One of the things you can do to present your local business better in search results is Schema.org data for rich snippets. Adding structured data to your site can help search engines understand your business and how it performs. For this reason, you must add your NAP details, store/location map, reviews, and images. Find out how Schema.org structured data can help your local SEO.
Table of contents
Local customers use search engines
Modern-day customers use search engines to find your specific business and businesses around their current location. Customers using their phones looking for ‘Italian restaurants’ will get rich search results from local businesses. The results will include distance, reviews, opening hours, and possibly making a reservation.
Improve local rankings
Getting a good ranking for your local business means offering search engines as much data about your business as possible, which local SEO helps you do. Besides that, you need an excellent, fast, and mobile-friendly website, quality content, links, and reviews.
You should focus on being the most relevant result for a specific query to improve your rankings. In addition to that, your business has to be the best result. One way of getting this kind of recognition is by asking your customers for reviews. Reviews help search engines and potential customers determine which business is legit and which isn’t.
Why Schema.org
The main thing to remember is that Schema.org describes your data and content to search engines. Search engines can find out a lot about your site by crawling it. However, if you add structured data, you can give everything meaning. This way, search engines instantly grasp what the content means and how they should present it. In addition, Schema.org is a shared initiative by the big search engines, so using it will lead to consistent results in the respective search engines. Yoast SEO automatically adds structured data with much information about your site.
Rich search results for businesses
So, when we mean rich search results, we are talking about the information about a business you can directly see in search results without clicking a link. There are a few different results here: a regular organic search result for a business can feature breadcrumbs, highlighted pages, or even a search box. In Google, there’s also the Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side. Here, you’ll find lots of metadata about a business, from opening hours to photos. Finally, the results you see when you search for a specific term rather than a business. See the screenshots below for the different results for a particular or generic search.
Search for specific clothes store in BurbankLooking for a local business using a specific term
Why you should use JSON-LD
To get rich results, you need to use structured data like Schema.org. In the past, adding Schema.org data to your post was pretty tricky because you had to embed it in your HTML code. With JSON-LD, you can add a JavaScript code block to your page. Plus, the code is readable and easy to change. Also, there are tons of helpful tools to do it for you.
With JSON-LD, you no longer have code wrapping around your HTML elements, with less possibility of messing things up. In addition to that, Google advises you to use it. Now, let’s see how it’s done.
How to add Schema.org to your local business listing
Since LocalBusiness is a subtype of Organization, we recommend implementing the fields for Organization in addition to the ones specific to your business.
When working on your listing, the most important thing to remember is to pick the correct business type. Make sure to choose a specific one, not a broad one. So, if you own a barbershop, you can use the LocalBusiness type HairSalon. You can find hundreds of types of businesses on Schema.org, so you’ll probably find one that matches closely. If not, try using the product types ontology. This site uses Wikipedia pages for describing products or services with GoodRelations and Schema.org. Here, you can get more specific information if your listing is too broad.
Generate and test
While you can write Schema.org JSON-LD code by hand, it’s not recommended. Use a generator like this Schema Markup Generator or Google’s Structured Data Helper — you can even ask ChatGPT to code structured data for you.
Always validate your structured data in the Rich Results Test Tool. Using Schema Markup Validator, you can check your site to see if the structured data is implemented correctly. Or use Classy Schema to visualize your implementation.
Don’t forget to add your site to Search Console so you can check how Google presents your site. If you want to learn more about Google Search Console, read our beginner’s guide to Google Search Console.
Quickly add structured data for your local business
The Local SEO plugin by Yoast gives you everything you need to do well in the local search results pages!
Required properties for local businesses
There are two main Schema.org at play here: Schema.org/LocalBusiness and Schema.org/Organization. Here, you’ll find everything you need to inform search engines about your local business. To get started, you need to define at least the following properties: the name of your business, its postal address, a URL, and a logo. Here’s what a simple address looks like in structured data:
The properties mentioned in the previous paragraph don’t get you far. You need to go further to make the most of structured data for your site. Be sure to add the following properties as well, if applicable. This is just the beginning, on Schema.org/LocalBusiness you’ll find loads more. Google also has a long list of supported properties.
- url (unlike the @id, should be a working link)
- geo
-- geo.latitude
-- geo.longitude
- telephone
- aggregateRating
- openingHoursSpecification
- openingHoursSpecification.opens
- openingHoursSpecification.closes
- openingHoursSpecification.dayOfWeek
- openingHoursSpecification.validFrom
- openingHoursSpecification.validThrough
- menu
- department
- servesCuisine
- priceRange (how many $?)
Recommended properties for Organization
As LocalBusiness structured data is heavily tied to the Organization structured data, so it’s necessary to focus on that. There are loads of options to help Google understand your business better. Below is a list of recommended properties. Remember that Yoast SEO Premium and the Local SEO add-on make it easy to fill these in.
name (Text: name of your business)
alternateName (Text: other name you often use)
legalName (Text: the registered legal name)
description (Text: describe your business)
logo (URL or ImageObject)
url (URL)
sameAs (URL: links to other online services or social profiles)
telephone (Text)
email (Text)
address (PostalAddress)
- address.streetAddress (Text)
- address.addressLocality (Text)
- address.addressRegion (Text)
- address.postalCode (Text)
- address.addressCountry (Text)
contactPoint (ContactPoint: how can a customer best contact you?)
- contactPoint.telephone (Text)
- contactPoint.email (Text)
numberOfEmployees (QuantitativeValue)
foundingDate (Date)
iso6523Code (Text)
duns (Text)
leiCode (Text)
naics (Text)
globalLocationNumber (Text)
vatID (Text)
taxID (Text)
Example code for local business Schema.org
To clarify how this works, we will use a real local business: Unique Vintage in Burbank, CA. This makes it a bit easier to validate the data we enter. In the code below, you’ll find all the NAP details, URLs, geolocation data, and opening hours you might need.
The LocalBusiness code above gets perfect scores from the Rich Results Testing Tool
Reviews
Reviews are a significant driver for new clientele. Scoring well in Google means your business provides quality, which can eventually lead to better local rankings. Think about how you pick the next company to visit. Will it be the one with three two-star reviews or the one with eighty-five-star reviews?
In the example above, we’ve added a review section. If you want to use reviews in your Schema.org data, remember that these reviews must live on your site. You cannot use sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor to generate reviews to show in the search engines. Ask your customers to leave a review. Make a review page, collect the reviews, and present them to the world.
Social
Another element to add to complete your online profile is links to your social media accounts. To do this, you must specify an organization or a person. The URL has to lead to your main site, while the sameAs links lead to your social media profiles.
Google My Business
There is another way you should add your local business to Google. By opening a Google My Business account, you will be able to verify that you are, in fact, the owner of your business. After that, you can add or edit all relevant information about your business, such as address information, opening hours, and photos. In addition to that, you can even manage the reviews people add to Google and see how your local listing performs.
Conversely, this only applies to Google. Every search engine can interpret Schema.org, so adding structured data to your site is still advisable. Additionally, Schema.org can do much more than add relevant local business locations. Therefore, Schema.org should be your main focus.
Despite all this, you’re still very much in Google’s hands. Some businesses appear in the Knowledge Panel, while others don’t. Some products get rich listings in the search results, including prices, reviews, and availability, while identical products from different vendors don’t. It’s hard to predict what will happen. However, don’t let this stop you.
Structured data for your local business
As we’ve shown, Schema.org can play an important part in the optimization of your site and your SEO strategy. Structured data can do much more; look at all those properties on Schema.org. We’ll keep an eye on what structured data can do for your site and keep you in the loop!
Don’t forget that if you want an easier way to add your local business and organization data to your pages, you should check out our Local SEO plugin and Yoast SEO Premium.
Google has announced a couple of updates to its Schema structured data support. These enhancements will improve discussion forums, profile pages, and organizations’ appearance in search engine results pages. Let’s review these changes. You’ll see how the Yoast SEO Schema framework can help you leverage them to their fullest potential.
About the discussion and profile markup
For Google, 2023 was a year of Schema updates. Google issued fifteen structured data updates this year, with eleven alterations occurring in the final quarter. The latest ones we’ll describe in this article. Structured data is a focal point for Google.
On November 27, 2023, Google enriched the search experience by introducing structured data types for discussion forums (DiscussionForumPosting) and profile pages (ProfilePage). This update is a nice improvement for online communities and social platforms. The new Schema types allow for a detailed representation of user interactions and forum activities, such as the number of posts or replies. These can be displayed directly in search results through rich snippets.
The InteractionCounter property is an essential addition, enabling forums to highlight the vibrancy of their community interactions. Profile pages can now benefit from enhanced visibility, with the ability to showcase individual contributions and reputations within a community. This level of detail not only aids user discovery but also fosters a sense of authority and trustworthiness for the profiles.
Understanding the organization markup
After the DiscussionForumPosting and ProfilePage markup announcement, Google expanded the Organization structured data type. This update allows businesses to provide more granular information about themselves. Google can use this to populate Knowledge Panels and other visual elements in search results. The markup covers various aspects of an organization, from official logos and contact information to social media profiles and founding dates.
This structured data type helps organizations stand out in SERPs. It offers a more comprehensive and visually appealing presentation of its brand and identity. The implications for brand recognition and user trust are substantial. This information can directly influence a user’s perception and interaction with a business.
Yoast SEO Schema framework is ready to build upon
The Yoast SEO structured data implementation is ready for these updates. Even before the upcoming additions, Yoast SEO is already properly set up as Google validates all Organization and ProfilePage markup. We’ve designed our framework to be flexible and future-proof. Our framework dynamically generates Schema markup meticulously aligned with Google’s recommendations and standards. From the outset, we’ve embraced a holistic approach to structured data, ensuring that our users’ websites can quickly adapt to changes and continue to communicate effectively with search engines.
Our Schema framework outputs the most structured data correctly and has done so for ages. We will also incorporate the new properties and types that Google recognizes. We’re working hard to get these to you as soon as possible.
After we’ve included this, companies can enrich their online presence with minimal additional effort. They’ll have new opportunities to showcase their brand information more prominently. Plus, forums and social platforms can easily integrate these newly structured data types for discussion and profile markup.
The Yoast SEO Schema framework simplifies the process. It removes the complexity of manual markup and automatically enhances their content’s visibility in SERPs.
Embracing the future with Yoast SEO
We invite developers and companies to make the most of Yoast SEO’s Schema framework as a foundation for their SEO strategies. Utilizing our comprehensive tools keeps you aligned with the latest SEO practices and enhances your website’s readiness for future updates.
