SEO Insights: What is Structured Data?

Structured data is based on a standardized collection of shared vocabularies (schema.org) and formats (Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD). Essentially, when structured data is added to a web page HTML code (this is referred to as “structured data markup”), the information helps search engines quickly and accurately understand what web pages are about, and the elements they contain – such a reviews, news articles, recipes, videos, and so on.

Visitors Can’t See Structured Data – but Crawlers Can

Structured data markup works on the back-end, and as such isn’t viewable by website visitors. However, search engines use structured data to create “rich snippets” about a web page. These snippets appear in search results, and can therefore help attract traffic.

Structured Data and Vertical Search Results

What’s more, structured data can be used to tell search engines that a web page (and by extension, a website) contains videos, images or news articles/announcements. This increases the likelihood that these elements will be displayed in their respective search verticals. In other words: a business that uses structured data to tell Google that it has a video on its website about hosted VoIP phone systems, increases the chances of having that video show up when people search for “VoIP phone systems” and click “videos” from the search results page.

Structured Data and Localization

Plus, structured data can be used to tell search engines where a business is located, which is an increasingly important factor in determining search engine rankings. With the rise of mobile surfing, Google is really big on “localization”, and wants to connect searchers with businesses that are located nearby – or at least, relatively nearby compared to other businesses vying for the same target market.

Structured Data Warning: Don’t DIY

There are a few tools out there can make creating structured data markup easier, such as Google’s Webmaster Tools. However, we don’t recommend that businesses create their own markup text and serve it to the search engines. This is because Google gets EXTREMELY UNHAPPY — as only a $527 billion dollar company can – if it detects that structured data contains anything that might diminish a searcher’s experience. What’s more, Google really doesn’t care whether such a transgression is accidental.

And if you have any doubt about this or think that we might be exaggerating, here’s what Google itself has to say in its Developers Guide: “At Google, our first priority is to help our users find relevant, engaging answers for their search queries. High-quality structured data must not create a misleading or deceptive experience for search users.”

Of course, what’s missing from this advice are the consequences of earning Google’s wrath. Grizzly evidence is found all over the web, including this article over at Search Engine Roundtable that reveals Google is coming down hard on some websites that are using WordPress plugins to share things like recipes with visitors. The problem? The plugins are automatically adding structured data markup to every web page – which is behavior that Google thinks is “spammy”. The result? The offending web pages are being scrubbed off the search engine results pages (note: it’s possible for them to get back up, but only after the problem is fixed and Google has been pacified – which can take a while and cost a lot!).

Learn More

Naturally, you aren’t reading this article to brush up on your Google’s Developer job interview (though if you are, feel free to use us as a reference!). However, as a business owner or other executive, you need to know how structured data fits into your overall online marketing profile – since it plays a significant role in helping you attract quality traffic.

To learn more and get practical and reliable advice on structured data, structured websites, and the joys of making Google, Bing and Yahoo happy for all of the right reasons, contact the Leap Clixx team today. Your consultation with us is free.

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