This is a summary of the talk that Alexis Sanders gave at Brighton SEO 2018.
What is structured data?
Structured data refers to information with a high degree of organisation, using some sort of microdata which structures said data for bots to access and better understand.
However, it’s very easy to make small errors in structured data so it’s essential to always validate.
Initially, Google started recognising Microdata only but now has started evaluating JSON-LD as well as Bing. Microdata is embedded in html whereas JSON-LD is in javascript meaning it is a little bit easier to understand and copy in.
Why we love structured data
Structured data presents a great opportunity to feature in the enhanced components of the SERPs, by increasing SERP ‘real estate’.
A study that Alexis conducted on 7 ecommerce sites found that those sites that implemented structured data such as review and price had a greater click-through rate almost 20% over those sites that didn’t.
Smart home devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home pull their information from featured snippets, which are generated from relevant structured data. Alexis conducted another study testing 100,000 queries, checked 25,000 of those and found that Microdata was present for 75% of the results.
The top 5 most popular schema are webpage, sitenavigarion, organisation, person and localbusiness.
A new and interesting schema to look into is speakablespecification schema markup, which provides better results with voice search, CNN is an example of a big brand with this already implemented.
Common Pitfalls
Syntax: a difference between curly quotation marks and brackets can cause a lot of issues if incorrect
Vocabulary: use specific vocabulary to give Google the best chance to understand your structured data
Policy Violations
Nesting Errors: make sure to attribute the correct product to the correct category type
Schema Prediction
Alexis thinks there will be big developments in the future for schema that supports voice, as well as specifically for health both proactive and reactively.
This post is one of 28 in our Brighton SEO 2018 collection
- Brighton SEO: Christoph C. Cemper – 20 Free SEO Tools You Should be Using
- Brighton SEO – Ways to to definitely get links for your business
- Brighton SEO: 5 Truths The Gurus Won’t Tell You About Facebook Ads
- Brighton SEO: Alex Major – Comparison Shopping: The Future of Google Shopping Ads
- Brighton SEO Keynote – Live Google Webmasters Hangout with John Mueller & Aleyda Solis
- Brighton SEO – Killing giants and competing in the SERPs
- Brighton SEO: Jeroen Maljers – Hidden Messages: The Psychology Behind PPC & SEO
- Brighton SEO: Arianne Donoghue – The PPC Automation Revolution Is Coming
- Brighton SEO: Laura Hogan – Big Links for £0
- Brighton SEO: Nichola Stott – Speed metrics in context of the UK Top 5,000 websites
- Brighton SEO 2018: We need to talk about competitor campaigns
- Brighton SEO: Bastian Grimm – Web Performance Madness: Critical Rendering Path Optimization
- Brighton SEO: Rob Bucci – Featured Snippets From Then To Now, Volatility, & Voice Search
- BrightonSEO 2018: Fili Wise – Optimising for SearchBot
- Advanced & Practical Structured Data
- Brighton SEO: Gavin Bell – Amplifying Your Content With Facebook Ads
- Brighton SEO 2018 : Craig Campbell – Risks and Rewards of PBNs
- Brighton SEO: Chelsea Blacker – Taming the Wild West of ASO
- Brighton SEO: George Karapalidis – Using machine learning and statistical models to predict revenue potential for search
- Brighton SEO: Barry Adams – Technical SEO in the Mobile First Indexing Era
- Brighton SEO: Kaspar Szymanski – Understanding Google Penalties by ex-Googler Kaspar Szymanski
- Brighton SEO: Mark Thomas – How much positive impact can crawl budget optimization have in a mobile first index era?
- Brighton SEO: Chris Liversidge – Using Machine Learning Technology To Build Audience-Led Analytics
- Brighton SEO: Emily Mace – Diagnosing Common Hreflang Tag Issues On Page & In Sitemaps
- Brighton SEO: Steve Rayson & Giles Palmer – How Metrics and Data Drive Advocacy Effectiveness
- Brighton SEO: Tom Anthony – Diving Into HTTP/2 – A Guide For SEOs
- Brighton SEO: Tom Pool – Command Line Hacks For SEO
- Brighton SEO: Eleni Cashell – How to Unleash The Power Of Unique Content