Top Schema Manager Features

Schemas are a set of types, each with its set of properties. As defined by search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex, schema types are arranged in a hierarchal structure and at this time, there are 818 Types, 1326 Properties, and 289 Enumeration values in the schema dictionary or vocabulary. Some of the common schema types are:

• Person
• Event
• Health
• Action
• Organization
• Review, AggregateRating
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant

Schema markup is not a ranking factor, however it can boost SEO results. Website schema markup helps search engines understand the content on your pages and provides richer results to saturate the search landscape and boost visibility. Adding schema tags to your website code favors Google Algorithm updates like BERT. Schema gives search engine bots the context of the website content and in turn, the content is more likely to be featured as a rich result on SERPs. This boosts the impressions of the website content on SERPs and possibly the click through rate (CTR) as the answer to a query is prominently displayed. This also gives users answers to their queries without having to click.

Schema markup helps search engine crawlers understand the components of web page content better, offering richer results to end-users. With proper markup, the likelihood of search results displaying rich snippets goes up. For example, How To schema explains to search engines that the content includes step-by-step answers to a ‘How–To’ question. The search engine is able to render the steps in the form of a rich result. An immediate benefit of schema is increased CTR or click through rate. It is estimated that schemas drive 30% extra click throughs as users find richer and useful search results. Additionally, as search engines map content to more relevant searches, searchers end up clicking the results more, thus increasing organic traffic (and higher quality traffic) as well as search impressions. Of Milestone's 9400+ schema projects executed, we have observed 25-60% increases in search impressions and organic traffic post implementations.

JSON-LD hands down. Over the last few years, JSON-LD has become the most preferred structured data. Why? JSON-LD is well-implemented. It can be embedded in "script" tags in the head of a document (moving out of HTML body), separated from the data it describes. This makes JSON-LD a format that can be templated, easily implemented and a great option for adding, deleting, or updating purposes. Other formats like Microdata or RDFa are neither that flexible nor easy to use options for adding, deleting, or updating purposes. RDFa are inline markups applied to HTML documents and define attributes that are added to the HTML. Above all, search engines love and prefer JSON-LD and thus JSON-LDs are more picked up. Here is what Google has to say – “Google recommends using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible”.

Schemas increase non-brand traffic share
Optimizing for non-branded content is essential for any website to receive new organic traffic, and it helps the content be visible and rank high in the SERPs. Based on our findings, non-branded content tagged with relevant schemas increased the non-branded traffic share by 121%.The average share of non-branded traffic increased from 15.4% to 33.9%. Schemas increase organic traffic
Not just the overall organic traffic of a website, but schemas implemented for each page of content increased the organic traffic per page by over 59%. This is an indexed number and is calculated by dividing the total lift in traffic by the number of pages of the website with some pages seeing large gains and some unaffected. This indexing analysis allows pages of different sizes and types to be compared. Not every page will see this lift as the underlying content and relevancy of the page drives visibility. The Milestone Research team saw that schemas are not a binary element that is on or off, but a very complicated set of elements on a spectrum from basic to advanced with quality measured as error-full to error-free. At the heart of the impact is the quality and relevancy of the underlying content, if that is poor, the schemas will have little to no impact as we all as users would hope and expect. Therefore, start with a technically solid site that is easy to use, helpful, and loads fast on both mobile and desktop. Next add in content that is useful and addresses the questions and queries people have about your industry and brand. Produce all of the popular asset types: text, FAQs, images, infographics, and video. Then add in error-free advanced schemas, using the most relevant types and properties from the 829 types listed at Schema.org to expose the facts and answers in your content.

While basic schema tagging is a start, created a nested schema architecture to coherently define the hierarchy of the entities and its relationship with other properties gives the search engine bot a finer understanding of what your website and its content is all about, which has resulted in a 20%-30% increase in organic search traffic for a website. Example of nested schema architecture for a financial institution: Example of nested schema architecture for a financial institution: