The Role of Structured Data Markup in SERP Rankings

Structured data is an organised format to provide information about a page. It helps search engines like Google to understand the content of the page and gather information to improve your business search result listings. It is coded directly to page’s HTML markup.

Google uses these structured data and generates rich snippets. These snippets are small pieces of information that appear in search results. It is basically the extra information provided along with the main information. Like the search for a particular coffee shop in the area will not only list its name but also show details of its location, hours, pricing and ratings etc.

Most structured data searches use schema.org vocabulary, but the documentation on developers.Google.com is recommended for Google search behaviour.

While creating these mark-ups, you must include all the properties for an object to make it suitable for an appearance in Google search. You can test your structured data using the Structured Data Testing tool during its progress, and the Search Console Structured Data report after deployment, to assess the fitness of your pages

Structured Data Markup Helper by Google is one of the most beneficial free tools to help you get going with the structured data. Not only this markup tool enhances the Google’s understanding of your page, but this content may also be incorporated into knowledge graph panels to increase your business’s reach online.

Google’s official stance says that it does not use markup for the ranking purposes currently. But a study conducted by Searchmetrics.com showed that “domains having schema integrated do in fact rank great by an average of 4 positions when compared to domains without them.” So, it can be said that sites with embedded Schema tags are better optimized than sites without Schema tags. If your site is ranked four positions higher than your competitor, this could mean a higher sale prospect and in turn a higher revenue over the competitor.

Though schema is currently not a ranking factor, clearly there may be some impact of having structured markup data. It might be due to actual Google’s algorithm or an overall effect of a better-optimised site. Although Schema doesn’t imply an increased ranking directly, it is a good practice overall. It also does convey that you should put in efforts to add schema markup your page.

Having snippets in your site’s result implies that you are going to take up better space in SERPs than your competitors. This can greatly increase your click-through rate. An increase in traffic because of a better CTR will have an impact on your SERP rankings. If you have Rich snippets in the search results can directly turn into conversion, as the users already have enough information to purchase your product/service before they even land on your website.

So structured data will help you communicate to search engines what your content is about and that is beneficial for you, the visitor as well as Google. The ability to effectively use structured data into the page does impact indirectly the site’s ranking in search engines. Therefore embedding structured markup data into the page is highly recommended.

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