Before you start even thinking about writing your own structured data, you need to plan out your strategy for the whole website.
This may seem like a boring and pointless task, however it will really help you later on, as it will be crucial when it comes to linking your structured data together (a bit like internal linking for SEO).
The first step is to work out WHY you want to add structured data to your site in the first place.
Are you looking for Rich Results?
Are you just adding it because you should?
If you’re looking for Rich Results, then you’ll need to make sure that you only use the recommended and required structured data markup outlined in Google’s guidelines and no added extras from schema.org. Ideally, you want to write bespoke structured data rather than using plugins to generate it.
The most common structured data types for each page are as follows:
Homepage – WebSite, Organization / LocalBusiness
About Us Page – AboutPage
Contact Us Page – ContactPage
Blog – BlogPosting
Article – Article / NewsArticle
Product (PDP) Page – Product
Product Category (PLP) Page – CollectionPage / ItemList
Service Page – Service
If you plan your strategy so that you write the bespoke Organization structured data first, then you can generally create the About Us page and Homepage at the same time, just with a few small alterations.
Your Product pages are your traffic drivers, so make sure you spend a lot of time on those and make sure that your structured data also correlates with any Merchant Center feeds that you may have in place.
Next, choose which structured data format you’d like to use. JSON-LD is the format of choice as it’s easier to implement than RDFa or Microdata.
Written by Kelly Sheppard
Kelly Sheppard is a search engine optimisation professional, author of the book “The Structured Data Guide for Beginners” and the founder of The Structured Data Company.
