Most consumers never make it past the first page of search results (or SERPs), making it essential for your business to ensure the most relevant content is conveyed and that it helps the search engine crawl better for a higher ranking. While SEO has evolved quite a bit — particularly in localization — it's still a useful tool for brands. Schema is a way to boost your SEO efforts to gain more clicks and, in turn, improve your clicks and ranking.
Schema markup is a form of microdata meant to let businesses speak the language of search engines. Think of it like this: When generating a SERP, it's challenging for search engines to tailor and display results that are both reliable and relevant to a user's request. This is even more challenging when the search engine has to determine the semantic meaning of every web page. However, when you add schema markup to a webpage, you create an enhanced description or a "rich snippet." These rich snippets (also called rich results) will appear in search engine results. They provide more information and/or insights that allow consumers to get a better understanding of a brand or page before they click. According to Milestone Research, 58% of users click on rich results compared to 41% for non-rich results.
Schema markup provides explicit meaning and context to search engines. For instance, Google may recognize the presence of an image on a business's website but can't discern whether it's the business's logo or an image of its storefront. Yahoo may read a web page containing the keyword 'tombstone,' but how does Yahoo know whether 'tombstone' is referencing the object, the movie, or the pizza brand? Schema markup helps to eliminate this confusion.
Schema.org is a collaborative effort between major search engines to provide a structured framework that search engines use to effectively determine the meaning of a page and its underlying content. By aiding a search engine's understanding of a website through schema markup, a business not only makes its site more understandable but simultaneously creates rich content that makes its site more favorable in search engine result rankings.
For businesses hoping to move onto or up the coveted first page of the SERP, the key is to mark up everything they can on their sites with schema tags. Some important questions to ask when schema tagging a site are:What do viewers hope to find on this page?
What do viewers hope to find on this page?
What keywords are related to the site's content?
What keywords are consumers most likely to associate with this business or service?
With over 10 million sites using Schema.org to markup their websites, schema tagging will likely become the vocabulary that search engines will default to when indexing data, entities, and the relationships between them. Despite the power and reach of search engines, they're still machines, and schema tags allow businesses to make it clear to search engines what they want to convey in their content.
To learn more about using schema markup, check out Yext's help article, or check out solutions like Search.
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