Structured Data and Schema Markup: Their Importance for Long-Term SEO Performance

Larisa E. Stefan Mihai C. Tudorache Ioana Loredana Tudorache-Mihai GAMITSEO

The long-term success of your venture will be primarily determined by the quality of the products or services you market, the experience of your staff, and the competition in your field. But as any company that has tried to enter national markets in the last 20 years knows, long-term profitability and audience recognition can only be achieved if you also implement a digital marketing campaign that takes into account the particularities of your business. For companies looking for SERP improvements, SEO is the only way to attract organic growth and gain increased market share and click-through rates.

?Implementing a comprehensive SEO strategy will improve the online visibility of the services or products you market, increase the trust that your target audience places in your brand, and refine the experience of the visitors who access your pages. SEO aims to attract organic traffic by improving the on-page, off-page, or technical processes that influence the visibility of your website to the algorithms used by search engines. In other words, SEO is all about online optimization, and for this reason, it is a much more effective long-term approach than techniques such as email outreach or PPC.

?The advantage of SEO is that it allows you to target the primary interests of your target audience. Are you a company active in a competitive field and want to gain an edge over rivals? Then, with SEO, you can identify the main keywords used by your target clientele, utilize them to create a content strategy that is in tune with market requirements, and discover trends in your industry before they are visible to rivals. Search engine optimization is cost-effective and suitable for both national and international strategies, and, not least, it is the best digital marketing technique if you prioritize long-term sustainability.?

What Are Structured Data and Schema Markups??

The success of the digital marketing strategy you adopt will be determined both by content elements, which will make your pages more visible to the crawlers of search engines, and by technical tools, which will render your site more navigable, both for desktops and mobile devices. However, some of the most essential elements used to increase visibility in the SERPs are schema markups and the use of structured data. The role of these tools is to provide additional context for the algorithms used by search engines, which will then better rank your results and catalog your content based on the provided information.?

Structured data involves implementing a markup language such as JSON-LD to provide additional, standardized information about content indexable by search engines. The purpose of this element is to improve how the search engine crawlers read the information present on the site and the context behind it. Schema markups, on the other hand, are tags that can be added to the HyperText Markup Language of a page to define the data provided. Schema markup is a type of structured data, and its role is, therefore, to give context to web pages and provide a way for websites to deliver information about the published content.?

In simpler terms, schema markup is a code that supports communication between the crawlers of the search engine and the pages of your website. Usually, it can be found in three distinct formats: Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD. Moreover, schema markups can be categorized by type, each having a different role, with Google accepting over 35 variants.? For example, an article markup provides information about the content of a published text, while an organization markup can encode NAP information about a business.? The goal is the same, though: help push your pages in the SERPs.?

It’s All About the Rich Snippets?

The main reason you should be interested in the implementation of structured data and, by default, schema markup is that they provide the underlying code necessary for improving your rich snippets' chances. What are rich snippets? In short, they are enhanced pieces of information that may appear under the search bar when you submit a specific query. Have you searched for info about a company, and instead of having to click on a link to find the data you are interested in, it was available directly from the search page? That's a rich snippet, and it's a powerful tool that can be vital to your overall SERP score.?

Optimizing your markup scheme for published content can increase the likelihood of search engines displaying enhanced information containing your NAP data. Moreover, it will have an excellent effect on your CTR. In search engine optimization, CTR is primarily used to determine the percentage of people who click on your content snippets. A CTR above 3% is considered satisfactory, while one above 5% is excellent. Nevertheless, CTR is not everything, and site visitors need to be primarily attracted by the quality of the underlying content.?

Are rich snippets and schema markups the same thing? No, but they are related concepts. Rich snippets display extra info in search results and are directly influenced by schema markup. On the other hand, schema markup is a type of code added to the HTML of pages, which provides data about the content of indexed content. In other words, it is a dictionary for crawlers, which helps them read the meaning behind the retrieved websites. Both terms are related and work for the same goal: to improve search results. However, rich snippets are a visual element, while schema markups are an underlying code.?

Why Entrust Your SEO Needs to Experts??

Ultimately, it is a matter of efficiency. Your team probably possesses the necessary knowledge to handle the basic SEO requirements of your venture. However, marketing success in the 21st century requires more than basic know-how. Plus, your staff's time would be better utilized by focusing on core competencies. Utilizing the high-quality SEO services of an SEO agency makes sense, as the expertise of the people you call upon will be crucial to determining the underlying elements necessary for SERP success.?

The SEO services of a professional firm will come bundled with access to professional tools, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, and the specialists you call will be up-to-date with the latest changes in your industry. The consultant services of an SEO agency can be the key behind your commercial success, help you stay one food ahead of algorithm updates, and make your content and website navigation more palatable to your target audience. The SEO experts you call will be cheaper than setting up an in-house digital marketing department, will tailor their services to market requirements, and will successfully implement structured data that is tightly integrated with the HTML of your pages.?

Not least, the specialists you contact will constantly monitor the performance of the implemented SEO strategy and will make modifications according to the analytical data recorded. SEO professionals can create a comprehensive SEO strategy that goes beyond the expertise of your employees and will help you eliminate common mistakes that affect SERP visibility. Plus, they will minimize the workload on your staff, allow you to concentrate on the other departments of your business, discover the keywords most utilized by your target audience, and leverage them to create a content strategy or a link-building plan focused on long-term stability.?

The Pillars Behind a Successful SEO Blueprint

The success of the SEO strategy implemented by the experts you call upon will be influenced by many elements, ranging from the quality of the content put out to the optimization for mobile devices and the link-building strategies set into motion. However, equally important will be the use of schema markup and, hence, structured data. By optimizing your schema markups to the content available on your pages, the SERP visibility of your domain will be improved, and the click-through rate of your featured snippets will be enhanced. Structured data provides a standardized way of delivering information about the content of pages to search engines and is a crucial element for displaying rich snippets.?

Moreover, for local SEO, schema markup can improve interactions with target audiences by highlighting NAP information. Schema markup is particularly suitable for mobile-focused websites, increases the chances that your domain will rank on the so-called position zero in the SERPs, and is also a crucial element in voice search optimization. Considering that mobile indexing, rich snippets, and voice searches are considered the future of SEO, the implementation of your schema markups can be regarded as one of the most critical actions in an SEO strategy and will require professional expertise to