Please read our developer documentation to understand how you can easily build an integration with the Yoast SEO structured data.
Getting visibility is paramount, so staying ahead of the curve is essential. With Yoast SEO, you have the tools and support to use structured data properly. This way, your website stands out and effectively reaches its target audience — even when Google announced more schema updates.
Master the art of using Schema.org to elevate your online visibility with our ultimate guide to structured data. Dive into the heart of Schema.org and how it can revolutionize how your site interacts with search engines like Google. Explore its power in improving the presentation of your pages when describing products, reviews, events, and recipes. Discover how to get rich results such as snippets, interactive mobile results, voice-activated actions, or securing a spot in Google’s coveted Knowledge Graph. Embrace structured data — your ticket to better online exposure and interaction.
Table of contents
What is structured data?
Structured data is a way of describing your website to make it easier for search engines to understand. You need a so-called vocabulary to make it work, and the one used by the big search engines is Schema.org. Schema.org provides a series of tags and properties to describe your products, reviews, local business listings, job postings, et cetera in detail.
The major search engines, Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo, developed this vocabulary to reach a shared language to understand websites better. Search engines use it today for many things, from fact-checking content to listing job postings!
If added well, search engines can use the applied structured data to better understand your page’s contents. As a result, your site might be presented better in search results, for example, in the form of rich results like rich snippets. However, there are no guarantees you’ll get rich results — that’s up to the search engines.
Below is an example of a simple structured data using Schema.org in JSON-LD format. This is a basic schema for a product with review properties. This code tells search engines that the page is a product (Product); it provides the name and description of the product, pricing information, the URL, plus product ratings and reviews. This allows search engines to understand your products and present your content in search results.
Product Title
Why do you need structured data?
Structured data, particularly when using the Schema.org vocabulary, breathes life into your site for search engines. It describes your products, reviews, events, job postings, and more in a language that search engines instantly understand. The beauty of structured data lies in its precision and detailed presentation of your site’s content. Gone are the days when search engines had to make guesses about your content: with structured data, every site element is deciphered clearly.
Structured data is crucial because it can outline clear connections among diverse website components. It fosters a new understanding for search engines, helping them see your site’s content and how everything relates. It’s a roadmap of your site’s content, with each piece connected and important to the bigger picture.
In a world where clarity equals visibility, structured data is no longer nice but necessary. By applying structured data, you speak the language of search engines, augmenting your website’s comprehensibility and attracting more organic traffic.
Is structured data important for SEO?
Implementing structured data using Schema.org is a strategic move in bolstering your website’s SEO. While it may not directly improve your site’s rankings, it enriches search result listings, making your site a more appealing click to prospective visitors.
Envision your search result as a movie trailer: The preview captivates the audience and compels them to watch it. An enhanced search result crafted with structured data offers a similar advantage. It gives searchers a more detailed, enriched preview of your website, significantly increasing the likelihood of being chosen from a sea of links. If your website delivers on what the enhanced listing promises, congratulations – you’ve just become a reputable source for your visitor. This user satisfaction translates into a lower bounce rate, signaling to search engines like Google that your site is a credible and reliable resource.
Moreover, with structured data gradually gaining traction, now is the perfect opportunity to leapfrog your competitors. It’s not just about keeping pace in the SEO race; it’s about being a frontrunner. Our structured data guide is designed to equip you with pragmatic tips and recommendations to maximize your website’s potential using structured data
Structured data can lead to rich results
By describing your site for search engines, you allow them to do exciting things with your content. Schema.org and its support are constantly developing, improving, and expanding. As structured data forms the basis for many new developments in the SEO world — like voice search –, there are bound to be more shortly. Below is an overview of the available rich search results; examples are in Google’s Search Gallery. At the moment, these are a couple of the available rich results:
Article
FAQ
Q&A
Book
Home activities
Recipe
Breadcrumbs
How-to
Review snippet
Carousel
Image metadata
Sitelinks searchbox
Course
Job posting
Software app
Critic review
Learning video
Speakable
Dataset
Local business
Subscription and paywalled content
Education Q&A
Logo
Video
Employer aggregate rating
Math solver
Estimated salary
Movie
Event
Practice problem
Fact check
Product
The rich results formerly known as rich snippets
Rich results are your golden ticket to creating dynamic, engaging, and information-packed search result listings. They are much more than the standard, black-line meta description text on a search engine results page. Harnessing the power of rich results enriches search listings with additional information and interactive functionalities.
Some listings offer extra information, like star ratings or product details
Consider rich results as added-value details that elevate a user’s search experience. From showing critical product data such as pricing and reviews to practical navigational tools like breadcrumbs or in-site search functions, rich results make your listing stand out in a competitive digital landscape.
Where a conventional search result offers a glimpse into your site, a rich result is akin to rolling out a red carpet, enticing users with a premium overview of what they can expect when they click through. These enriched listings can effectively boost click-through rates (CTR) and enhance user interaction, providing an SEO advantage that improves your site’s visibility and drives more traffic.
In today’s mobile-driven world, rich results are pivotal in shaping a distinctive and interactive search experience. Rich results find a particular resonance in mobile searches, becoming more prevalent and impactful. Specific searches for local restaurants, recipes, movies, how-tos, and courses benefit from a specialized treatment in mobile search results.
Tasty, right?
They are often presented in a touch-friendly and user-engaging, swipeable manner, making rich results intuitive and streamlined on mobile devices. This format, frequently called the carousel, significantly enhances the user experience and the ease of information access.
Google significantly emphasizes fostering rich, interactive elements within these results. With Google’s touch of innovation, you can conveniently reserve a table at your favorite restaurant, order movie tickets, find delectable cheesecake recipes, or even book flight tickets— all directly from the search results. Google’s advancements have turned the humble search engine results page into a powerhouse encompassing almost every aspect of daily life, with structured data propelling parts of it.
With structured data and rich results, your website gains the potential to offer more than just links and text — it becomes more visible to the user. It elevates the user experience by leaps and bounds, improving your site’s visibility and creating potential for greater user engagement. Remember, the precision and dynamism offered by structured data and rich results are still in the early adoption phases across the web. Therefore, harnessing them presents a lucrative opportunity to gain a competitive edge. And from the looks of it, we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of potential here.
Knowledge Graph Panel
When you search Google, you’ll commonly see a large box of detailed information on the right side. This dynamic feature, Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel, provides an enriched snapshot of information tied to your specific search.
A knowledge panel
So, how does Google amass this information? It systematically evaluates related content about the subject in question, with structured data from a website being a significant resource. This exhaustive examination of interconnected data helps to unveil a more holistic picture of the search subject.
Imagine you’re a verified business or an authority on a particular subject. The Knowledge Graph Panel can showcase your name, logo, and social media profiles. This visibility warrants a sense of prestige and credibility conferred by Google.
But the implications of the Knowledge Graph Panel go beyond just surface-level information. Linking to a multitude of related content creates a comprehensive web of knowledge that helps users delve deeper into their areas of interest. This enhances user experience and increases the time spent on Google services, making it a win-win feature for both ends.
Moreover, the Knowledge Graph’s influence extends to SEO strategy. A billboard showcasing your site’s relevance and authority is featured in search results. It underscores the importance of structured data in shaping a website’s digital visibility and underlines how optimized, high-quality content can pave the way for enriched search results.
Featured snippets
This might be a sneaky addition because featured snippets are rich results, but they do not get their content from structured data. A featured snippet answers a search question directly in the search results but uses regular content from a web page to do so.
A featured snippet for the search term [site structure]
Does structured data work on mobile?
Yes, the results of implementing structured data work everywhere. Mobile is one of the places where the results of a Schema implementation are most visible.
If a page meets the criteria Google sets, you can now book movie tickets or reserve a table at a restaurant directly from the search results. If you implement structured data correctly, you could also be eligible for several interactive extras on the mobile search results pages.
Different kinds of structured data
Sitelinks Searchbox
A Searchbox is where the internal search engine of a site is presented within the search results of Google. Google uses Schema.org code for this as well. Yoast SEO has support for this built in, and there’s more info in our Knowledge Base.
If you look at the Schema.org website, you’ll notice a lot of information you could add to your site as structured data. Not everything is relevant, though. Before implementing structured data, you need to know what you should markup. Do you have a product in an online store? Do you own a restaurant? Or do you have a local business providing services to the community? Or a site with your favorite cheesecake recipes? Whichever it is, you need to know what you want to do and explore the possibilities. Don’t forget to check the documentation by search engines to understand what they need from you.
Yoast SEO does a lot of these
Yoast SEO has Schema controls, which help translate your content into a language search engines understand and appreciate. It automatically generates structured data for your site with sensible default settings, which you can also manually adjust based on over twenty supported content types. This granular control over your Schema settings can increase your chance of obtaining coveted rich results.
For instance, our Schema tab lets you specify your contact page as a ContactPage, removing potential ambiguities for search engines. Beyond this, Yoast SEO makes automatic connections that guide search engines in deciphering the meaning of your site. We also provide additional features that enhance Schema elements and center around content specificity, all contributing to a cohesive structured data strategy.
Yoast SEO helps you fine-tune your schema structured data settings per page
Creative works
The Creative Work group encompasses all creative things produced by someone or something. You’ll find the most common ones below, but the list is much longer. You’ll also find properties for sculptures, games, conversations, software applications, visual artworks, and much more. However, most of these properties don’t have a rich presentation in search engine results, so they are less valuable. But, as mentioned earlier, if your site has items in the categories below, mark them up with Schema.org.
Articles
An article could be a news item or part of an investigative report. You can distinguish between a news article, a tech article, or even a blog post.
Books
A book is a book, whether in paper form or digital form, as an eBook. You can mark up every property type, from the author who wrote it to any awards it has won.
Google understands structured data for datasets and can use this to help surface and understand these datasets better. Find out more on Google’s developer pages.
FAQ pages
Make a great FAQ page to answer your customers’ frequently asked questions. Yoast SEO helps you turn those FAQs into something Google can understand properly, with the Schema structured data FAQ content block.
How-tos
You can markup your how-to articles with HowTo structured data. Our structured data content block for how-tos is in the WordPress block editor. By following a step-by-step process, users can get a specific task done.
Image metadata
By incorporating detailed image metadata, Google Images can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the image, including details about the creator, usage permissions, and acknowledgment specifics.
Music
Music also gets the structured data treatment. There are a couple of Schema.orgs of interest for music, like MusicRecording, MusicAlbum, MusicEvent, and MusicGroup.
