What does “schema mark-up” mean?

Introduction

When first investing in SEO, its common for a marketing agency to state loads of work that your website needs.

And this is all well and good, but if you haven’t got the foggiest clue as to what any of the terms mean, well you could be left just a little bit confused.

But do not worry, as here at this marketing agency we explains things very clearly. Within this blog post we are going to explain what schema mark-up means, and also how to add this to your businesses website.

Collaboration

Now when your reading about various forms of SEO, its pretty safe to say that the vast majority of agencies focus on optimising your businesses website for Google.

However, with schema you may here that this form of seo is promoted by most of the large search engines.

The reason being is that Google is said to have worked in collaboration with other search engines to help create schema.

Yes, but what is schema?

Well, when you on a website, say a website that reviews brand new cars, there’s likely to be tons of information.

For example, articles dedicated to explaining the performance of a new car, and what the car handles like.

But this mass of information is what we in SEO called unstructured data. Which basically means its useful from an SEO perspective, but it can sometimes be hard for the search engines to decipher what the page is about.

However, the search engines have got very clever at knowing what a page is about, and most SEO consultants believe massive leaps forward came from the Google Hummingbird updates and Google’s Knowledge Graph.

However, what if there was a language that most search engines understood, where you could mark up the really important areas of your website. Such as your businesses reviews, its contact details and also opening hours?

Well there is and this is called schema. So, basically instead of Googlebot having to work out what a page is about, after reading hundreds if not thousands of words, well Schema helps cut through all that, and allows you to highlight the really important details.

Rich snippets

Have you ever searched for a business, such as a hotel, and the listing that really stood out was the one that looked different from the other business listings.

For example, you were looking for a hotel, and the star rating appeared in the results, and all the other businesses didn’t have this?

Well this wasn’t magic that was taking place, it was most probably the hotels clever seo agency implementing schema to mark-up the businesses reviews.

As a hospitality business they know good customer reviews are essential to getting more bookings, so some businesses may wish to draw attention to the reviews that their business has. Schema can do this.

But rich snippets hasn’t got to  just be business reviews, it could be opening hours and many other details as well.

Local SEO

Digital marketing agencies, like our business use schema to mark-up details that are essential to improving a business’s local seo.

In SEO we refer to the name of the business, its address and phone number as “NAP” information.

You can use schema to mark-up the NAP information of your website. This way when Googlebot next crawls your company website, well you would have made it super easy for Google to know your businesses NAP details.

And this is pretty important, as with all the information on your business’s website, if you can make the important information, such as the NAP information standout, you will be helping to improve your businesses SEO.

So, how do you actually add schema to a website?

Adding schema to a website has never been so easy, that’s thanks to Google, which has a structured data mark-up helper.

Does your business require help with its SEO?

If your business needs help with its seo, then why not give us a ring? We are organic seo experts.

We offer affordable prices.