What exactly is Schema mark-up and how can this improve my SEO?

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Introduction

When sitting down with your seo company, to discuss ways your website can be improved, you may feel like your ears have been bombarded by tons of marketing jargon.

The reason for that is some seo agencies just like to make things more complicated than they need to be.

So, if your currently in a daze as to what schema mark-up is, and how it can be used to improve your businesses seo, well this is the blog post for you.

 

Unstructured data

Let’s say your shopping for a new car, and you visit car review websites. Now these websites will normally have loads of information, as most people want an in-depth car review.

So this normally means loads of text to read through, which is great for the reader that’s excited to know if that car is any good or not.

But Googlebot, which is the bot that Google uses to read websites, well it will be presented with loads of what we seo’s call “unstructured data”.

Now don’t get us wrong, unstructured data is useful, is actually essential to any good white hat seo strategy, yet picking out the important detail from a ton of other information, well can be hard work.

So in order to help Google figure out the important details, us SEO’s use what is called schema.

So the things like the star rating of car that actual owners of that vehicle have left may well be marked-up with schema.

And you may now be thinking, well that’s great, but what use it? Well when your searching for reviews of that car on Google, the add that might jump-out at you may well be the one which has the star rating there in the SERP’s.

And guess what? To get that star rating in the serps the seo consultant will have used schema.

 

CTR, click through rate

This leads us on nicely to our next point, that is schema can help to improve your businesses CTR.

For those of you who don’t know, CTR stands for click through rate. Now, this is the important part, your seo agency should be looking to improve your businesses CTR rate.

The reason being is this, even though your business may well be on the first page of Google, it still has to compete with all the other businesses.

This means that sometimes you may lose business because someone clicks on one business, finds what they want, and doesn’t bother looking at the other businesses.

This is why marketing companies like us recognise that is super important to improve a businesses CTR.

So, in a nutshell, if the seo agency can get the business to standout, and have a business listing that’s a bit different from the other businesses, well this should help to improve the businesses CTR.

For example, imagine you were booking a hotel, and there were 10 businesses that were displayed, all saying pretty much the same thing, such as “luxurious hotel, which offers affordable prices”.

Yet there was one business which was different from the rest, it had a star rating which was really positive. It therefore stood out from all the other businesses.

Therefore in order to get the businesses star rating, in terms of what customers think of the business, being displayed in the SERP’s, you will need to mark-up the customer reviews using schema.

 

How do you add schema to my website?

Google has made it super easy to add schema to a website, that’s by using the Google’s structured Data Mark-up Helper.

 

Local SEO

If you know a thing or two about local seo, well you will know that is really important for your businesses “NAP” information to be easily read on your website.

For those that don’t know, NAP stands for name of your business, its address and phone number.

And as you can imagine, most business websites have loads of text. This text is obviously used to describe what the business can offer, yet in all that information the NAP information may get lost in the text.

So when your describing the businesses services, or products that the company sells, Googlebot may be struggling to work out where your business is based, the businesses name and phone number.

So, you may wish to ask your SEO company to mark-up the NAP information using schema.

This can help to improve your local seo.

 

Does your business require help with its seo?

If your business requires help with its organic seo or local seo we can help.