Q&A pages
Question and answer pages are eligible for rich results as well. According to Google, Q&A pages differ from FAQ pages, where you can find multiple questions and answers on a page — more in Google’s Q&A page documentation. Use the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks to provide structured data for your FAQ pages.
Recipes
Adding Recipe structured data to the recipes on your cooking website lets you get your recipes featured directly in search results. Moreover, with mobile rich results, recipes look great on mobile featuring great images — if you add them. And that’s not all, because you can now send your recipes to Google Home and get Assistant to speak it out loud. How cool is that?
Speakable
Google is currently testing the implementation of speakable Schema.org. With this code, you can tell a search engine that a piece of content is specially written to be spoken aloud by digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant.
TV & Movies
Movies and TV shows get their piece of structured data as well. Searching for a movie in search engines will yield a rich result with reviews, poster art, cast information, and even the ability to order tickets for a showing directly. You can even mark up lists of the best movies ever made or your favorite TV shows.
Videos
It’s possible to do all kinds of interesting things with video. Google, in particular, is working on new ways to display videos in the search results.
Commerce
There is also structured data for commercial goals. Here, you’ll find a couple of important ones:
Events
Marking up your event listings with the correct Event Schema.org, might lead to search engines showing your events directly in the search results. This is a must-have if you own a nightclub, a venue, or any business regularly organizing events.
Businesses and organizations
If you make money with your website, you might own a business. If you’re a site owner or work on a company site, you’ll find the business and organization Schema.orgs interesting. Almost every site can benefit from the correct business Schema.org. If you do it well, you could get a nice Knowledge Graph or another type of rich listing in the search engines. You can even add special structured data for your contact details so customers can contact you directly from the search results. For local businesses, our Local SEO plugin helps you take care of all your local structured data needs.
Have job postings on your site? Mark them up with the job postings structured data to have them show up nicely in Google. We use this on all our Yoast job postings as well.
Products
Schema.org for products is almost as important as the one for businesses and organizations. Using Product Schema.org; you can give your products the extra data search engines need to give you rich snippets, for example. Consider all the search results with added information, like pricing, reviews, availability, etc. This should be a significant part of your structured data strategy if you have products. Remember to mark up your product images. Our WooCommerce SEO and Shopify SEO products output proper product structured data.
Reviews and ratings play an important role in today’s search process. Businesses, service providers, and online stores all use reviews to attract more customers and show how trustworthy their offer is. Getting those five stars in search engines might be the missing link to creating a successful business.
Voice assistants are interesting, but they have yet to reach the adoption levels they were predicted to have. Still, there’s stuff happening on this front if you see it as part of the conversational search movement. Take recipes, for instance; you can send a recipe from the search results to your Google Home to read aloud while cooking. These are called Actions, and there are a whole bunch of them. If you want your recipes to appear in the Google Assistant library, add a specific structured data set and adhere to additional rules. You can find more on that on the Creating a recipe action page. Visit Google’s Assistant site to get a feel for what’s possible (a lot!).
Google Assistant uses a lot of structured data to understand your content
The technical details
To start marking up your pages, you must understand how Schema.org works. If you look closely at the full specs on Schema.org, you’ll see a strict hierarchy in the vocabulary. Everything is connected, just like everything is connected on your pages. Scroll through the list to see all the options, and note the ones you need.
Let’s look at the structure. A Schema.org implementation starts with a Thing, the most generic type of item. A Thing could be a more specific type of item, for instance, a Creative Work, an Event, Organization, Person, Place, or Product.
For example, a movie is a “Thing” and a “Creative Work”, which falls under the category “Movie”. You can add a lot of properties to this, like a “Description”, a “Director”, an “Actor”, a poster “Image”, “Duration” or “Genre”. There are loads to add, so you can get as specific as you want. However, don’t overdo it since not all search engines use every property – at least not yet. For instance, you should look at the specifications in Google’s documentation to see which properties are required and which are recommended.
A sample Schema.org structure
If we put what we know now in a hierarchy, this is what you will end up with:
Thing
Creative Work
Movie
Description (type: text)
Director (type: person)
Actor (type: person)
Image (type: ImageObject or URL)
etc.
If it would be a local business, you could use something like this:
Thing
Organization (or Place)
LocalBusiness
Dentist
Name
Address
Email
Logo
Review
etc.
For local businesses, you could pick a more specific type of business. This makes it easier for search engines to determine what kind of business you own. There are hundreds of types of local businesses, but your business might not fit one of the descriptions. Using the Product Types Ontology you can get more specific information if your listing is too broad.
In the local business example, you’ll see that Google lists several required properties, like your business’s NAP (Name and Phone) details. There are also recommended properties, like URLs, geo-coordinates, opening hours, etc. Try to fill out as many of these as possible because search engines will only give you the whole presentation you want. You’ll find our Local SEO plugin very helpful if you need help with your local business markup.
What do you need to describe for search engines?
Looking at Schema.org for the first time is daunting. The list is enormous, and the possibilities are endless, so it’s easy to become overwhelmed. To get over this, you need to go back to basics. Think about your site, business, or product and write down the specifications and properties you feel are necessary, then work up. Also, Yoast SEO covers the most essential properties automatically — so there is no need to worry about those if your plugin is configured correctly!
Having said that, there are a couple of sections you should prioritize in your plan to add structured data to your site. If you start with these three, you’ll have the basics covered, and then you can build on that. You should start with structured data for your business details, products, and reviews. These will have the biggest effect in the short term.
How to implement structured data
Don’t be frightened, but here comes the technical part of the story. Before we do that, we’d like to remind you that Yoast SEO comes with an excellent structured data implementation. It’ll automatically handle most sites’ most pressing structured data needs. Of course, as mentioned below, you can extend our structured data framework as your needs become bigger.
Do the Yoast SEO configuration and get your site’s structured data set up in a few clicks! The configuration is available for all Yoast SEO users to help you get your plugin configured correctly. It’s quick, it’s easy, and doing it will pay off. Plus, if you’re using the new block editor in WordPress you can also add structured data to your FAQ pages and how-to articles using our structured data content blocks.
Thanks to JSON-LD, there’s nothing scary about adding the data to your pages anymore. This JavaScript-based data format makes it much easier to add structured data since it forms a block of code and is no longer embedded in the HTML of your page. This makes it easier to write and maintain, plus both humans and machines better understand it. If you need help implementing JSON-LD structured data, you can enroll in our free Structured data for beginners course, our Understanding structured data course or follow a high-level course on Google’s Codelabs.
Structured data with JSON-LD
JSON-LD is the preferred method of adding structured data to your site. However, not all search engines have been quick to adopt it — Bing being the last hold-out. Thankfully, Microsoft came around in August 2018 and now supports this, as the most efficient method.
Since Yoast SEO 11.0, the plugin comes with a fully-featured Schema.org implementation. Yoast SEO now creates a structured data graph for every page on your site, interconnecting everything. While working on this, we’ve also created complete, detailed documentation on Schema, including a specification for integrating structured data. You’ll find some example graphs for various standard pages on your site.
The old ways: RFDa and Microdata
The classic way of writing structured data for inclusion on your pages involves directly embedding it into your HTML. This made a really inefficient and error-prone process and is much of the reason why the uptake of Schema.org hasn’t been swift. Writing and maintaining it via RDFa or Microdata is a pain. Believe us, try to do as much as you can in JSON-LD.
Microdata needs itemprops to function, so everything has to be inline coded. You can instantly see how that makes it hard to read, write and edit.
Yoast SEO automatically handles much of the structured data in the background. You could extend our Schema framework, of course — see the next chapter –, but if adding code by hand seems scary, you could try some of the tools listed below. If you need help with how to proceed, ask your web developer for help. They will fix this for you in a couple of minutes.
Generators
Validators and test tools
WordPress Plugins
Yoast SEO Local (Our Local SEO plugin adds Schema.org for your business details, like address, geo-location, opening hours, etc.)
Yoast SEO uses JSON-LD to add Schema.org information about your site search, your site name, your logo, images, articles, social profiles and a lot more to your web pages. We ask if your site represents a person or an organization and adapt our structured data based on that. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor make it easy to add structured data to your FAQs and How-to’s. Check our the structured data features in Yoast SEO.
The Yoast SEO Schema structured data framework
Implementing structured data has always been challenging. Also, the results of most of those implementations often needed improvement. At Yoast, we set out to enhance the Schema output by millions of sites. For this, we built a Schema framework — ready to be adapted and extended by anyone. We combined all those loose bits and pieces of structured data that appear on many sites, improved these, and put them in a graph. By interconnecting all these bits, we offer search engines all your connections on a silver platter.
See this video for more background on the schema graph.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it. We can also extend Yoast SEO output by adding specific Schema pieces, like how-tos or FAQs. We built structured data content blocks for use in the WordPress block editor. We’ve also enabled other WordPress plugins to integrate with our structured data framework, like Easy Digital Downloads, The Events Calendar, Seriously Simple Podcasting, and WP Recipe Maker, with more to come. Together, these help you remove barriers for search engines and users, as it has always been challenging to work with structured data.
Expand and improve your structured data implementation
You’ll need to follow a structured and focused approach to effectively implement and enhance Schema.org markup on your website. This includes understanding the key concepts, identifying your goals, leveraging the right tools, and regularly reviewing your strategy. Here’s a guide on how you can do this:
Understanding Schema.org Markup: First, you need to understand what Schema.org markup is and why it’s crucial for your SEO strategy. Yoast’s developer portal provides a detailed insight into the functional approach of constructing Schema.org markup. This will help you to comprehend its importance in generating rich results on search engines.
Selecting the right format: Choosing the right format for your structured data is critically important. Yoast’s approach recommends JSON-LD as the preferred format for structured markup. According to their Technology and Approach page, JSON-LD provides usability and efficiency in conveying structured information, making it a recommended format by major search engines, including Google.
Integrating with Yoast’s structured data framework: To seamlessly add Schema.org markup to your web pages, you can use our structured data framework. Yoast’s Schema Integration Guidelines provide an easy and beneficial way to integrate Schema.org markup, optimize communication with search engines, and potentially improve its SEO performance.
Reviewing and enhancing your implementation: To keep your structured data markup implementation effective, reviewing and enhancing it regularly is advisable. Not only does this help in identifying any potential issues, but it also presents opportunities to improve your existing markup for better SEO performance.
