Structured data: what to get right first

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you only fix one thing about structured data this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Start here

Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Then this

It powers the rich results that stand out in listings. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Eventually

Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What this looks like day to day

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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.