SEO Guides, Tips & More!

Keeping current with search engine marketing and search engine optimization trends can be a challenging task. After all, most marketers are responsible for more than just the company’s website. Other priorities need your attention and in the blink of an eye Google can make one change that can impact how your website is ranked and displayed which impacts traffic, conversions and new business. A relatively recent change that was announced by Google (as part of a joint effort with other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo) was structured data. This is a new type of data that website marketers can provide to search engines that allows certain parcels of content to be displayed with more information including photos and other details. It’s an important development that marketers in every industry need to be aware of, and where appropriate, work with their SEO and digital marketing provider to implement. To help clients, prospects and others understand the impact of structured data on their marketing efforts, FlashPoint Marketing has provided a brief summary of key details below.

What is Structured Data?

“Structured Data” also called “Schema Markup” refers to a type of code that makes it easier for search engines to crawl, organize, and display your website’s content. It’s a SEO 2.0, of sorts, that allows marketers to provide Google and other search engines with additional information about their content so that it can be displayed in more places, more prominently with the goal of getting more people to view and interact with their content. Traditional on page SEO (meta title, keyword and description) provides search engines with basic information about the content and what it’s about. Using this information search engines can get a basic understanding of what the content is about and how it relates to other materials on the website. Structured data goes one step beyond and provides significantly more information about a blog post, article, event, news release and other types of content.

Structured Data and SEO

Structured data is important for SEO because it makes it easier for Google, Bing and other search engines to grasp what your website and its pages are about. While adding structured data to your website has not been proven to increase ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs), it does create the opportunity to attract additional eyes to your content which drives traffic and engagement.

Structured Data Features

So how does using structured data impact how your content is displayed? As mentioned above it makes it easier for search engines to more prominently display your content. Some examples of how this is accomplished includes:

• Rich search results: Includes styling, images, and other visual enhancements
• Rich cards: A variation of rich search results that’s like rich snippets and is designed for mobile users
• Enriched search results: Includes interactive or immersive features
• Knowledge graph: Information about an entity such as a brand
• Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs in your search result
• Carousels: A collection of multiple rich results in a carousel style

Getting Started

Most marketers would agree that additional attention to their website content is a good thing. For this reason, it’s important to become familiar with structured data to ensure you understand how it works, it’s benefits and how you can configure your website to take advantage of this opportunity. If you have questions about how to implement it on your website or need assistance with a SEO issue, FlashPoint Marketing can help. For additional information please call us at 954-621-8080, or click here to contact us. We look forward to speaking with you soon!