When a search engine receives an inquiry, they crawl the web looking for relevant and reputable results, but it isn’t always easy for them to decipher the content out there. Your website might make sense to humans, but does it make sense to machines?

With the objective of delivering excellent service to their users, the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo and eventually Yandex) collaborated back in 2011 to create a comprehensive labelling system (an ontology) that they called schema.org.  The idea was that if website owners could tag their content with these labels, known as “classes” and/or “types” the search engines would understand the content on their webpages and well as the context of the content.  This improved “understanding” of the content would help to improve “findability” resulting in higher impressions, clicks, CTR and eventually revenue.

Today, the schema.org vocabulary has grown to over 800 primary “types”, each with their own properties to further describe and bring clarity to the content. It is managed by a large group of interested individuals and chaired by Google.  Some industries have even created their own “extensions” so that they can describe their industry-specific content (automotive, financial, health and bibliography).

The challenge is that the schema.org vocabulary is extensive and is constantly evolving. Choosing the most accurate “type” can be tricky. Plus your website content changes as does the Google algorithms. Adding the code by hand is a time consuming, finicky effort and maintaining it is just an onerous, which is why we created Schema App.

Adding schema markup to your website is well worth the effort. Not only do the search engines explicitly understand your content, but schema markup can make you eligible for rich results and features (so you stand out from your competitors), optimize your content for voice search, allow your content to be accessible via many different devices and provide you with additional information in Google Search Console so you can understand what is driving your traffic.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts use a variety of tactics to help their customers be found and stand out in search. Schema markup is one of them.  Leading SEO experts recommend schema markup (aka Structured Data) as an imperative for success:

In addition to the URL and a description, a rich snippet might show ratings, reviews, photos, videos, price, promotions, availability, and so on. Because rich snippets provide incremental data and are visually appealing, they attract more viewers.

• How to create a Schema markup strategy
• 5 Day Free Email Course on Schema Markup
• Schema Markup Masterclass: 101