When structured data is worth the effort
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Structured data is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.
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.
When it is worth it
Schema markup tells search engines what a page actually is. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
When it is not
If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.
How to decide
Validate it, because broken markup is ignored. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
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
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.