Structured data: the questions we get asked most

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The questions about structured data that come up most often on our calls.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Do we need to care about this?

Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How do we know it is working?

Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about structured data before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Validate it, because broken markup is ignored — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.