Your website is your brand’s home online. It is where your brand meets your audience and is a powerful tool for communicating your value. But even the most beautifully written copy, carefully curated imagery and bespoke design are wasted if it does not reach its intended audience. Therefore, your website needs the right traffic. A practical method to help with generating website traffic is search engine optimisation (SEO).
One of the latest strategies to improve SEO is to leverage structured data. Structured data helps search engines understand your website’s content, making it more effective. In this article, we’ll discuss how structured data can improve your SEO, its benefits, and how to implement it effectively.
What is Structured Data?
Structured data is information that has been organised and presented in a standardised way. It makes it easier for software and humans alike to access and understand. Structured Data is often stored and presented in clear, categorised segments like a table. Using structured data is a way to concisely communicate what your website is about to Google and other search engines.
Why is this important for Search Engine Optimisation?
Well, there are several benefits of using Structured Data for SEO. These Include:
1. Enhanced Visibility in Search Results:
- Rich Snippets: Structured data allows for creating rich snippets. These provide additional information and visual elements (e.g., star ratings, reviews, product prices) in search engine results pages (SERPs). Rich Snippets improve the visibility and appeal of your website, improving click-through rates.
- Knowledge Graph Integration: Structured data enables search engines to incorporate your website’s information into their Knowledge Graphs. This gives your brand greater visibility and authority on search engine result pages.
2. Improved Crawlability and Indexing:
- Clear Context and Relevance: Structured data provides search engines with a concise understanding of your website’s content, facilitating better indexing and classification. This increases the likelihood of your pages appearing in search results for relevant queries.
- Indexing Complex Content: Structured data helps search engines extract and comprehend complex content elements, such as events, recipes, articles, or FAQs. This improves the accuracy and richness of search results for specific queries.
3. Better Targeting and User Experience:
- Targeted Features: Structured data allows you to define specific attributes of your offerings (e.g., price, availability, locations) to target users searching for these attributes, increasing the relevance of your website.
- Voice Search and AI Assistants: With the rise of voice search and AI assistants, structured data can help your website provide more precise and accurate answers to user queries. This enhances the user experience and increases the chances of your content being selected as a featured snippet.
This is useful for organic growth of your business but also benefits in areas of paid online advertising. Structured Data and improved SEO can lead to better ad ranking and helps produce more relevant leads for your business.
How do you add structured data to your website to make it both practical for the software to understand and valuable for SEO benefits and still make sense to humans? Some information in its natural, unstructured, form will not make sense when structured after all. Other forms of information, like images, videos, social media posts and written texts like emails and this blog article, cannot be structured.
Schema-On-Read
Unstructured data stored in its native form and not processed until it is used is referred to as “schema-on-read”. Schema.org is a collaborative project developed by the “big search engines” which provides a shared vocabulary for structured data markup. It defines a set of schemas (HTML tags) that can be used to annotate your content, providing search engines with additional context to understand and display it.
You can manually search through, amend, and apply code snippets to your website as appropriate. This involves:
- Identifying Relevant Schemas:
Determine which schemas align with your website’s content and goals. Schemas can vary depending on your industry and the content you produce. - Implementing Markup:
Use schema markup to incorporate structured data into your web pages through HTML tags. Make sure to validate and test the markup for accuracy. - Monitoring and Optimising:
Regularly monitor the performance of your structured data using tools like Google Search Console. Analyse click-through rates and user behaviour to identify any areas for optimisation and improvement.
Evolving Standards in Structured Data and SEO
It is important to keep in mind that things in the online landscape change quickly. As such, make sure that you keep up-to-date with developments in structured data, schema.org updates, and new opportunities for incorporating structured data into your website.
Future-Proof Your SEO
As search engines continue to evolve, structured data will play an increasingly important role. The most effective way to stay on top of changes is to adapt and enhance your implementation to take advantage of emerging technologies and trends. The easiest way to do this is to install a plugin that automates much of the process. Yoast, Semrush, and SE Ranking are amongst many businesses with a variety of SEO management and improvement product options for optimising SEO on your website. There is still a manual element to this process, despite the assistance from these tools. Some businesses find it helpful to hire an expert, like Unbound, to take care of their SEO for them.
By leveraging structured data, you can optimise your website’s appearance in search engine results, provide richer information to users, and increase click-through rates. Implement it effectively yourself or with the help of an SEO tool or agency. Harnessing the power of structured data can elevate your SEO efforts and position your business and website for success in the dynamic digital landscape.
Would you like help with implementing and improving structured data and SEO on your website?
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