Hi this is John Locke, and today I’m
answering a great SEO question that I saw in a forum. This question was, how
important is Schema markup to SEO? Schema markup, for those of you that
don’t know, it’s basically hidden code, that is output in the code of a
web page, but basically it gives meta information about that page. For
example, if you had a company or organization, it would mark up that
organization, saying, here is the the company name, the logo, the address,
the hours, the business description,etc. If it was a product, it would say, “Here is the
product, here is the the SKU, the price, the availability in stock or not in
stock, etc” those sorts of things. There is Schema markup for specific
things such as events, products, places, and it can take forms of ratings, reviews — those
things can be Schema markup. Reviews that you see on web sites are aggregate
ratings, which is Schema markup. How important is it? Well, it can be important.
I would say it’s not as important as other things such as: can people
complete the search goal? aka searcher intent, the
links coming into the page, the overall UX or user experience of the page. Schema
markup is a nice to have, and it’s definitely something that if you can do with many “off-the-shelf” WordPress themes. Sometimes they include it. You
can also use something like Yoast SEO to include the Schema markup about your
organization. There’s another plug-in that I will put in the links,
by Phil Singleton’s team.I think it’s called WP Structured Data or
something like that. I’m going to put it all in the show notes. Other
solutions such as WooCommerce output Schema data about the products. That
said, I see results in the first page of Google all the time,
that have no Schema markup, although increasingly less. More and more, the majority of
websites seem to have Schema data already embedded in them. I would say
that it’s a trend, it’s trending upward that most sites in the first page
of Google, in the top 10 or 20 results, seem to have Schema markup. Now, I am not saying
that if you don’t have Schema markup, that you’re not going to rank. It just gives
Google a little bit of extra information about that page.
Some people will point and say, yes you might get snippets or Rich Snippets. There might be extra information in the search results if you
include the Schema for specific things. Yes, for events, for products, if there’s
reviews that are on the page.Like we talked about before, if there’s a
mechanism for collecting reviews and outputting the new aggregate rating on
the page, then yes — that Schema data will be in there (on the search results page). But the other things that can be
extracted from the page, such as images, product images, featured images,
and photos out of the page — those things can be taken out from the page directly.
I would say that Schema data is probably most important for products and events.
But there are other cases that apply, there are types of services, and certain types of things (where it is beneficial). It’s
not set in stone that if you do not have Schema markup, that you’re not going to
rank. Like I said, I’ve seen quite a few sites that do rank without any
type of Schema markup. I think it’s important to differentiate that some WordPress
themes, that claim that they are (SEO-friendly because they have Schema built in). WordPress themes are what I’m
talking about here, but this could extend to other things like Shopify themes. But talking
specifically about WordPress themes, there are some themes that claim that they are
SEO friendly because they include Schema markup. But it’s mostly from what I’ve
seen — and I’m looking at you Genesis — it’s just data about the website itself. It’s not
about the organization, or any products, services, or events
built in there. Those must be provided by additional plugins. But the
Schema markup is basically just saying, “This is a website, here’s breadcrumbs, here’s footer and sidebar.” There’s not any additional Schema data
baked into the the Genesis themes or any other themes that I’ve seen.
Those are generally provided by SEO plugins, or Schema data or Structured
Data plugins. If you wanted to test and see if your your website itself has
Structured Data, or whether it has Schema markup, or Microformats, or any
other type of Structured Data that Google recognizes — I will also link this
in the show notes — but there is a tool. Google, or search for “Structured
data testing tool”. This is a tool that Google has, that lets you run any web address,
any URL, through this tool. And it will show you exactly what Structured Data or
Schema markup or Microformats is in that page. It could be very useful. Something that you can investigate on your own. I hope that answers this
question. To sum up, Schema is
nice to have. This markup includes certain things that will help a little bit more (in search results). I would
definitely include it if I were you. But if you don’t have it, or if a competitor
site doesn’t have it, that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to rank. If people can
still accomplish their goal, and Google understands what this page is about, then
the absence of Schema markup or other Structured Data may not have an effect.
That page may still rank. That said, I think it does play a bit
of a role. I don’t think it’s a major factor. I think it’s a minor factor. But
it’s a nice to have. It’s something that you should probably have in your pages,
wherever it applies. This is John Locke for Lockedown Design and SEO. We help
industrial and manufacturing firms, and we’re here publishing videos every
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Until next time, peace.