What to ask your agency about structured data
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on structured data, these questions are worth asking early.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
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.