Increase your website traffic?
Written by: Benjamin Paine
Managing Director at Digital Nomads HQ
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What is Schema Markup?
Alright, let’s talk about something that might not be on your radar, but could be a game-changer for your online presence: Schema markup.
Put simply, it’s code you add to your website that helps search engines understand your content better. Think of it as giving those search engines a little nudge in the right direction, because although their algorithms are really advanced and are updating constantly, they are not mind readers!
So, let’s break down what Schema markup is and how it can work for you.
Think of it this way: while you can easily recognise a recipe by its list of ingredients and measurements, a search engine sees just a jumble of words. Schema markup is like adding labels to those words, clearly explaining, “Hey Google, this is an article!”.
All of this code looks complicated, but when you understand some fundamentals, it becomes easy, stick with us and we’ll give you all the information you need to get started.
This layer of information allows search engines to present your content in a richer, more informative way to users. These listings are called “rich results” and can include images, ratings, prices, and other eye-catching details that draw users in, promoting engagement.
Schema Library
Structured Data
Structured data is a term referring to any organised information that follows a standardised format.
You’ll hear “structured data”, “Schema Markup”, and “Rich results” mixed in together, but just know it’s generally talking about the same thing.
Schema markup is a type of structured data that is used to present a Rich result.
Schema.org
This is a collaborative effort between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex.
They all agreed on a set of schema types and a set vocabulary so that web designers and programmers could collaborate.
It’s basically the dictionary for Schema types, where you can find all the approved schema types (like “Product,” “Event,” etc.) and their properties. It’s your go-to resource for schema vocabulary.
Search Engine Results Page (SERPS)
Rich Results
Here’s an example of Review snippet;
Microdata, RDFa, JSON-LD
Semantic Vocabulary
Entities
Properties
Google Search Gallery
Why Use Structured Data?
For a long time, structured data was primarily used to showcase Google reviews for businesses or to highlight products and offerings.
However, with the introduction of Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience), now known as AI Overviews, and soon to be available globally, it has become increasingly important to make it simpler for Google and other search engines to comprehend our content.
Google’s documentation emphasises the need to present content in a structured manner that is easily understandable and processable by search engines.
Long story short, if you want to outrank your competitors or beat them to the punch with AI search…..start implementing schema markup on your site.
Now this isn’t to say that just by having schema markup on your site you’re going to rank 1st for all of your primary search terms, as content and authority in your niche are still king here, but it will help Google crawl and index your site much easier.
Rotten Tomatoes added structured data to 100,000 unique pages and measured a 25% higher click-through rate for pages enhanced with structured data, compared to pages without structured data.
How do I add schema markup to my website?
Ok, so we know what schema markup is now, and we know why we need it and the benefits. Let’s get to the important stuff, how do we implement it?
This will depend on the CMS (content management system) that your website is built on. The most commonly used CMS by far is WordPress (Elementor), but it may be built on Wix, or even Shopify if your website is an online store.
We will use WordPress for our example here as over 43% of the world’s websites are built on this, but the principles are all the same regardless of your website builder.
What Schema types should I use?
Ok, so now would be a good time to pull up Schema.org and take a look, there are many, many schema types that we can use, 792 to be exact! Luckily, we have compiled a list of the most commonly used ones that we will use in our example today. Here is the list:
- LocalBusiness
- Product
- Article
- Event
- FAQ
- Organization
- Video
- Recipe
- Review
- BreadcrumbList
You can also take a look at Google’s search gallery, as this has some useful examples that you can use for specific use cases
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/search-gallery.
There are schema types for almost every “thing”, “action” or “industry” that you can think of, so you can spend quite a lot of time just searching the Schema type dictionary, there are even sub-types for some types.
But know that you can use multiple on the same page.
So if you have a product page for your business, you could use the “product”, “review”, ”offer”, ”price” and possibly “video” if your page features a product video.
Schema Formats
Ok, so we’ve decided what schema type or types we want to use, but how do we create the required code in the correct format?
There are many different ways of doing this. You can use a plugin like RankMath or Yoast SEO, which will implement some schema markup for you automatically, or if you want a more tailored approach, you can do it yourself using Google’s really helpful structured data markup helper, or even ChatGPT or Gemini. These new LLMs are good at writing code and formatting JSON-LD.
What’s JSON-LD?
So we briefly touched on formats in our library above, but before we move on to creating our schema code, we need to understand how it needs to be formatted. Google search supports structured data in the following 3 formats:
JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) (recommended)
Microdata
RDFa
Some boring technical information on these types:
JSON-LD: This format embeds data using JavaScript within HTML’sor. It separates data from content, making complex structures easier to manage. Search engines can also read JSON-LD data dynamically loaded by JavaScript or widgets.
Microdata: This method leverages existing HTML attributes to define structured data directly within the content. Similar to RDFa, it uses attributes on HTML tags, typically within the, although theis also possible.
RDFa: An extension for HTML5 that uses attributes to link data to the corresponding visible content for search engines. This format is commonly found in both theandsections of a webpage.
