Technical SEO - Structured Data/Schema Markup Guide

What is Schema Markup?

Schema Markup, or Structured Data, is a set of data that helps the search engine understand and categorise your content.

By placing structured data within your pages, you can help search engines understand the context of your content, and also give your pages a higher chance of appearing in SERP features such as:

• Featured Snippet
• Knowledge Panel
• Image Carousel
• People Also Ask
• FAQ
• Video Carousel

By appearing in different SERP features, you can appear multiple times in the same SERP, increasing your visibility to users.

How to add Schema Markup

You can add structured data to your website by using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

• Select your data type, for example ‘Article’, and enter your URL. Click ‘Start Tagging’.

• Once loaded, you will see your page on the left, and data items on the right. Highlight different parts of your page and assign data tags such as Author, Date Published, Image and more.

• Add any missing tags that might not be visible on the page by clicking on ‘Add missing tags’.

• Click ‘Create HTML’ when you’re finished to produce the schema markup. It’s automatically scripted as JSON-LD, but you can change this to Microdata using the drop-down menu at the top of the markup.
• Download the script as an HTML file, then paste it into your CMS or the source code of your webpage.

Testing your Schema Markup

You can test your structured data through Google’s Schema Markup Testing Tool.

How to add Schema Markup in Wordpress

By installing the Yoast SEO plug-in, you can add certain structured data into your posts and pages.

The Schema tab in Yoast SEO presents two drop-down boxes where you can pick the page type and article type for your page, making it an easy solution for adding schema markup to your website.

Yoast SEO also provides a couple of structured data blocks, the ‘Yoast How-to’ and ‘Yoast FAQ’, that automatically adds structured data code to your content within the blocks.