Before you invest in structured data

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Before you spend anything on structured data, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

It powers the rich results that stand out in listings. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about structured data before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• It powers the rich results that stand out in listings — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.