Structured data: a practical guide

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. This guide covers what structured data actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

What it costs to ignore

Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How we handle it

It powers the rich results that stand out in listings. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is
• It powers the rich results that stand out in listings
• Validate it, because broken markup is ignored
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Where it usually goes wrong

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Where to go from here

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.