Read up
By following the guidelines and adopting a comprehensive approach, you can successfully get structured data on your pages and enhance the effectiveness of your schema.org markup implementation for a robust SEO performance. Read the Yoast SEO Schema documentation to learn how Yoast SEO works with structured data, how you can extend it via an API, and how you can integrate it into your work.
Several WordPress plugins already integrate their structured data into the Yoast SEO graph
Most search engines have their developer center where you can find more information on the inner workings of their structured data implementations. You can read these to see what works and what doesn’t. It would be best to stick to their rules because a bad Schema.org implementation could lead to a penalty. Always check your code in the structured data test tool to see if it’s correct. Fix errors and regularly maintain the code on your site to see if it is still up to scratch.
In the end
You can’t run away from structured data anymore. If your site means anything to you, you should look into it and figure out the best way to use Schema.org. Still need some help? Read more on how Yoast SEO makes it easy for you. Or check out our digital story on rich results, structured data and Schema, or take our free structured data for beginner’s online training course. If implemented correctly, it can do great things for your site, now and in the future. Search engines are constantly developing new ways to present search results, and more often than not, they use Schema.org data.
Adding structured data to your site is an essential part of technical SEO. If you’re wondering how fit your site’s overall technical SEO is, take our technical SEO fitness quiz to find out. This quiz helps you figure out what you can still work on!
If you use Yoast SEO on your site, you’re probably familiar with features like the SEO analysis or the snippet preview. You might also know our inclusive language analysis, and how easily you can link to related posts or create redirects in the premium version of the plugin. But there’s (much) more! For instance, the Yoast SEO plugin has so-called hidden features. You won’t find them in your settings, but they do great work. Today, we’ll dive into these hidden features: which ones do we have and how do they lighten your load?
Why hidden features?
You can optimize a website in many different ways. Imagine having a toggle for all these options! That’s why, when developing our Yoast SEO plugin, we decided not to translate all these options into settings. If we believe something is beneficial for every Yoast SEO user, we turn the feature on. We call these features hidden features because as a user you’re not necessarily aware of their existence. You might even think we don’t have certain features because there’s no setting for it. But the opposite is true! We’re quietly taking care of things for you.
The hidden features of Yoast SEO
To help you understand what Yoast SEO does for your website in the background, we’ve listed some of the hidden features for you below. Let’s go through them one by one!
1. A structured data graph
Yoast SEO outputs a fully-integrated structured data graph for your posts and pages. But what is a structured data graph? And how does it help you optimize your site? To answer these questions, you first need to know what Schema is.
A few years ago, search engines came up with something called Schema.org to better understand the content they crawl. Schema is a bit like a glossary of terms for search engine robots. This structured data markup will help them understand whether something is a blog post, a local shop, a product, an organization or a book, just to name a few possibilities. Or, whether someone is an author, an actor, associated with a certain organization, alive or even a fictional character, for instance.
For all these items there’s a set of properties that specifically belongs to that item. If you provide information about these items in a structured way – with structured data – search engines can make sense of your site and the things you talk about. As a reward, they might even give you those eye-catching rich results.
How does the Yoast SEO plugin help?
Adding structured data to your site’s content is a smart thing to do. But as the number of structured data items grows, all these loose pieces of code can end up on a big pile of Schema markup on your site’s pages. Yoast SEO helps you prevent creating a big and unorganized pile of code. For every page or post, our plugin creates a neat structured data graph. In this graph, it connects the loose pieces of structured data with each other. When the pieces are connected, a search engine can understand, for instance, that a post is written by author X, working for organization Y, selling brand Z.
You can even build full how-to articles and FAQ pages using the free structured data content blocks in Yoast SEO!
A structured data graph: Yoast SEO connects blobs of Schema markup in one single graph, so search engines understand the bigger picture.
Canonicals were introduced as an answer to duplicate content quite some time ago. So, what’s duplicate content? Duplicate content means you’ve published content that is the same or very similar to other content on your site. In other words: it’s available on multiple URLs. This confuses search engines. They start to wonder which URL they should show in the search results.
Duplicate content can exist without you being aware of it. In an online store, for instance, one product might belong to more than one category. If the category is included in the URL, the product page can be found on multiple URLs. Another example would be campaign tags. If you add these tags to your URLs when you share content on social or in your newsletter, it means the same page is available on a URL with and without a campaign tag. And there are more technical causes for duplicate content such as these.
The solution for this type of duplicate content issues is a self-referencing canonical. A canonical URL lets you say to search engines: “Of all the options available for this URL, this URL is the one you should show in the search results”. You can do so by adding a rel=canonical tag on a page, pointing to the page that you’d like to rank. In this case, you’d need the canonical tag to point to the URL of the original page.
How does the Yoast SEO plugin help?
Should you go through all your posts now and add the canonical tag? Not if you’re using Yoast SEO. The plugin does this for you, everywhere on your site: single posts and pages, homepages, category archives, tag archives, date archives, author archives, etc. If you’re not really a techy person, the canonical isn’t easy to wrap your head around. Or perhaps you simply don’t have the time to focus on it. Why not let Yoast SEO take care of it? Then you can move on to the more exciting stuff!
Another hidden feature in Yoast SEO is rel=next / rel=prev. It’s a method of telling search engines that certain pages belong to an archive: a so-called paginated archive. A rel=next / prev tag in the header of your site lets search engines know what the previous and the next page in that archive is. No one other than people looking at the source code of your site and search engines see this piece of code.
Not so long ago, Google announced that it isn’t using rel=next/prev anymore. Does this mean we should do away with this feature? Certainly not! Bing and other search engines still use it, so Yoast SEO will keep on adding rel=next / prev tags to paginated archives.
If you have a WordPress site, you most likely have a login link and a registration link for the backend of your site. But the login or registration page of your backend are places that visitors and search engines don’t ever need to be.
Therefore, Yoast SEO tells search engines not to follow links for login and registration pages. Yoast SEO makes sure that search engines will never follow these links. It’s a tiny tweak, but it saves a lot of unneeded Google action.
5. Noindex your internal search results
This hidden feature is based on Google’s Search Essentials documentation. Google wants to prevent users from going from a search result in Google to a search result page on a website. Google, justly, considers that bad user experience.
You can tell search engines not to include a certain page in their search results by adding a noindex tag to a page. Because of Google’s guidelines, Yoast SEO tells search engines that they shouldn’t display your internal search results pages in their search results with a noindex tag. But the links on these pages can still be followed and counted, which is better for your SEO. The plugin tells them not to show these pages in the search results; the links on these pages can still be followed and counted which is better for SEO.
This last hidden feature is quite a technical one. In short, it prevents your site from creating lots of URLs with no added value. WordPress has a replytocom feature that lets you reply to comments without activating JavaScript in your browser. But this means that for every comment, it creates a separate URL with ?replytocom variables.
So what happens if you get a lot of comments? Search engines then have to index all those URLs, which is a waste of your crawl budget. Therefore we remove these variables by default.
But that’s not all..
Our plugin comes with loads of features and settings that will benefit the online visibility of your website. The free version of Yoast SEO already gives you access to a lot of features that will help you do well in the search results. Yoast SEO Premium gives you access to additional tools, like the internal linking suggestions or the redirect manager. This makes many SEO-related tasks much easier and saving you time.
Buy Yoast SEO Premium now!
Unlock powerful features and much more for your WordPress site with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!
Google Search Console is an essential tool for website owners. This tool shows you how your site appears in Google’s search results. It also shows you what to improve to maximize your listings in the results. One of the many cool features of Search Console is the structured data analyses found in the Enhancement reports. Let’s dive into that!
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is like the Swiss army knife for site owners. You’ll get incredible insights into your site’s performance and inner workings at a glance. Not only that, it shows issues and helps you fix those issues by giving guidance. Google even sends you emails when it finds new issues.
In this post, our main focal point is structured data, so we’ll jump to the Enhancements report section of Google Search Console. Clicking on the various structured data reports — identified by the layer icon — will show you an overview of the pages with some structured data attached.
Structured data is all the extra information you give search engines to help them understand what a page is about. For instance, as the writer of this article, I am both a Person and an Author. I work for Yoast, this is my short bio, and you can find me on social media. Yoast SEO also lets you add extra details to your profile, like your accolades and expertise. All this supports the things search engines know about me and where to find me on the web.
If I add this data to the source code of this page, search engines can use that data to do incredible things. For instance, you can enhance your search listings with reviews, ratings, prices, and availability if you sell products. These might all become visible in the search results.
Author structured data as generated by Yoast SEO
How does Yoast SEO handle structured data?
Yoast SEO has a very sophisticated Schema structured data implementation. Yoast SEO doesn’t just add structured data to separate parts of your site but ties everything together to create a connected graph.
In addition, Yoast SEO has a robust, adequately documented Schema.org structured data framework, including a Schema API that developers can use to connect their structured data to ours, creating an extensive network of structured data. On the Integrations page of Yoast SEO, you’ll see which WordPress plugins integrate with it.
Helping search engines understand your site with Yoast SEO
The SEO plugin handles most of the structured data for you; you don’t need to do anything for it. Well, not that much, anyway. You only have to select whether your site represents someone or an organization and add an image or a logo. This way, Yoast SEO knows what structured data to generate for this particular site.
Using the Yoast SEO Schema tab you can determine what your content represents on a per page basis
As we said, one of the things that makes the Yoast structured data framework unique is that all this code is interconnected. That means that search engines can see and make connections between every part of your site and its contents. All this helps make your content findable and readable for search engines.
What is the Enhancements report all about?
The Enhancements tab in Search Console is a place to collect all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results. You’ll find a list of items in the Enhancements tab, from breadcrumbs to videos. In addition, you can find information on your product’s structured data in the Shopping tab. All these tabs show how many valid enhancements your site has or how many have errors or warnings. The list only shows what Schema structured data Google found on your site.
Clicking on an item, you’ll get details about the kind of errors and warnings and which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.
The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder your performance in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation, and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search.
For instance, if you have described your FAQs on your site with valid FAQ schema, these might appear highlighted in the search results. You can try to give search engines as much information about your site as possible — it helps them make the right connections.
You can find the list of structured data Enhancement reports on the left-hand side
What can we find there?
A lot! For every different type of enhancement, Google built a dashboard showing you how your site or page is doing. These insights help you to see how you are doing quickly and find areas to improve. The visual aspect helps make the data more concrete and easier to absorb, plus you can quickly locate the issues and on which pages these occur.