Let’s get started
Ok, we’ve talked about the what and why enough; let’s get started. The best place to start will depend on what type you want to use, but the most comprehensive resource by far is the schema.org website itself.
When you land on the schema.org homepage, click the “schemas” tab at the top; this will give you a page with some options. You can either choose to browse the full hierarchy in HTML or jump directly into common types if you know what you’re looking for.
When you select a schema type, it’ll take you to the page for that type of schema. There will be a table that contains all the information about that schema and the properties associated with it.
Below the table at the bottom of the page, you’ll see examples for that type of schema. You can choose to view the code in “no markup”, “Microdata”, “RDFa”, “JSON-LD” and “structure”.
You can experiment by copying the JSON-LD code directly out of the box and adapting it to your page and offerings. JSON is good because it’s fairly self-explanatory in that you can read the “properties” and “entities” and know what value you need to add.
Let’s do it together
So we’ll take an example from one of the schema pages, and we can walk through updating it for our page and implementing it on our WordPress website together.
We’ll then look at some ways we can edit and adapt the schema to include some sub-types. For our example, we are going to use the “LocalBusiness” Schema, there are too many “product” examples available out there.
You can see the page for the LocalBusiness type here: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness
Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see the examples as we discussed before.
We’ll use example 1 for this. Click the JSON-LD tab at the top, and you’ll see the code format change; it should look like this:
You’ll see at the top next to the “Example 1” title a little icon, click this and it will copy the code to your clipboard. I find it easiest to just paste the code into a text editor to edit the schema for our website, but you can use Word or any other text editor you like it doesn’t matter.
Now you can start editing your schema for your website.
The first piece of information we need to change is the @type, you’ll see it’s currently set to “Restaurant”, now if your business is a restaurant, you can leave this as is, but if not, we’ll need to go back to the schema page to see what @type’s we can use for the LocalBusiness schema type.
Just above the example code we’ve copied, you’ll see a list of more specific types that can be used under the LocalBusiness type; note here that all of these types are industries that will most likely have a brick and mortar store or physical office.
That’s because the LocalBusiness schema type is specifically for these types of businesses, if you don’t have a physical store, and you’re an online business, you’ll probably want to use the “Organization” schema type rather than the LocalBusiness which is actually a sub-type.
But pick a @type that’s closest to your business industry, you can click each one and see a short summary at the top of each page to give you an idea if this sub-type suits your business.
Once you’ve changed your @type, you can move down the list, filling in the required information, and keeping the same formatting for your entities and properties.
You’ll see when you get to “aggregateRating” that there is a “ratingValue” and “reviewCount”.
You can use the reviews from your Google Business Profile to fill this out, adding your review rating under the value and the number of reviews under the “reviewCount”.
If you don’t have a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) account.
You should!
As it’s a vital piece of your business’s local visibility, we have written a comprehensive How-to on this here:
https://digitalnomadshq.com.au/blog/how-to-setup-google-my-business/.
Once you’ve finished filling in your information, you’ll want to test it!
Don’t throw any custom code into your website without testing it first! Luckily, Google and Schema.org provide us with some great tools to test out code for errors and warnings before we add it to our page.
Let’s use the Google search tool, which can be found here: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results.
Copy your code out of your text editor and go to the rich results tester page.
You’ll see the heading “Does your page support rich results?” below that, you’ll want to select the “< > code” tab above the search bar. Paste your edited code into this box and click “test code” at the bottom.
Now, if this is your first time doing this and you get an error like this:
Don’t stress!
It may be that your code isn’t formatted correctly; you may have removed a comma or added something that has “broken” the code.
Honestly, the easiest thing you can do here is use ChatGPT!
But you can use meta.ai or Gemini if you’d prefer; they are all good at formatting code; use this prompt:
If you have, good job!
We’re ready to add this to your website!
Now you will see “Non-critical issues detected” these issues are ok, but if you get a “critical issue”, that will need to be checked, click the drop-down and have a look at what it says; it might look like this if you have accidentally removed a line item that was “expected” to be seen, it’ll look like this:
You can compare your code to the original we copied to make sure it’s not missing anything important.
But it’s also worth checking Google’s LocalBusiness schema page for their guidelines on expected and recommended properties here https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/local-business.
You’ll see some recommended properties on this page that aren’t added to our code. If you feel confident enough, you can try adding extra information. Again, ChatGPT can be helpful here.
Adding Schema markup to your WordPress Website
Ok, we’ve got our schema code, it’s been edited, formatted in JSON-LD and tested. We’re ready to add this to our website.
Now where you add the code and what page you want it applied to will depend on the type of schema you are using, for our example, LocalBusiness schema type is generally added to the website homepage.
So let’s go ahead and do this.
Start by logging into the backend of your website, once in, you can hover over the “Elementor” tab in the menu on the left and click “Custom Code”.
Add the title to your custom code, it’s highly recommended to give it a name that relates to the specific schema type you’re using, as when you start adding multiple entries, it can get messy.
So we’ll add “LocalBusiness Homepage Schema” into the name, and paste our code into the code box at the bottom of the page and make sure the location is set to.
