The SEO advantages of Schema
Friday, 11th July 2014
With the recent excitement of the Tour de France I am reminded of the famous phrase coined by Sir Dave Brailsford, the Olympic Cycling ex-coach and current Team Sky leader. He said that part of the success of the team was down to the aggregation of marginal gains.
Actually I am reminded of it every day, not just when the cycling is on! And I think that Schema is probably a great example of a marginal gain - although depending on how you use it, how well you use it, where you use it and if at all your competitors use it your uplift in SEO performance may well be more than marginal.
So lets start with some facts.
According to Searchmetrics 99% of domain names don't use Schema. That is a massive opportunity. Having said that it is hardly a secret and has been around for a few years.
What is Schema
We sometimes call it "Rich Snippets". It is HTML Markup (Stuff that is in the source code behind your website), which wraps itself around certain elements of your site. So for example you can wrap it around your Blog / News to tell Google what your Blog is all about and who wrote it. You can wrap it around your product information to tell Google in a more structured format what the price of a product is, when it is on sale, the product name or any reviews associated with that product.
All of this structuring of your data with schema allows you to present the information more efficiently to Google and without ambiguity. This in turn lets Google use your information more efficiently. In that way the presentation of your information in the Google Search Results (SERPS) is more likely to engage the user and get a click. As well as you probably outranking a competitor because your "pitch" to Google is more efficient.
There are other advantages that are less well known. For example, when Google Audits your Google Shopping Feed it by default looks for Schema - if your site has it your Google Shopping listing will be more efficiently processed.
All in all everyone is a winner and is a useful addition in the ever running battle of marginal gains with Google.
We can help you implement Schema. Google also provides a great tool here which will act as a little introduction
Which would you click first?
Without Schema:
With Schema:
Without Schema:
With Schema:
