Anna Kaleta18 October 2020|~8 min read

TECHNICAL SEO

SEO

GUIDE

Schema Markup Guide For Beginners

Find out why Schema markup is important and how to implement it on your website

Structured data became an important part of any website & SEO strategy especially after the 2013 Hummingbird Algorithm update and 2015 RankBrain update.

Schema.org has been created as a result of the collaboration of Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex. Currently, Schema.org offers a vast range of schema types which will be suitable for most of the businesses. This type of structured data allows search engines to crawl your website and gather essential information about your business. For those who just started to learn what Schema is, I have prepared an informative Schema Markup Guide.

Types of Schema

Schema Markup can be created with the flexibility needed for you and your business. There are however a few types you need to follow. Below I present the most popular types of Schema:

• Local
• Organisational
• Personal
• Product
• Recipe
• Author
• Publisher
• Review
• Image
• Video

You might wonder, which type of schema will be most suitable for your business. Because of this, I have prepared a few examples.

If you are a small business that operates locally, such as Painters in London or a Family Bakery in New York, you will aim to create a Local Schema which will provide basic information such as an address, operating hours, and contact information to Google.

If you run a large eCommerce company that sells products nationally you will look at creating an organisational schema for your business which will provide basic information such as an address and business name, you won’t however, have an option to add business opening hours.

Additionally, if you own an eCommerce shop you should look at the product schema, which gives the product price overview and rating in search results. For a better understanding please see the snippet below.

This is very important, as many users will decide to visit your page based on the information you provided to them within a small result snippet in search results.

SameAs Schema

SameAs Schema can be added as a part of the local or organisational schema. This type of schema indicates to crawlers that there is a strong connection between your social media profiles and your website. This snippet should look like one below:

"sameAs": [
    "https://twitter.com/YOUR-PROFILE-NAME",
    "https://instagram.com/YOUR-PROFILE-NAME",
    "https://youtube.com/YOUR-PROFILE-NAME",
    "https://linkedin.com/YOUR-PROFILE-NAME",
    "https://facebook.com/YOUR-PROFILE-NAME"
]

This short snippet should be added below your main schema section.

How to create schema markup

I usually suggest creating a Schema Markup within JSON-LD, the reason behind it is that Search Engines can read Structured data served in an easier way than if you would use other formats. It is also fully supported and recommended by Schema.org website.

However, if you would like to use another type then please see below the list of fully confirmed and supported options:

RDF/XML - application/rdf+xml - .rdf
Triples - text/plain - .nt
Turtle - application/x-turtle - .ttl
CSV - text/csv - .csv

If you are fresh to the Schema Markup and you have never created it before, you don’t need to worry. There are many tools that can be used online and are free of charge. With free online tools, you don’t need to have coding knowledge or experience as you will just need to fill the spaces in the form and your Schema will be generated automatically.

To speed up the process, you might want to use TechnicalSEO Schema generator, which provides you with a neat online form that gets updated in real-time when you are filling in the necessary information.

If you are going to create LocalBusiness Schema, you might want to consider adding more specific information about your business type, this can be chosen from a dropdown menu in the Schema Markup Generator. For example, if you are a painter based in Manchester as a LocalBusiness type you will want to choose ‘HomeAndConstructionBusiness’ and more specific type: ‘HousePainter’. Bear in mind there are types of business which are not specified yet as Schema is constantly updated and improved. If your type of business is not presented on the list, you should choose just the standard ‘LocalBusiness’.

Once you provide all the information required in the form your newly generated Local Schema should look like one below:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "AccountingService",
  "name": "YOUR BUSINESS NAME",
  "image": "YOUR BUSINESS LOGO",
  "@id": "",
  "url": "YOUR WEBSITE URL",
  "telephone": "YOUR BUSINESS PHONE NUMBER",
  "priceRange": "RANGE YOU CHARGE",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "ADDRESS",
    "addressLocality": "CITY",
    "postalCode": "POSTCODE",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": 0,
    "longitude": 0
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": [
      "Monday",
      "Tuesday",
      "Wednesday",
      "Thursday",
      "Friday"
    ],
    "opens": "08:00",
    "closes": "21:00"
  },{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": "Saturday",
    "opens": "09:00",
    "closes": "19:00"
  },{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": "Sunday",
    "opens": "10:00",
    "closes": "17:00"
  }] 
}
</script>

And here you have an example of organisational schema:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Corporation",
  "name": "NAME OF BUSINESS",
  "alternateName": "OTHER NAME",
  "url": "URL TO YOUR BUSINESS WEBSITE",
  "logo": "YOUR LOGO URL",
  "sameAs": [
    "",
    "",
    "",
    "",
    ""
  ]
}
</script>

How to implement Local & Organisational Schema

Once your schema has been created and you have ensured all the details are correct, you can start the implementation of Schema script. To do this you will either need access to the code of your website or have a fully working Google Tag Manager account.

If you or your developer can implement Schema script directly into the code, then you should add the script into the section of the code. This type of implementation might be the most difficult if you don’t have coding experience, but it allows you to set everything up in the way you wish to add it.

If you use Wordpress and have a YOAST SEO or ALL in ONE SEO plugin then, in most cases your Schema will be already implemented to the code. Bear in mind, adding Schema markup through the SEO plugins in WordPress has limitations and you might not get Local Schema unless you upgrade to PRO version. The quality of Yoast Schema is also questionable and I tend to suggest disabling it within the function.php file. To find out more how to do it, Prodjex blog explains it perfectly.

The third option is to use Google Tag Manager to implement the Schema Markup. To do that you will have to create a new tag with custom HTML and as a Trigger apply it to all pages.

Once you add it, preview the changes to ensure that your Schema Tag has been fired correctly on the page and submit the changes.

Please note that if you are adding the Schema Markup through Google Tag Manager then the script won’t be visible within the code and you can check if it has been deployed correctly by using the Structured Data Testing Tool extension available in Google Chrome. Whilst this option might help you avoid discussion with your developers, I'd not recommend adding schema via Google Tag Manager.

Conclusions

Schema Markup is one of many Technical SEO tasks you should undertake as a website owner as it is a really important feature you should add on your website. Structured data helps search engines to crawl and understand your business and its basic information. Schema can give you an SEO advantage as well presented details in Schema Markup can be then presented in the new attractive way by Google as a rich snippet. For example, if you run an event and you added Schema Markup to it, your event then will appear in Search Results.

As you can see Schema Markup gives a good variety of options and most of us will find suitable Schema Type.

I recommend the implementation of at least Local or Organisational Schema as an absolute minimum, which gives a perfect overview of your business. If you look for advice on how to set up the schema correctly or whether the schema you prepared will be suitable for your website, contact me directly!