Here’s How It Works
Google is THE most commonly used internet search tool in the world today with an estimated 91.9% of all internet searches being driven by the powerful search engine. In 2022 there were an estimated 50 billion web pages indexed by Google and 200 million active websites. That’s a lot of websites all competing for first place in the listings!
Of course not all 200 million websites will have the answers to every question that people are typing into the search engine at a rate of 99,000 searches per second (Internet Live Stats 2022). But if you want your website to appear top of the list of the search engine listings, it’s clear that the site will need to be thoroughly search engine optimised.
Using keywords, meta tags, alt tags, headings and structured content will all help your website to climb higher in the rankings. But one tool, could see a page or article get featured and that is Schema.
What Is Schema?
Schema is an SEO tool that can help your website content get seen more often in the search engine listings. It’s basically some lines of code that sit behind a web page to help the search engines understand what kind of information is on the page.
Human visitors to the page won’t see the code but search engine robots will be able to tell immediately if a webpage is displaying a recipe, a video, a menu, a review or a product description. Armed with detailed information about the page content, the search engine robots can then index it and decide when to show it in response to a query.
Here’s what happens when you implement schema on your website pages, product descriptions and blogs.
- Your website is more likely to appear in prime positions in the search engine listings such as rich snippets
- Search engines understand your website better and you are more likely to show up for a wider range of queries
- Human searchers may be shown enhanced search results which give them extra information on the contents of a page. This often means they are more likely to click on the listing to visit that page.
- Visitors spend more time on your website because they already know that your organisation has the answers to their questions.
What Are Rich Snippets?
Beneath the adverts, (or sometimes at the top of the page) Google will often show rich snippets from the web pages it feels will be most helpful to you. For example, if you were to ask Google “how do I make bread?” You will likely be shown a series of recipes with images of bread and a link to the baking instructions.
Or if you were to type into the search bar “what is reward based dog training?” You’ll likely be shown a featured snippet. A featured snippet appears near the top of the search results and includes an image and paragraph of text taken from the web page. The link to that web page sits beneath the text. (Normal listings usually show the text beneath the hyperlink)
Other types of rich snippets include pictures and prices of products relevant to your search, restaurant menus and reviews.
In general, rich snippets have a higher click through rate than organic listings and so if your website is featured, its quite likely that your visitor numbers will increase.
How Does Schema Increase The Chances Of Rich Snippets From My Website Being Shown?
Search engines are incredibly clever, but they do have limited ability to interpret the information on a page. With schema, their job is speeded up as the code effectively spoon-feeds them a comprehensive description of the page and how it can help human website visitors.
Schema.org explains why schema is important to search engines:
“Your web pages have an underlying meaning that people understand when they read the web pages. But search engines have a limited understanding of what is being discussed on those pages.
By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages—tags that say, ‘Hey search engine, this information describes this specific movie, or place, or person, or video’—you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way.”
How Do I Implement Schema On My Website?
The good news is, that you don’t need to worry about writing code to implement schema. The team here at Upshot Media can do it for you. Our experienced website developers will write and insert a piece of code for each of your products descriptions, landing pages, and web pages that you hope might appear among the rich snippets in search engine results.
Of course, implementing schema is no guarantee that your site will be featured but to date we’ve seen an enormous upturn in traffic on the website’s that we have added schema to. It’s a bespoke service which will be priced according to your needs.
We think that this SEO service represents really good value for money. Call and talk to Stuart about what’s involved.
