A short guide to structured data

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about structured data in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Why this earns attention

Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How we handle it

It powers the rich results that stand out in listings. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The mistakes we see most

Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

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
• 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

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