The report shows errors and warnings
Of course, you’d like to see structured data succeed in one go, but you’ll probably run into issues at some point. Following the guidelines and adding the required properties will be fine once you fix the issues. However, there are cases where Google asks for more input, the so-called recommended properties. Adding these will make your structured data item go from orange to green. So it boils down to this:
Errors are problems, warnings are potential enhancements to improve the results.
A warning is a chance to do better
For example, some how-to posts on our site use the Yoast SEO How-To structured data blocks for WordPress. These blocks automatically generate valid how-to structured data that leads to rich results. We haven’t built in support for the recommended supply and tool types, so we see Search Console generate a warning. Our how-to, however, is still valid, and we have a rich result to prove it.
In this case, valid with warnings still leads to rich results
Errors mean not eligible for rich results
If you have errors in your structured data, you’ll not be eligible for rich results. That doesn’t mean, however, that your page won’t rank well. These are separate things. Having valid structured data might make you a better fit, though.
There are many reasons why your structured data implementation may need fixing. Sometimes, you forget to add necessary stuff correctly; sometimes, it’s an issue with code quality. For whatever reason, pages with structured data issues will not get rich results in the search results pages. So you’ll need to work on that.
Clicking on a page with an error opens a modal with the structured data highlighted. From here, you can copy the code to start fixing it. Once you do that, mark this issue fixed, so Google knows you’ve worked on the problem. If the problem persists, the issue will come back to Google Search Console.
Search Console highlights the line where the error appears
You can also hit Inspect in the bottom right corner to retrieve the page from the index to see what else is happening on that page. From there, you can run the live URL to do further testing.
If Search Console can’t read your structured data due to programming errors or determine which type it’s supposed to describe, it’ll send these messages to the Unparsable structured data report. Run your code in the Schema Markup Validator, fix the errors and see if they disappear.
Eligibility for rich results
Green is good! These items have properly structured data attached, which might lead to a rich result. Red is an error and something you should fix if you want the whole, rich result experience. Warnings are orange and allow you to improve or extend your structured data to get the whole experience. However, it is up to you if you want to fix it. Sometimes, fixing a small thing is easier said than done.
This page is eligible for articles, how-to, breadcrumbs, logos, video and sitelinks rich results
Trends in crawling and errors
A handy little addition to Search Console is the trend line. This helps you determine a trend in the number of items validated and error changes.
Trend lines help you uncover trends in errors or validations
Retrieve post from index to evaluate/fix
As Search Console gives you insights into how your pages perform in Google, it would be cool to get an idea of how Google sees those pages. Luckily, you can! There are several ways to do this, but the easiest is pasting your URL in the big search bar at the top of the Search Console interface.
Comparing indexed and live pages can lead to interesting insights
This gives you an overview of everything index related to this URL, including how Google crawled the page. See below. You can even compare the indexed URL to the live URL by hitting Live Test URL button in the up-right corner. These should be the same, but sometimes there are errors on your live page that have yet to reach the index. From here, you can perform all kinds of tests and checks.
Sometimes, the indexed page doesn’t have errors while the live page does
Which types are available in Google Search Console?
Google is quickly expanding the content types we see in Search Console. There are enhancements for things like books, reviews, app listings, events, courses, movies, recipes, and many more. You can see the complete list of supported structured data in Google’s structured data documentation or an overview of the different types of rich results in the search gallery. Below is a sampling.
Remember, when implementing, try to follow the rules, or you might not get any results. Badly implemented structured data doesn’t do you any good.
Breadcrumbs
Adding breadcrumb structured data to your site helps Google determine how your navigation works and how a specific page fits in the site hierarchy. Yoast SEO automatically generates this for your pages. You only have to add some code to your WordPress theme to activate the feature. After that, enable the breadcrumbs in Yoast SEO and set the breadcrumbs to your liking. After a while, check your Search Console to see if there are any errors in your implementation.
Events
Marking up your events with event structured data helps them stand out in search results. Event markup is available for every type of event. You can add dates, locations, images, performs and more to maximize your listings. In Search Console, you’ll see if your events are properly marked up with the essential items and the recommended properties that help to enhance your listing.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions
One handy piece of structured data is the FAQ, which marks up frequently asked questions pages. By implementing this, you might get a nice eye-catching dropdown in the search results. Building a valid FAQ listing is peanuts, thanks to the structured data content blocks in Yoast SEO. Pick the FAQ block, fill in the fields, and ready. Here’s how to build a structured data-powered FAQ page using Yoast SEO. Search Console will show you if your listing is valid. After that, you can check it in the Rich Results Tester to see what it will look like.
How-to
Next up is another handy structured data powered rich result: the how-to. You can add how-to structured data to content that describes how to do something in a couple of steps. Like the FAQ above, Yoast SEO has structured data content blocks to help you build a valid how-to. Pick the block, fill the fields, add images and publish. It’s that easy! Learn how to add HowTo Schema to your how-to article. Again, in Search Console, you’ll see if your how-tos are valid or can be improved. The free Yoast SEO How-to content block helps you add it in you WordPress posts.
Job Postings
Job Postings are another interesting addition. Google runs a job site that loves to present its listings in a structured way. Adding job posting structured data to your available jobs helps them enrich your job postings, which in turn leads to better visibility for your jobs. As with the previous enhancements, Search Console gives you an idea of how your listings are doing and gives you tips to further improve them.
Logos
Adding markup to your logo helps search engines validate your logo to use the correct one in search. Google likes to use these files in things like the Knowledge Graph-powered knowledge panels on the right-hand side of your screen. Yoast SEO automatically adds structured data to your logo so search engines can pick it up properly.
Products
Products are the lifeblood of many sites. Structured data can help showcase products in search. By adding relevant data, you might get highlighted in search with reviews, ratings, prices, availability, and much more. Like all the other reports here, Search Console shows you which products are valid for rich results and which aren’t. Plus, you get tips on what you should fix to get them.
If you’re using Yoast SEO, our WooCommerce SEO add-on offers an easy way to add structured data for your products. It automatically arranges everything for you and even adds your product structured data to the rest of Yoast SEOs structured data, building a complete and interconnected overview for search engines.
Sitelinks searchbox
You know the search bar you see for some sites in the search results? That’s a sitelinks searchbox. This allows users to directly search on a site, without opening the site first. Yoast SEO automatically adds all the structured data necessary for sitelinks searchboxes for your site, but it’s up to Google to decide who gets one and who doesn’t. In Search Console, you’ll see which URLs on your site might get a searchbox.
Video
The Enhancement reports is also has a Video video section. You’ll find more information about how Google sees your embedded videos here. Also, Google also implemented a special search feature in the Search Appearance part of the Performance tab so you can see how many times your videos showed up in search and how many people clicked on them. The Yoast Video SEO add-on automatically adds the necessary code and ties everything neatly together. Here’s more information on how to get Google’s video reporting with the Yoast Video SEO plugin.
Keep an eye on your structured data in Google Search Console
As we mentioned several times: Google Search Console is a goldmine. It should be your go-to tool to see how your site is doing in the search engine. There’s a lot to see and do. The Enhancement reports, for instance, show you if your structured data implementation is valid for rich results. These reports help you fix errors and warnings to get the most out of your structured data.
For most sites, SEO in 2023 will probably be similar to the past couple of years: you still need to improve your work but set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer, and Google — and your potential customers — are getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, you should keep an eye out for technological advancements like ChatGPT, as they might make for an exciting year. Here, you’ll get a quick overview of SEO in 2023.
Table of contents
2022 is over; now what?
2022 was a weird year. It might have been a somewhat positive year for most of us — although we’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with a recession looming. The pandemic is still around but has taken a back seat in most places. If we look at our industry, SEO, we see that the online world has made a big jump. A lot of businesses moved online. Many people have shopped online for the first time, and many of them will keep doing that. There’s never been a better time to build an online business.
With a recession looming, SEO will likely become even more important. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching an audience — plus, it’s relatively easy to do. You can rely less on external platforms and more on the one that you fully control: your website.
So, with all these people waiting for your content — how would you use SEO in 2023?
It’s all about quality and E-A-T
2023 is all about quality and authority. Improving quality across the board should start with determining what you do. Please look at your products and services and the way you describe these. Have you had any trouble telling what you do? You may need to go back to the drawing board. Your product must be excellent, as there is no use in trying to rank a sub-par product. No one would fall for that. A killer product needs a killer site and a killer plan to get that site noticed.
Increasingly, Google looks at other signals to determine the value of your offer and yourself. These signals, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (or E-A-T) help it to discern the real from the fake, so to speak. The web is already rife with sub-par content, and the advent of new artificial intelligence content writers might flood it with even more. Quality, originality, authority, trustworthiness, and expertise will be where you will be judged on. And the recent addition of Experience to the E-A-T acronym shows Google is not done with its focus on this ranking factor.
Google will build out the Helpful Content system that it launched earlier in 2022 to help uncover truly good and original stuff.
SEO in 2023
For years, we heard talk about AI taking over the world, and 2023 might be the year that could happen. The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 was a bombshell for many, and it was followed by a ton of new tools and developments. Plus, all the news surrounding the chat AI helped it reach a vast audience, which will surely help it get into the mainstream. ChatGPT could dramatically reshape how we search for answers, write our content, and much more. Now, it’s still early days, but keep a close eye on it and related technologies.
There’s a ton of other stuff happening as well. 2023 will also see much more visual and intelligent ways of searching and finding, like the multisearch stuff that Google introduced. Images will play a big part in how people will find you, so be sure to make these as good as possible.
There will also be a renewed interest in SEO as marketers will get trouble tracking their success on other platforms due to various legal changes, like a possible ban on Google Analytics in Europe. Cookies are also about to die. Even though tracking will continue in different forms, it’s time to invest in SEO before others flock to SEO.
Take note of these developments to see where search is heading, but for this moment, for most sites, it’s all about improving what you have right now. Site quality is critical. Content quality is vital. So, these SEO trends for 2023 are not hyped-up stuff but subjects we’ve been hammering home for a while. Remember Holistic SEO?
Improve site quality
If you’ve been playing this SEO game for a while, you’ve been working on your site for a long time. Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about all the things you should focus on because that’s what the search engines would be looking at. Experts claim to know many factors that search engines consider to rank a piece of content for a specific term. That’s not possible. While nobody knows precisely what happens behind the scenes of a search engine, you can look back over a more significant period to determine trends. One thing that always keeps popping up?
Quality.
To win in SEO in 2023, your site needs to be technically flawless, offer a spectacular user experience and high-quality content, and target the right audience at the right time in their user journey. And, of course, your site’s speed and user experience need to improve. It also means incorporating and improving Schema.org structured data, as structured data remains one of the critical developments for some time.
