Firstly, let’s get one thing straight – structured data is not a direct ranking factor, but it is an indirect one.
This question has been asked time and time again, and Google has said the following in the past:
There’s no generic ranking boost for SD [structured data] usage.”
“However, SD structured data] can make it easier to understand what the page is about, which can make it easier to show where it’s relevant (improves targeting, maybe ranking for the right terms)
John Mueller – Google
John said that way back in 2018, however it’s still true to an extent today. In 2015 Google said that they may use structured data for ranking purposes. Nowadays, Google says that it “helps” them:
Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page.
Google’s Introduction to Structured Data
That’s not to say that structured data isn’t useful though, it’s definitely worth learning it and adding it to your website.
It ties in very nicely with something called Entity SEO, which is a whole other chapter.
Let’s look at some commonly asked questions about structured data and how it impacts search engine optimisation:
What does structured data do?
Whichever type of structured data you choose to implement on your site, all of them help to describe your content, give more information about your business, and if implemented automatically, can add product information to search engine results (SERPs). This information can help customers decide on whether your product is right for them, based on reviews, price and whether or not the product is in stock.
Structured data can also help you gain rich results (AKA structured data features) in the search engine results, such as product, carousel, recipes and reviews as well as something called enriched search results, which include things like pop-ups for jobs.
Why is structured data good?
Structured data is good because it helps search engines understand the context of your content more easily, and how that content relates both to your brand and the products or services you sell.
So how does it do that?
Well, imagine that you have content on your page about a club.
That could be seen in various different ways as it’s a pretty ambiguous entity:
- A nightclub
- A chess club
- A golf club
- A heavy wooden stick
- A club in a deck of cards
If you just look at keywords, you would optimise for the word “club”, however that has so many different meanings that it’s really hard for search engines to understand what you mean. Ok, they can read your content and try to figure it out (which is actually what happens) but we can help even more.
In the olden days of SEO, you’d be able to keyword stuff the word “club” as many times as humanly possible into the page content (and footer!) and you’d rank #1. It’s not like that anymore thank goodness.
You can use structured data to help search engines understand what type of club you are talking about on your website by adding links to show them what we mean, like this:
"sameAs": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q622425",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightclub",
"https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/120n35z1"
],Here we’ve added a Wikidata entry for nightclub, a Wikipedia entry and also Google’s own reference called a kgmid, so that it understands we are talking about a nightclub.
Why is structured data bad?
Structured data can be “bad” if you don’t implement it correctly, you don’t follow Google’s guidelines or if you mark up things that aren’t on your page. This can lead to a structured data penalty from search engines, which could possibly result in your rich results being removed from search results which will impact rankings.
How does structured data impact rankings?
As I’ve said above, it’s not a direct ranking factor, however the rich results that structured data can provide can really help drive traffic to your website.
A study by Milestone Research that looked at 4.5 million searches showed that 41.5% of users were more likely to click on a rich result than a non-rich result, which is one of the reasons why Google is always implementing new ones and looking for new ways to enrich search results for users.
If you were looking for a printer and you had a choice between clicking on either of these two products, which one would you be more likely to click on?
From previous experience, I also know that companies who have review snippets linked to their products can have a really good increase in traffic.
What are the most important types of structured data?
If you are only going to implement one type on your website, I’d say that the best type would be Product. The reason for this is that search engines need the most help with this type – they need to understand what your product is, what it does, the ideal audience for it and also information about price, availability and delivery information.
This can be really hard for search engines to understand from content sometimes, particularly if things like the delivery information is spread across different pages, or if you have more than one delivery method.
Probably the most important thing to remember about structured data and SEO is that it doesn’t guarantee results. You can add as much as you want to your website, but that doesn’t mean that you will instantly see a ranking boost, more traffic or a higher CTR. Your content still has to be amazing, your user experience needs to be spot on, and your technical SEO needs to be on-par with your competitors.
