Three myths about structured data

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. A few things about structured data that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

“It only matters for big sites”

Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

“Our platform handles it”

Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What this looks like day to day

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about structured data before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.