What is structured data & how to use it to improve your SEO?
If you have a website, you should have heard of structured data as they are becoming more important in SEO strategies. As the Web evolves, more data formats are used to enrich the user experience. But what is exactly structured data and how to use it best to promote your website and increase your visibility?
1. What is structured data?
According to Google, ‘Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.’
The best-known example in the digital marketing community is the one of a recipe page where you can highlight the cooking time, the calories or the required ingredients.
Thanks to the info that you provide through structured data, Google and other search engines understand better the content of your different Web pages. Besides that, structured data are also really useful to present your web pages in a more interesting way on SERPs.
2. Why is structured data important?
Besides being more interesting and eye-catching, the structured data also improves the search experience of Web users. As Google is able to segment information very precisely, it can provide a deeper way to use search engines. For instance, you can search for a specific recipe, using a certain type of ingredients or representing a certain amount of calories.
3. How to set up structured data?
You have to set up structured data on each specific page. As it can represent a long process, we advise you to start with your most important pages (especially category pages). To do this, you have to use in-page markup and be very precise concerning the content of your page. But before that, you can evaluate the current situation of the structured data on your website, if you have some through Google testing tool:
In most cases, you have to follow schema.org documentation. It will give you a good first approach concerning every detail you need according to each specific page content (it has been created by the most important search engines). Yet, Google recommends to rely on its own documentation to create your structured data.
To take the most out of structured data, you have to follow instructions precisely. For instance, you have to take into account every property of an object in order to be eligible for appearance in Google Search. Of course, you can test your integration thanks to the Google testing tool.
Also, do not try to be spammy. It is better to provide fewer properties through structured data but with a higher quality. Crawlers will be able to see if structured data concerns invisible or non-existant content.
If you’d like to test your structured data skills, you can train yourself on Codelabs.
What was your first experience with structured data? Did you manage to create it easily on your website? What impact did it have on your SEO?
Thanks for reading this SEO article, hope to see you again soon :).