Let’s review some of the things you need to focus on in 2023.
A better Page Experience with good Core Web Vitals
As part of an effort to get sites to speed up and to provide a great user experience, Google announced the Page Experience algorithm update that rolled out in 2021. This update gives you another reason to put site speed front and center. While the Page Experience update didn’t shake up the SERPs, we expect it to continue to become a stronger signal.
Site speed has always been critical. If you can’t keep up with your competition now, you’ll soon find yourself having a more challenging time keeping up if you’re not speeding up your site. If one of your competitors becomes a lot faster, you become slower by comparison, even when you’re not becoming slower. Improving loading time is a lot of work, but as it might make you much faster than the competition, it’s an excellent tradeoff.
Start by finding a better hosting plan — one of the quickest ways to speed up your site! — and optimizing your images with image SEO.
Enhance the user experience
Page experience ties in with user experience. Is your site a joy to use? Can you find what you need in an instant? Is the branding recognizable? How do you use images? Improving the user experience is a surefire way to make your — potential — customers happy. Happy customers make happy search engines!
Untangle your site structure
Loads of sites were started on a whim and have grown tremendously over time. Sometimes, all those categories, tags, posts, and pages can feel like the roots of trees breaking up a sidewalk. It’s easy to lose control. You might know that keeping your site structure in check is beneficial for your visitors and search engines. Everything should have its proper place, and if something is old, outdated, or deprecated, maybe you should delete it and point it to something relevant.
This year, you should pay special attention to your site structure. Re-assess your site structure and ask yourself if everything is still where it should be or if improvements need to be made. How’s your cornerstone content strategy? Is your internal linking up to scratch? Are redirects screwing up the flow of your site? The SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium can help you get started on this.
Implement Schema.org structured data
Structured data with Schema.org makes your content instantly understandable for search engines. Search engines use structured data to connect parts of your page and the world around it. It helps to provide context to your data. Besides making your site easier to understand, adding structured data makes your site eligible for rich results. There are many rich results, from star ratings to image highlights, and search engines continue to expand this. Structured data forms the basis of many developments, like voice search and Google’s ecommerce push.
Implementing structured data has never been easy, but we’re solving that problem. Yoast SEO automatically outputs a complete graph of structured data, describing your site and content in detail for search engines — and connecting everything. For specific pages, you can describe the content in the Schema tab of Yoast SEO. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor let you automatically add valid structured data by simply picking a block and filling in the content. We now offer blocks for FAQ pages and How-to articles, with more on the way. In addition, we also have an online training course on structured data to help you improve your SEO in 2023.
The FAQ block in Yoast SEO makes it easy to get rich results for your FAQs
Mobile still needs your focus
We’ve talked about mobile for years, but we must remind people to take it seriously. Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing, it judges your site by how it works on mobile, even when most of your traffic is from the desktop. Give your mobile site special care and work on its mobile SEO. You should test whether your site works as well on mobile and desktop. Is the structured data functioning and complete? Do images have relevant alt-texts? Is the content complete and easy to read? Could you make it lightning-fast, easy to use, and valuable?
In 2022, many people experienced mobile shopping for the first time, and they will come back for more in 2023. If you sell stuff online, be sure to optimize the checkout process of your ecommerce site — make it as short and focused as possible!
Content quality
There is a ton of content out there — and a lot of new content is published daily. Why should your content be in the top ten for your chosen focus keyphrases? Is it perfect enough to beat the competition? Are you publishing original, all-encompassing content that answers the questions your audience has?
Keep search intent front and center
Search intent is the why behind a search. What does this person mean to do with this search? Is it to find information or to buy something? Or maybe they’re just trying to find a specific website. Or is it something else entirely? Search engines are better at understanding this intent and the accompanying user behavior. Thanks to breakthroughs in natural language processing with BERT and MUM, Google is starting to know the language inside out. In 2023, we’ll see Google use these new skills to bring better and more accurate search results — and present them in innovative ways.
Of course, we can still help search engines pick the correct version of our content. By determining the intent behind a search, you can map your keyword strategy to a searcher’s specific goals. Map these intents to your content, and you’re good to go.
Re-do your keyword research
The last two years were impactful for many of us, and a lot has changed. Keeping this in mind, it’s high time to re-do your keyword research. There is bound to have been an enormous amount of change in your market. Not only that, your company itself is bound to have changed. Not updating your keyword research means missing out on significant opportunities. Read up on the research about consumer trends for 2023 and beyond. After that, ask yourself these questions:
What changed in my company?
What changed in and around my audience?
Has something changed in people’s language?
What has changed in where people search?
Content is context
Context is one of the essential words in the SEO field. Context is what helps search engines make sense of the world. As search engines become more innovative and intelligent, providing them with as much related information as possible is becoming more critical. By offering the necessary context about your subject and entities, you can help search engines make the connection between your content and where that content fits in the grand scheme of things. It’s not just content; the links you add and how you add these links also provide context that helps search engines. Also, Schema structured data provides another way to show search engines how entities are connected.
By mapping the context of your subject, you might find a hole in your story. It could be that you haven’t fully explored your topic. Or maybe you found new ways of looking at it, or perhaps the recent developments threw you a curveball. Who knows! Stay on top of your topic and incorporate everything you find. Sometimes, it also means going back through your old content to update, improve or fix things — or delete stuff entirely.
Re-assess the content and quality of your most important pages
If you are anything like us, you have been at this game for a while and produced loads of content. That’s not a bad thing, of course, unless you are starting to compete with yourself. Keyword cannibalization can become a big issue, so content maintenance is a thing. Keep an eye on the search results of your chosen focus keyphrase. Do you have multiple articles in the top ten for a specific keyphrase? Is that what you want to happen?
You need to re-assess your content to find out how you are doing. Is everything in tip-top shape? Do you need to write more? Or less? Maybe combine several weaker articles into one strong one? Content pruning is going through your posts to see what you can take to improve the rest. Sometimes, the best SEO strategy can be to hold the writing for a while and improve what you have!
Work on your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
Now search engines can understand the content; they are increasingly looking at its value. Is it trustworthy? Who is the person claiming these things? Why should we trust the author? Is the author an authority on the subject? Google looks not just at the quality of the content but also at whether that content can be assessed professionally. Trust and expertise will be essential, especially for YMLY (Your Money or Your Life) pages, like medical or financial content. E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) looks at this and is becoming a more significant part of SEO in 2023. What’s more, at the end of 2022 even added an extra letter to the acronym: Experience!
Hone those writing skills!
Quality content is well-written content. Quality content is original, in-depth, and easy to understand. Search engines are improving at determining an article’s text quality and making decisions based on that. Also, readers value well-written texts more and get a sense of trust from them. If content reads well and is factual and grammatically correct, it will come across as more professional, and people will be more likely to return to read more of your content.
While it is increasingly challenging to write all that high-quality content yourself, artificial intelligence might help make your job easier. AI content generators are getting better by the day and have reached a level that produces pretty good content. So why not make use of these tools, I hear you say?
Having an AI tool write your content doesn’t lead to high-quality, unique, authentic stuff. An AI has been trained on stuff that we already know, so there is no way for it to write something unique. Please take care in using tools like this. Of course, there’s no harm in having an AI speed up your work, getting you inspired, and helping you set stuff up. Be sure to edit the outcome into something you are proud of.
It will be interesting to see Google’s reaction to the flood of AI-generated content that is bound to arrive in 2023. They will probably focus even more on identifying E-A-T signals in content to try and discern AI content from content written by expert humans.
As much as we’d like everything to happen on our website, it’s not. Depending on where you are and what you’re doing, your search engine optimization might need to happen elsewhere, not specifically in Google. Search is moving beyond the website or social media platform for investigations and actions. Loads of devices can answer a spoken question with a spoken answer. Machines that can book tickets for you or reserve a table. There are powerful e-commerce platforms that seem to get most of the product searches, not to mention all those app-based services. Visual search is also on the rise. TikTok is huge in certain demographics. Maybe these have value for you?
(Progressive web) apps
Links to apps continue to pop up in search, especially on mobile. Many sites bombard you with links to their apps on the home screen. Some services are app-only, like Uber. Apps are everywhere; even Google is testing structured data for software apps. Moreover, Google has expanded its mobile homepage with the Discover app that suggests new content based on your interests.
Where there’s an app, there’s a customer to reach. Uber might be the ultimate taxi-hailing service, but why can’t a local taxi company replicate that? Apps offer another way — and sometimes a better way — of reaching your audience. Depending on your product and market, looking into apps might be a good idea. If you’re not willing to go down the native route, there are always progressive web apps — which we’ll see a lot of this year!
Video
Video content is incredibly popular! And there’s no end in sight for the video boom. YouTube might be the most crucial search engine for many people besides Google. We’ve seen the arrival of short-form content providers like TikTok and several enhancements in how video gets presented on the search results pages. You can count on it that video content will only become more critical. If you have the means, invest in video. Remember, it doesn’t always have to be flashy and professional — make it heartfelt. In addition to our Video SEO WordPress plugin, we also have a ton of content on how to do video SEO well.
Other platforms
Traditionally, many searches happen not on search engines but social media and other platforms. These past years, we’ve seen a steady decline in traffic and conversion from social media. Different platforms are taking their place. YouTube is a powerful search engine, as is Amazon. Plus, there are all those short-form videos going around. Maybe that’s something to attract a new audience? Also, did you see the meteoric rise of alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Neeva? People are getting more privacy-aware, which is a good thing! Depending on the searcher and their goal, platforms like these are becoming increasingly important. Indeed, something to think about!
Don’t just think: “I need to publish a blog post on my website” — there are so many great destinations out there that might fit the goal of your message better.
A system for getting traffic with SEO in 2023
What does it all boil down to if we recap all this? We know it sounds easy when you read it like this, but this is what you should keep in your head at all times:
A lot has changed in the last two years, so restart your research and read up on consumer trends for 2023.
You should have a fast, easily usable, technically flawless website with high-quality content that genuinely helps visitors.
This website must be supported by a brand offering high-quality products and services.
SEO in 2023: What’s next?
It’s easy to say that your site must be better than ever in 2023 because it’s true! Those ten blue links and rich search results are what it’s all about for most sites. The majority of traffic will still come from organic searches. Social media traffic is down, and conversational search is rising, but not enough to put a dent in organic. And then there’s video. Ultimately, you must keep improving your site in all the right places.
