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If your website isn’t appearing in rich search features like featured snippets or AI summaries, you’re missing out on potential clicks and conversions. Today, SERPs don’t just contain a list of links; they include rich snippets, featured snippets, knowledge panels, carousels, and AI-powered summaries. Because rich results provide important context right away, users click on them 58% of the time, while non-rich results get a CTR of just 41%.
Read on to discover how to use schema to transform your website into a search engine magnet.
What is Schema Markup?
Schema markup is a standardized vocabulary developed collaboratively by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex through Schema.org. It is a type of structured data that can effectively help all search engines understand the meaning and purpose of the content on your website. This makes your content easier to categorize, display, and rank in relevant search results.
There are hundreds of schema types, but some are more important than others. Schema markup gives search engines clear, explicit context, which allows them to put your content on SERPS in more ways than one.
Benefits of Using Schema Markup On Your Website
Schema markup is widely used today by many websites. It improves SERP visibility, increases CTR, supports AI and voice search, and gives you a valuable competitive edge.
1. Search Engines Prefer Websites With Structured Data
Search engines like Bing and Google have shown that they favor pages that contain schema markup. Schema markup makes it easier for Google to understand the site’s context and relevance for user queries. Websites with schema markup show up in rich snippets and featured snippets more often. Google states in its documentation that structured data helps enhance search appearance and eligibility for rich results.
2. Improves Your Chances of Being Featured in Rich Snippets
Schema markup helps in the creation of rich snippets. Rich snippets, also called rich results, are enhanced results on search engine pages. Instead of displaying just the title, description, and URL, these results display additional data like prices, reviews, product availability, etc., on the SERP itself.
As you may have gathered, many visitors and even search engines prefer websites that provide more in-depth, relevant information. Rich snippets provide extra information that could potentially give you an edge over your competitors. Currently, Google shows rich results for 21 types of schema, as expressed in their developer documentation.
3. Helps You Show Up in Google’s Local Pack
You may be familiar with Google’s Local Pack—those three search results at the top of SERPs. These are the results Google considers most relevant for a given search query. The Local Pack contains the website and address of these hospitals right away and occupies a considerable space on top of the regular search results.
It’s very likely that most visitors clicked on one of these three listings and didn’t even scroll down to the rest of the page. Can you imagine the traffic you could get if your website showed up in this position?
4. Boosts Click-Through Rate and Organic Traffic
Using schema markup can increase your website’s CTR and organic traffic. Search engine visitors prefer websites that tell them everything at a single glance. That’s why rich snippets that provide vital information like ratings and product availability get more clicks. Websites that use schema markup experience a 40% higher click-through rate than pages that don’t.
5. Improves SERP Rankings
It’s true—using schema markup gives you an edge over your competitors. Backlinko found that 72.6% of pages on the first page of Google use schema markup.
Schema helps search engines understand your site’s content and context better and show your pages for more relevant search queries. It also helps them categorize your content better! This boosts your visibility on SERPs and makes you stand out from local competitors.
6. Boost Visibility in AI Search
Schema markup might have originally been created for search engines, but it’s become even more relevant for AI search results. AI systems use schema to understand the content of a web page and to summarize and cite it in relevant queries. So, by implementing structured data on your website, you’re opening yourself up to greater visibility on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI search engines, virtual assistants, and Google’s AI overview.
7. Helps You Show Up in Voice Search
Voice search remains popular as people have been switching to smart home systems and voice assistants. Schema markup can help voice assistants provide clearer and more accurate answers to search queries, which can help you attract potential customers to your website.
Turn Your Website into a Search Engine Magnet With Schema Markup
Search engines use something called Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the content on web pages. NLP works, but it’s resource-intensive and makes crawling and indexing a more expensive process. Search engines like Google and Bing might thus show a preference for websites with schema markup, since machine-readable, context-rich content is easier (and cheaper) to index.
Schema markup isn’t a ranking factor, but it can boost your visibility, organic traffic, and CTR. It continues to grow in importance, especially with advancements in AI-powered search, personalized search results, voice-first search experiences, and interactive SERP formats. It’s highly likely that reliance on schema markup will only increase in the near future.
Choose Apex Infotech For Schema Optimization
Schema markup helps websites claim better positions and more real estate on SERPs. This makes them stand out from their competitors and get better CTR and organic traffic. It can be a bit complicated to set up at first. But third-party CMSes and the practical application of schema on multiple search engines help. In 2024, more than 45 million domains are using schema on their web pages. Are you?
Apex Infotech’s technical SEO experts can help you select and apply the right schema types to maximize search visibility. Contact us for a complete SEO audit and schema optimization strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions:
What is Schema.org?
Schema.org is a shared structured-data vocabulary created by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex to standardize schema implementation across the web.
What are rich results?
Rich results are search results that display additional details about a website like ratings, prices, images, or FAQs in search result pages.
How many types of schema are there?
There are three major coding languages for schema: JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa, and approximately 800 types of schema types on Schema.org.
How can I check if my schema markup is correct?
To check if your schema markup is valid, use the Schema.org validator. You can also use the Google Rich Results tool to check if Google will use your schema to generate rich results.
How many types of schema languages are there?
There are three primary ways of using schema markup: Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD. Of these, JSON-LD is Google’s preferred format.
