Structured data for small teams

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Most advice about structured data assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to keep

Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

The practical version

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.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.