Of course, much other stuff is happening simultaneously, and most of it concerns an ever-changing Google. Next year, we might see Google less like a search engine and more as a virtual assistant — a person who lives on your phone and solves your problems. And that’s what they want to get to. It’s been a promise for a long time, but now we’re starting to see it with all these rich results and answer boxes. This will be interesting to watch.
Search has come a long way since its early beginnings. Altavista and AskJeeves are long gone, and most of us can’t imagine a world without Google these days. But search continues to change. It has always been a work in progress, and it will probably always be that way. And the search engines that we’re using today might not always reign supreme. So let’s talk about the direction that search is heading in and what Schema has to do with it.
The search engines they are a-changing
The year 2022 has already shaken search up quite a bit, with the revelation that almost 40% of Gen Z use TikTok instead of Google to search for information. Meanwhile, on more traditional search platforms we’ve seen a lot of changes too. Google and Bing have both been busy sprucing up their search results this year. With new arrivals like Google’s multisearch and Bing’s buying guides, it’s clear that search is doing anything but standing still.
Challenges in search and SEO
So, there’s been a lot going on. But there are still many challenges for search and for SEO (besides social media and Gen Z). Ambiguous phrases and names are difficult for search engines and users to differentiate. And they can make it really hard to optimize content for search.
On top of that, expertise, authority and trust are important factors too. There’s too much spam and misinformation out there. We need search to become more precise and deliver better-quality results.
How Schema can help
This is where we turn to structured data. Schema.org structured data, in particular. Its standardized framework enables search engines to move away from simple text-matching, allowing them to piece together the relationships between concepts. In this way, search can identify relevant phrases and content in a more semantic way.
Here’s an example. There’s more than one Joost de Valk in the world (we actually found 3 more besides the one we know). With a good Schema implementation, search engines can tell the difference between each of these people. In the future, Google could even look at your other searches to guesstimate which Joost you’re looking for. Neat, huh?
Where is search heading?
But that’s not where the story ends. Search is becoming much more experiential too. With things like knowledge graphs, Google Discover, and the Multitask United Model, search could become a lot more powerful. And a lot more personal. Whether it’s about showing your preferred sources first or offering tailored results for very specific multi-layered questions, there are huge developments in the works.
Besides making quality information more findable, what happens within search is set to change too. Google has been testing new shopping features in their search results on an almost-monthly basis in 2022. In the near future, you could be comparing and buying products directly from search, and then tracking your shipment there too.
Many of these new search features rely heavily on structured data. And in the distant future, Schema could pave the way for a much more entity-based search, with less focus on individual keywords. So don’t be hesitant about getting started with structured data — it’s probably only going to get more important as time goes on.
What does this all mean for SEO?
Whew! It’s a dizzying prospect to think about what this could mean for the future of SEO. First things first — as long as search exists, it should always be possible to optimize your content for it. Structured data is likely to play an increasingly important role in that.
If, and when, entities take a more central role in search, having content that refers to all the facts and entities related to your topic may be the way to go. It could be a case of optimizing with context more than optimizing with keywords. And of course, some things will never change. The need to create quality content is one of them — even if you’re making that content for TikTok.
Offering the best information and a seamless user experience is bound to pay off. At the very least, it’s going to help you rank in the short and long term. It could also earn you a fanbase that will be shown your content preferentially above other sources in the future. Invest in that content now, and keep an eye on the search landscape as it changes. That’s your best bet.
Want to stay up to date with all the latest news in SEO? Hear it from the experts in our monthly SEO news webinar!
Amy is a content manager at Yoast. She enjoys writing about SEO and digital marketing, and she is particularly interested in how content can create trust.
If you have a local business selling products or services, you have to think about the local ranking of your website. Local SEO will help you surface for related search queries in your area. As Google shows local results first in many cases, you need to make sure Google understands where your location is. In this article, we’ll go over all the things you can do to improve Google’s understanding of your location, which improves your chances to rank locally.
What are ranking factors?
Ranking factors are elements that Google considers when determining the position of a URL in the search results. There are many ranking factors, most of which are characteristics of the URL and your website, but they can further extend to your online presence. An example of a ranking factor is page speed: a fast-loading page that delivers a good user experience is likely to rank higher than a slow page when other characteristics are comparable.
Local SEO ranking factors
In this post, we’ll focus on the factors that influence the ranking of your website’s pages in local searches. As you can read here, Google itself talks about local ranking factors in terms of:
Relevance: are you the relevant result for the user? Does your website match what the user is looking for?
Distance: how far away are you located? If you are relevant and near, chances are you’ll get a good ranking.
Prominence: this is about how well your business is known. More on that at the end of this article.
So you have to show you’re relevant, you’re close by, and you’re well-known. Let’s see how you can work on these factors with some concrete actions!
Be relevant
Being relevant means that you offer the service or products the searcher is looking for. While this might seem pretty straightforward, sometimes, people can get too cryptic on their website. Make sure that you clearly mention what your business or profession is, what kind of products and services you offer, and make sure to do this in the wording your audiences use. To find out if you indeed communicate using the language your audiences use, please conduct some keyword research and speak with your customers to find out which terms they use when looking for a service like yours.
Check out this local content strategy guide for more inspiration to write relevant content for your local business site.
Google Business Profile
For your local ranking in Google, you can’t do without a proper Google Business Profile listing. Google Business Profile is especially helpful if you want to show up properly in the local pack – i.e., the big panel with the map. You need to sign up, pick the right primary categories for your business, add all your locations, verify these and share some photos. You’ll also need to actively manage your profile and build it up over time.
Google Business Profile allows for customer reviews, and you should aim to get some of those for your listing. Every year, the importance of online reviews for local SEO grows. Positive reviews (and negative ones) help Google and its users judge your business. This is pretty much like your local market. If people talk positively about your groceries, more people will be inclined to come to your grocery stand.
Getting reviews is one, but you can keep the conversation going by responding to these reviews. But, as Google puts it, be a friend, not a salesperson.
It helps to sign up for Google My Business if you want to rank your business in the local three-pack
LocalBusiness schema structured data
If you have a local business and serve primarily local customers, of course, you’ll add your address to your website. To help Google and other search engines understand the primary address, you can best serve it in a specific format readable for machines. Use localBusiness schema for that. Our Local SEO plugin makes adding that LocalBusiness schema to your pages a breeze!
This is very much about what Google calls distance. If you are the closest result for the user, your business will surface sooner.
Make sure you have one main NAP!
Even if your business has multiple locations, make sure to match the main NAP (name, address, phone number) on your website with the Google Business Profile NAP. That is the only way to make sure Google makes the proper connection between the two. Add the primary address on every page (you are a local business, so your should mention your address on every page). For all the other locations, set up a page and list all the addresses of your branches.
Facebook listing and reviews
What goes for Google Business Profile goes for Facebook as well. Add your company as a page for a local business to Facebook here. People search a lot on Facebook as well, so you’d better make sure your listing on Facebook is in order. Facebook also allows for reviews, which could help your business too. Keep an eye on those reviews! If your reviews aren’t that great, make sure to fix that by providing better products or services, or at least show in your replies you take the feedback you get seriously.
Location and keywords in title
The obvious one: for ranking locally, adding city and (in the US) state to your
helps. Add your main keywords as well and make the title attractive. Please keep in mind that the effect of adding the name of your town to your titles might be a lot less effective for local ranking than adding your business details to your Google Business Profile. But it won’t hurt for sure. For more <a href="https://yoast.com/tips-local-seo-content-strategy/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">local content tips</a>, do check out this guide.In this example, this title could have used a location to help in the local search results
Local directories help your local ranking
In addition to your Google Business Profile listing, Google uses the local Yelp and other local directories to determine just how important and local you are. While we usually recommend against putting your link on a page with a gazillion unrelated links, the common ground for a local listings page is, indeed, the location. And, these links do help your local rankings.
So get your web team to work, find the most important local directory pages and get your details up there. We’re explicitly writing details and not just links. Citations work in confirming the address to both Google and visitors. If a local, relevant website lists addresses, do consider getting yours up there as well. And while you are at it, get some positive reviews on sites like Yelp as well!
Get relelated, high-quality links
Following how directories help your local ranking – especially in the organic local search results, exchanging links with related local businesses also pays off. If you work together in the same supply chain or sell related products, feel free to exchange links. Don’t just exchange links with any business you know. In most cases, these will be low-quality links for your website (because they’re usually unrelated). Also, try to build high-quality content that attracts relevant links. And, don’t forget to get those local keywords in the anchor text of those inbound links.
Social mentions from local folks
Again, there’s a local marketplace online as well. People talk about business, new developments, or new products on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. All these social mentions find their way to Google’s sensors as well. The search engine will pick up on positive or negative vibes and use these to help them rank your local business. If many people talk about your business and link to your website, you must be relevant. Monitor these mentions and engage.
Some say links from other websites, directories, and social media are critical for local rankings. As always, we believe it’s the sum of all efforts that makes you stand out from the crowd, not just optimizing one aspect. Take your time and make sure your Google Business Profile is correct, local business structured data is active on your site, and you have proper links to your site and the right people talking about you on other platforms like Twitter. And please don’t forget to do proper keyword research and make sure the right content is on your website.
Optimize your content for better local rankings
Google won’t rank your site for a keyword if that keyword isn’t on your website. It’s as simple as that. If your business is in city X, you probably have a reason why you are located there. Write about that reason. And note that these may vary:
You are born there or just love the locals and local habits
There is a river which is needed for transport
Your local network makes sure you can deliver just-in-time or provide extra services
The city has a regional function and your business thrives by that
There are six other businesses like yours, you’re obviously the best, and you all serve a certain percentage of people, so your business fits perfectly in that area.
These are just random reasons to help you write about your business in relation to your location. They differ (a lot) per company. Make sure your location/city/area is clearly mentioned on your website and not just in your footer at your address details! If you have multiple locations, set up and write pages for each one and include the proper business details.
Prominence means that when Google can serve a result first from a well-known brand or business, they actually will. Despite all your efforts to improve your local ranking, this might get in the way of that number one position. But, it just means you have to step up your game, keep on doing the great work you do, work on your branding, and trust that eventually, Google will notice this as well. As a result, Google might allow you to rank on that number one position for that local keyword!
Another thing to note is that prominence is also based on the information that Google knows about a business. All this information is derived from links, articles, and directories across the web. The more positive reviews and ratings your business has, the more likely Google will place it in a high position for local search queries. Not to mention, your position on the “normal” search results page (web results) is also a ranking signal. So, invest some time and resources into SEO if possible, and ask your satisfied customers to leave a good review on Google and other platforms such as Yelp or Facebook.
