Structured Data: A Complete Guide to Boost Your SEO



Understanding the Basics of Structured Data

Structured data is a way of formatting information on webpages so that it’s not only accessible but also comprehensible for search engines. When you embed types of code—like JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa—into the very content of your site, you’re essentially giving explicit clues to the search engine about what exactly your content is. And when search engines understand your content better, they can serve it up more reliably and accurately in search results.

How Search Engines Interpret Your Content

Search engines are like the best of friends, going out of their way to understand you. They crawl your website and interpret its content. Still, they need your help if they are to understand the stuff that is hard for even humans to understand. That’s the role of structured data. It and you can converse in a sort of ontology, the basic vocabulary of a particular domain. You tell it what your content is about, and it tells your best friends, the search engines, which then tell the public.

Structured data is used in many of the ways we are familiar with, yet it often goes unrecognized. That product review, event detail, or recipe card we see in search results is more than just an ordinary search result. It is a rich snippet—data that has been semantically marked up to make it comprehendible not just for humans but also for machines, at which point a “search engine” becomes fully operational. In such an engine, content is better understood, better matched, and thus better served.

Formats for Implementing Structured Data

Three formats reign supreme in the realm of structured data:

• JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation – Linked Data): They are simple but powerful means of embedding structured data that actually does something. This means using a <script> tag in the HTML and embedding the real coded stuff inside. This is by and far the best method, according to the world’s leading search engines. JSON-LD can coexist with all the user-facing stuff you want on a webpage.
• Microdata: This format is much more an HTML5 thing than it is a SEO HTML thing; this means it is for semantics, basically. You can put it in any <div>, and not only search engines but also browsers can understand it.
• RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes): If RDFa sounds obscure, that’s because it is. RDF is a foundation for linked data—data that’s connected across different databases. RDFa users embed linked data into HTML5. RDFa is on its way out in favor of easier JSON-LD.

Why Structured Data Are Key

If you’re a business, a group, or an individual creating content online, the first key benefit of structured data is that they help you secure a place next to your competitors in the digital marketplace. Search engine algorithms are getting better all the time. They sort through multitudes of web pages to deliver the best content to the user. But search engine algorithms can’t do the job they’re meant to do if they don’t understand the content they’re sorting through.

Better Click-Through Rates (CTR)

When it comes to search engine results pages, it is not enough for your links merely to be there. What should be of foremost concern is how engagingly those links are presented. High-quality content gets you only so far, because unless users are viewing it, it might as well not exist. Scholars and practitioners in search engine optimization (SEO) have long understood this series of relationships. What has been less understood, and that which this article seeks to clarify, is how and to what degree structured data can figure into improving the performance of links to your content.

Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Structured data doesn’t influence your SEO ranking in a direct way. But what it does do is enhance the appearance of your site in search results. In terms of SEO, the goal is to optimize the content on your page so that search engines can understand what it is and serve it to the right users. Structured data gives them a boost in understanding that. And the better they understand it, the better chance you have of ranking well for it.

Frequent Applications of Structured Data

Structured data finds application in several industries, with e-commerce and content publishing among the most prominent. If you operate a website, even one of a completely different sort, there is almost certainly a structured data solution available that meets your particular needs.

E-commerce Websites

Structured data is critical for e-commerce stores because it allows them to convey vital product information right in the search results. This includes such particulars as pricing, availability, and even the all-important “buy” button. E-commerce means not just selling but also giving the customer a visual experience that is as close as possible to that of a brick-and-mortar store. And this visual experience can take many forms.

Product and Offer Structured Data

The “Product” schema gives general information about a product. It tells what the item is. “Offer” schema paired with “Product” provides the commercial information one needs to make a buying decision. This tells what the seller is offering the item for. We need both to understand not just the product itself but also the context in which it resides.

Websites for Blogging and Content Creation

For content creators and bloggers, the appearance of their posts in search engines is of paramount importance. Yet, too often, our work appears in search results as little more than a title and a link. With schema, we can ensure that our work stands out in a more eye-catching manner. If you work in one of the types of content creation mentioned (or even if you don’t and just happen to create content that you want more people to see), then head to the next section, where we discuss work that works for you.

Structured Data Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide

Structured data implementation may seem to be a challenging task at first glance. However, when you use the right tools and resources, it may even give you the false impression of being simple. The process involves careful, thoughtful decisions about what kind of structured data to use (in this case, schema.org vocabulary) for what kind of markup type. And then there’s systematic testing of the end result.

Implementing Structured Data: A Few Good Tools

There are a number of tools that help would-be users to create and validate the structured data that they hope might help improve their site’s appearance in the search results. At the most basic level, Google’s own Structured Data Markup Helper is a nifty way for less technical users to generate some of the basic code needed to do this and to do it correctly.

How to Check Your Structured Data for Errors

You can’t overemphasize the importance of checking structured data for errors. Anything that’s inconsistent or incorrectly formatted is unable to do the one job that allows it to do all the other jobs—being usable. You can check it in two high-quality ways: using Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema.org Validator. Then, for better peace of mind and a clearer view of the overall function, you can strategically monitor your structured data in your Webmaster Tools for any hiccups.

Trying to Succeed Despite the Odds

Some typical obstacles to success include developing a schema that’s far too complicated or trying to implement every conceivable property without having a clear focus. A better way is to adopt a targeted approach—prioritizing the key features over a bunch of redundant additions. That way, the development is much smoother and the path to accuracy is a lot clearer.

The Role of Structured Data in Your Marketing Framework

Structured data is not just a technical afterthought; it forms part of the modern digital marketing strategy foundation. It even extends to social media marketing. But using it is often easier said than done. Tools like WoopSocial can help, but there’s still a need for you to understand what it is, how it works, and why it matters to content marketing.

Using Social Media Data to Our Advantage

Having structured data allows us to connect the integration of social dynamic links and SEO. When someone shares a link to your content on social media, you want them to share it with as much info about the content as possible. Tags like OpenGraph and TwitterCard pretty much guarantee that whatever is shared on platforms like Facebook or Twitter will be rich with the right kind of data when it’s shared. WoopSocial is a tool that uses OpenGraph data to make sense of the posts that are shared using it. It can use that info to manage links it’s responsible for, whether they belong to WoopSocial itself or not.

How to Use Structured Data for Omnichannel Campaigns

Today’s modern marketing tools increasingly use structured data to automate intent-driven campaigns. Indeed, platforms that marry website analytics with predictive actions are, at some level, utilizing structured data. And for good reason: structuring your data gives you (and your platform) better insights into the user behavior that you’re trying to understand and predict.

The level of insight that you achieve from the data is intrinsically linked to how well you’ve integrated it into your system. Whether you use a platform like WoopSocial, which ensures your omnichannel efforts are consistent and real-time, or another tool, the better integrated your data and user insights are, the more engaging your overall user experience will be.

To sum it all up, using structured data gives both search engines and end-users a way to experience web clarity. When all is said and done, it just gives Human and Machine Readers the web experience they need to do the things they want to do. And when search engines have clarity about a given URL’s content, they can make much better decisions about where and when to show that URL in their results.