The power of structured data – part I

Introduction

Probably a lot of us remember the beginnings of search engines, when it used to look like this:

This view of Google Search came from 2003. As you can see, it contains some basic informations like:

• page title
• description
• ordered categories (which was new feature that time)
• URL, page size, cached page URL + similar pages

With the development of the internet, including of course search engines, information has been shown in an increasingly accessible way.

Nowadays there is plenty of information that we can read without necessity of going to the page that interests us:

What you see above are Knowledge Graphs and Featured Snippets.

It is really worth to use them on the website. Take a look at below examples of the stores. Which one is more visible and informative? I bet that users pay more attention to this one:

instead of the other:

Furthermore adding them does not require a lot of work!

By default, search engine robots do not know what the given page fragments relate to.

Structured data is used to indicate what this information applies to.

Schema.org

Briefly explaining Schema.org is a community that develops schemas of informations on websites, e-mails, etc.

These schemas are used, among others on most popular search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex.

To implement the code developer use the dictionary from http://schema.org, which allows the rich snippets to be displayed. Full list of Schemas can be found under the link: https://schema.org/docs/full.html.

Why is it worth structuring our data?

Implementing structured data has many advantages. Some of them are:

• Increasing the CTR (Click-through rate) by distinction in relation to other websites, so in the end, increased conversion rate
• Improving Google data accuracy – “Structured data markup helps define the properties of the products in your merchant hosted local storefront and store pickup data. Adding required structured data markup helps to ensure that Google can review the accuracy of the local product data.”
• Higher rankings (indirectly). Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/structured-markup/230931/
• Higher visibility in search engines – highlighted products, knowledge graphs, improved voice search, etc.
• .. and of course improved UX

Structured data implementation

The second part of the post will deal with the implementation of structured data. Hold on.