

Here are some common benefits of using a Schema Markup.

1. Schema Markup Helps Search engines Understand your website better.

As said earlier, Schema Markup enables your website to speak the language that search engines understand.
The main goal of SEO is conveying to search engines what your site is about. This is exactly what schema markup was created for.

So the number one reason to use schema is to provide a clearer sense of what your content is about to help search engines surface your content to relevant searchers.
Making use of a Schema Markup is your chance to explicitly tell search engines exactly what your video, content, Job site and many more are.

2. Schema Markup helps Improve your brand presence with a full Search engine Knowledge Graph.

The Knowledge Graph is the big box on the right-hand side of Google desktop searches (or front and centre in mobile searches).

It has most of the pertinent business information that customers need to know like phone numbers, social accounts, reviews, etc.

Making use of Schema Markup enables you to provide a strong boost to your brand presence online. Google and other search engines will display knowledge graphs only if they are highly confident the information contained within is accurate and useful.

3. Schema Markup makes it easy to Get attention-grabbing rich results on search Engines.

Your search listing can now be pimped out as if your business is exhibiting itself on search engines, important information such as Rating stars for a movie, product pricing, recipe cook time and more are all now possible to show right in search listings.

Google has gone beyond displaying direct links to presenting more data and information about your business. To get these special listings, add whatever relevant schema you can to your page.

4. Schema helps Improve your SERP ranking position.

SEO is all about telling Google what your website pages are about in a non-spammy.
Schema is another legitimate tool in your toolkit that helps tell your brand story using search engines.

Schema Markup allows you to do this in just a few clicks, In this case, I think it would be very hard to crack the first page without having the preferred structured data Google wants to include in the results.

5. Schema Markup allows you to Position your site for voice search.

With voice search results, there is typically only one result provided. So getting to that top position on voice search is more critical and difficult than it seems.

With the use of Structured data, you can achieve this feat without hassle, use schema to increase your odds of surfacing as the #1 voice search.

6. Get more video views (YouTube, Livestream, or native video).

Markup Schema can help you optimize your website on the SERP and help your video content get more views.

Similarly, Google could help you directly get more views of your regular videos right from Google, even if the video is not on YouTube, which is Google-owned.

Marking up your video or upcoming Livestream with the correct schema is the first step. Then it becomes eligible to be featured in a video carousel or even a larger single-video snippet. It will also help your chances of being included in the video search results tab.

7. Increase social media following.

Configuring your website to use Schema Markup provides you with the chance to increase your social media following.

If you are trying to increase the number of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter followers you have, give schema markup a serious look.

By marking up your social accounts using the same schema, you can get the familiar social icons of the top platforms in your Google results with links pointing to your accounts.

8. Display Social Proof in Google.

Google has evolved from more than just providing links to content to displaying social proof to those looking up for information about you.

This is why social proof, positive signals from unbiased third parties, is huge. We previously mentioned that Google ratings and reviews can show up right in your Knowledge Graph.

In addition to that, you can mark up your pages with rating and review information. Maybe you ask readers to rate how helpful a post was.