You can select “Save & Close”, and it will return to the custom code page; you can now select Publish!
Congratulations!
You’ve now successfully created, edited, tested and implemented LocalBusiness schema markup to your website’s homepage.
You’ll want to make sure everything is working as it should now that it’s been added.
So we’ll go back to the Google rich results tester we used to test our code before and, this time, add the URL into the box rather than the “< > code”. Click “Test URL” and if everything is correct, you’ll get this response:
You can see we’ve added more to our homepage, such as “merchant listings” and “product snippets”.
Now that you understand how to edit, format, test and implement your schema code, you can go ahead and start doing some research of your own and start highlighting more of your offerings on your website!
It’s super important to remember, that with adding custom code to your site, make sure you test it before implementing it, and test it after it’s been added. This way you will pick up on any mistakes you may have made.
How to get ahead of my competitors
If you are new to implementing schema markup on your website or if you are unsure which schema markup to use, it’s a good idea to check out your competitors.
You can take their URL and test it using the rich results tester to see which schema markups they are using.
Now this isn’t going to put you ahead of your competitors if you’re just copying them, but it’ll help you get closer, and potentially help you spot areas that they may have missed.
What schema markup do your competitors NOT use?
Once you’ve tested your competitor’s sites and you know the markup they are using, you’ll also know which they are not using.
You can then use this to your advantage by looking at the schema.org website and Google’s documentation for areas of opportunity, you can then use some great free tools like Merkel’s free JSON-LD markup generator.
A good tip is to search for some of your primary key terms and see how everything looks from a users perspective in the SERPS. Take a look at this screenshot and see what you notice:
Here is what you get when you search for a web designer on the Sunshine Coast, notice we’re first ;-). But we are utilising the product review markup to highlight the reviews given to us by our valued clients.
By using this review markup, Google stated “Nestlé has measured pages that show as rich results in search have an 82% higher click-through rate than non-rich result pages.”.
If you are using this like above and your competitors aren’t, that means more website clicks, potentially leading to higher website engagement (Which positively affects your SEO as well) and hopefully more leads or sales! So what are you waiting for?!.
Monitoring your rich results for your website
Once you have written, implemented, and tested your schema markup, it’s important to continue to monitor it.
This can be done using Google Search Console. If your website has eligible schema markup, you will see a tab called “Enhancements” on the left-hand side that displays the different types of rich results your website is eligible for.
This overview will also alert you to any errors that may need to be addressed, making it a valuable resource for making sure everything works as intended. To access this information, you’ll need to verify your website in Google Search Console. Once verified, the data will be automatically displayed.
Schema Plugins to Help
Free Schema Plugins:
1. Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP
Pros:
- Easy to use with a point-and-click interface for schema type selection.
- Supports a wide variety of schema types, including articles, products, recipes, events, etc.
- Offers AMP compatibility for faster mobile loading.
Cons:
- The free version has limited features compared to the pro version.
- It can be a bit overwhelming for beginners with its numerous options.
2. WPSSO Core (Schema plugin)
Pros:
- A lightweight plugin that won’t slow down your site.
- Integrates well with other SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math.
- Offers basic schema markup for articles, organizations, and social profiles.
Cons:
- There are limited schema types in the free version.
- Requires some technical knowledge to configure properly.
Paid Schema Plugins:
1. Schema Pro
Pros:
- Comprehensive schema markup for various content types and custom fields.
- Automated schema generation based on your site’s content.
- Advanced features like conditional display and schema mapping.
Cons:
- It can be expensive for smaller websites or blogs.
- It might require some learning curve to master its full potential.
2. Yoast SEO Premium
Pros:
- Includes robust schema implementation tools as part of a comprehensive SEO suite.
- Offers a user-friendly interface with visual schema builders for articles, courses, etc.
- Automatically generates schema markup for many content types and allows customisation.
Cons:
- Schema implementation is tied to the Yoast SEO plugin and its ecosystem.
- It might be overkill if you primarily need schema markup and not Yoast’s other SEO features.
3. Rank Math Pro
Pros:
- Another comprehensive SEO suite with built-in, easy-to-use schema markup functionality.
- Offers a wide range of schema types with customisable options.
- Includes advanced SEO features that can complement schema implementation.
Cons:
- Like Yoast SEO Premium, it might be more than you need if you’re only looking for schema tools.
- The learning curve for Rank Math’s features, including schema, can be steep.
Hire a Professional
The last, and possibly best option is to hire a professional to do it for you. Whether this be a digital marketing agency or an individual, they will be able to look at your site and online presence as a whole and provide insights and recommendations that best suit your business and use case.
This will be more expensive than the other options, but having someone on your team who does it day in, and day out and knows schema back to front is an invaluable asset to you and your business.
Conclusion
Hopefully, after all that, you should feel much more comfortable with Schema markup and structured data, and have valuable information to take away!
Get stuck in and start implementing schema markup on your website, and get ahead of the competition! Remember to check the Google and Schema.org documentation regularly to keep up to date with changes and new features.
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