WordPress SEO in 5 Minutes – Structured Data

In a previous article, we spoke about how Rich Snippets can help you improve rankings, and the use of structured data to deploy rich results. So, what is structured data? Structured data generally means any organised data that follows a specific format. In SEO terms, it is a way to make your site more comprehensible to search engines through descriptions. Feeling confused? Don’t worry. As a well-established web development agency in Perth, we can help you understand what structured data is and what are its impacts on SEO.

What is structured data?

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Structured Data is a code written in a format that search engines understand. Its purpose is to add more details to your snippet to make it a rich snippet in SERPs.
It serves search engines to understand more about what your web page content is. Search engines like Google are usually good at understanding the general context of a page or site’s content. But when a site wants to represent itself, its pages or its posts using some specific standardised attributes, its code needs to be marked up properly. With Structured Data, a website converts HTML content to JSON or XML. Search engines understand JSON or XML better and increase the chances of your page ranking higher.

Structured data formats

Schema.org is the most popular when it comes to Structured data forms for search engines. It is open source and has a large library of codes. Schema.org is supported by all major search engines, and you can find almost all markup that you may need here. You need to copy codes and edit them to suit your requirements.

JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa are all markups in Schema.org. JSON-LD is the most popular and recommended as they do not break sites like other markups. It doesn’t tag individual HTML elements and can be considered as one chunk of information that search engine crawlers can understand.

Open Graph is another form. It used by Facebook to display the content when sharing and to construct the shared object in their feeds. It usually contains necessary information about the shared content like URL, featured image, author, title, and others.

Impacts of structured data on SEO

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Structured Data is not an SEO ranking factor. And adding it does not necessarily mean that Google will show a rich snippet. But adding structured data does help in a few ways. Let’s see what they are.

Boosting your Ranking

It helps Google to understand the content better and make the page more relevant for search queries.

Higher CTR and More conversions

Boost up in visual appeal in the SERP with rich results, especially for products or reviews. This gives a chance to increase the click-through rates(CTR) of your website. Higher CTR means more traffic which leads to more conversions.

Authority

An enhanced result in the SERP increases the assurance for the users that your website is more authoritative and trustworthy. This enhancement is possible because search engines pay attention to what features in SERP. Adding structured data to your website does not necessarily need coding experience. But coding knowledge does help in doing it correctly and without errors. If you find it too technical our SEO experts are there to help just a call or email away. Contact us today or email at sales@computingaustralia.group and speak to our experts.

Jargon Buster

Markup language : a system containing codes for formatting and presentation of text or annotating a document.

Rich snippets or Rich results : snippets where additional data in addition to the title, meta description, and URL gets displayed.

SERP : Search Engine Results Page. Pages displayed by search engines containing the results when a user searches for a particular term or words.