You might have heard about structured data, Schema.org, and JSON-LD. You might have even heard that it’s becoming more and more important to add them to your site. But what do these terms mean exactly? What is structured data? And what does it have to do with SEO? We’ll explain all of this, and how to get started, in this post!
Yoast SEO makes this easy
Our WordPress plugin and Shopify app build a structured data graph for every post or page on your site. A graph is a complete piece of structured data that helps search engines understand the contents of your page or post. All you need to do is decide on the type of content and our plugin will do the rest. Do the first-time Yoast SEO configuration to get started!
What is structured data?
Structured data is a way of describing your site to make it easier for search engines to understand. To describe your site to search engines, you’ll need a vocabulary that presents content in a way that search engines can understand. The vocabulary used by the big search engines is called Schema.org, which translates your content into code that they can easily process. Search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a specific and much richer way. You can easily put this piece of code on your website.
Imagine you have a website with a lot of recipes. If you add structured data to a page with a recipe, your result in the search engines might change. It will be much “richer” regarding the other content that’s shown. That’s the reason we call these results rich results or rich snippets. Here’s what a rich result can look like:
An example of a rich recipe result powered by structured data
Besides the title, the URL, and the description of the search result, you can see how long it will take to make the world’s best lasagna. Also, you’ll see how many calories the lasagne contains. You need to add structured data to your web page to get such a rich snippet. This also works for the products you offer in your Shopify online store.
In the following video, we explain what structured data is:
Want to know everything about structured data? Take our Understanding structured data training course! In this course we explain what structured data is in detail and how you can improve your chances of getting rich results. Get access to this course, all of our other SEO courses and extra features in Yoast SEO by going Premium:
There are lots of different rich results
There are all kinds of structured data. It’s always a code format. You have them for books, for reviews, for movies, and for products in your online store, for instance. In all cases, it adds more details to your snippet in the search results. Browse Google’s Search Gallery to see which rich results are powered by structured data.
We have to make one side note here. Unfortunately, Google does not always create a rich snippet of your page, even if you’ve added the structured data. There are no guarantees. So all you can do is add it to your page, and hope Google will pick it up!
But why do we structure data?
It’s quite simple, we structure data so computers can easily read, understand and categorize that information.
Structured data refers to data that is organized, while unstructured data is unorganized data. For instance, this sentence: “Marieke is the author of this post and she works at Yoast” contains unorganized data.
As humans, it’s easy for us to understand the sentence and information in it. Marieke is a person, she’s an author, she works at Yoast, and Yoast is a company. Search engines can also understand and organize this information, but it’s not immediately clear to them. They would need to do a bunch of analysis to reach the same conclusion as us, while we do that simultaneously as we read.
That’s because the above sentence contains ambiguous information. We know Marieke is a person because we see her author profile and we know Yoast is a company because it has a website and offers products. But to search engines, Marieke might be the name of a company, while Yoast may just be the name of the author. By structuring all this data, you disambiguate it to search engines, helping them to serve better information to searchers.
The need for structured data
As technology advances and the internet grows in size and complexity, the need for structured data also grows exponentially. While Google and other search engines become smarter and more advanced over the years, their resources are still limited. They only have so much time, processing power, and energy to distribute across all the activities required to keep search engines up and running. And they still struggle to serve the most helpful and relevant results to users’ queries.
Structured data can help take some work off search engines. When you add structured data to your pages, you facilitate search engines to serve better and richer results. You also help them save resources like processing power and energy which they can use somewhere else.
What do you do with structured data?
With structured data, you can “talk” to search engines. You can tell the search engines which ingredients there are in your recipe, you can tell them how long the preparation time is, and you can tell them how many calories the dish will contain. You can tell who made your Shopify products, for what price you sell them, and what people thought of them. Google will be able to grasp all that information instantly and can decide to show it in the search results.
Structured data is a tool you can use to tell Google detailed information about a page on your website. Then, Google can use this information to create informative, rich results. And audiences love these rich snippets.
What is Schema.org?
The big search engines have developed a project called Schema.org. On Schema.org you can find all the structured data markup supported by the search engines. This makes Schema.org a large collection of pieces of code.
You can use Schema.org to find the markup you need for your particular page. For instance, if you sell t-shirts on your Shopify store, you could show what color t-shirts you sell and what sizes you offer in your snippet. You should investigate Schema.org/Product and find out the possibilities. Yoast SEO for Shopify and WooCommerce SEO automatically add this for your products.
On Schema.org, you can copy code examples. After copying it, you’ll have to adapt the code to your specific preferences. You can also use SEO tools like Yoast SEO first-time configuration or the initial setup in Yoast SEO for Shopify to help you get started with structured data.
On schema.org you find all the available options
Schema.org is a taxonomy of code formats that the large search engines understand. You’ll find examples of what the code looks like. There are other forms as well. For instance Open Graph (used by Facebook) and Twitter cards (used by Twitter).
JSON-LD is one of the markups of Schema.org. It’s just a way to write code. On Schema.org, you’ll also find other markups like Microdata or RDFa. At Yoast, we’ll advise you always to use JSON-LD, because it does not break your site as easily as other markups do. Plus, it’s the format that Google prefers. Yoast SEO automatically adds lots of structured data JSON-LD to your site. That’s not possible with the other markups.
Why is structured data important for SEO?
Structured data is important for SEO because it’ll make it easier for Google to understand what your pages, products, and your website are about. Google needs to find out what a page is about to show it in the search results. Using structured data is like talking to Google and telling Google what your site is about. That’ll help with your rankings.
On top of that, structured data will change the way your snippet (your search results) will look like. It’ll show more information to your customer. More specific information. And this will increase the likelihood a customer will click on your results. More clicks will eventually lead to even higher rankings! We’re seeing more and more structured data powered rich results pop up, so it is important to keep an eye on this.
How to use structured data?
Using it may sound complex, but everyone can do it as we made the essential pieces of structured data automatically available in our plugins. If you want to adapt or expand these, you might need some development skills. You have to get the correct code, you’ll have to adjust that code, and you’ll need a way to put it on your site.
A lot of structured data markup can also be added to your website using plugins. As mentioned, Yoast SEO automatically adds the most important data for your site. You can even determine per page or article what type of content is on there. So, you can describe the Contact page on your site as being a ContactPage to search engines. You can do this by simply selecting the type in the Schema tab in the meta box or the block editor sidebar. In addition, you can use the free Yoast SEO content blocks to markup your FAQ pages and how-to articles with valid structured data.
You don’t have to write code to get that rich snippet, you’ll just use our WordPress plugins or Shopify app, fill out some details and we’ll do it for you. And there are many more plugins that’ll help you use structured data without the need to struggle with any code!
Marieke is the head of strategy at Yoast and founder of Yoast SEO academy. She loves coming up with new ideas and products to make SEO attainable for everyone, and ensure a healthy growth for Yoast!
Reviews or testimonials are mostly said to work based on social proof. Social proof is a psychological process in which people copy the behavior of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior. In addition, search engines are increasingly looking for that proof as well. In this post, I’ll look at how reviews work, how you can get them, and how structured data can help bring them to the search results. Plus, we’ve got some great tips for getting reviews from the experts at Opinew.
Table of contents
If you’re a business owner, one of your online goals should be getting more reviews from your (satisfied) customers. It’s important to get reviews or ratings, because these help Google in determining the value of your company or products for its users. If you have a nice amount of four-star and five-star ratings, Google considers you a more valuable result on their search result pages, contributing to better rankings for your site. In this post, we’ll dig a bit deeper into reviews and convince you to ask your customers to rate you. Of course, loads of positive reviews will also help build trust for your potential customers, too.
Before we get started, let’s get clear about some details. When is something a review, and when is it just a rating? And what about testimonials? These terms are used a lot, and sometimes they get to mean something similar. So, what is the difference between testimonials, ratings, and reviews?
Testimonials
A testimonial tells you that someone you can identify with has bought a product and loved it. That might mean the product is just the right thing for you as well. A testimonial is often a page of text and photos of customers explaining why your product or business is great. Also, video works really well for this. You could feature a recognizable expert endorsing your product.
An example of a testimonial on Yoast.com
Ratings
Ratings are — often star-based — valuation of your website, online store, or service. Customers can rate your entire business or a specific product.
Business ratings
You will most likely get ratings for your brand or shop on a website like Trustpilot, Reseller Ratings, or Google My Business. Google will see these ratings and will even add Google My Business ratings to their Knowledge Graph information.
Made.com’s Trustpilot score is highlighted in Google’s search results
The time that Google added stars to search result pages for any website that added these ratings in Schema.org structured data is over. Google was flooded with ratings, so it made less sense to add them to all the results. That doesn’t mean they are entirely gone, as the opinion of your visitor or customer is still very valuable to Google. So, where it makes sense, Google will still show that rating. Google also tends to show shop ratings in their Google Shopping results, by the way.
Product ratings
Product ratings are a bit of a different breed, although they work pretty much the same. Have people rate your product, and add an aggregate rating on a nice spot on your product page. Next to Google picking up on that rating and showing it in, for instance, the Google Shopping result, it increases trust in a product.
Google Shopping shows a score for the product as well as the seller
Besides, in the search results, you can also find product reviews from major websites in the search result pages, like this one from CNET:
The CNET reviews appear highlighted in the search results
CNET is a trusted source for Google, so they feel comfortable showing that rating and link these reviews on page one in the search result pages.
Obviously, it’s key to monitor these ratings and take action if products are getting negative reviews. Either contact the reseller and ask them to fix the issues or stop selling that specific product. More on negative reviews later on in this post.
Reviews
Most of the time, the ratings we discussed earlier are just half of a package deal. Ratings are great, and great ratings even greater. But if a detailed review accompanies that rating, people will relate to the experience another customer had even more. Regardless if that’s for a product or an entire business. These reviews influence the decision-making process of your visitor. If they come to your website and see only negative reviews written by real people that speak from experience, they will think twice. If these reviews are all raving about the product, people will be a little less hesitant to hit that buy button.
Websites like Yelp and Tripadvisor help people from all over the world to find the right coffee shop or bakery. Sites like Booking.com tell people where to stay and allow people to share their experiences afterward. If you have good reviews, Google shows these ratings and will let you stand out from their search results. If you search for a specific hotel in Google, you’ll find even more reviews in the search result pages:
Reviews and ratings aplenty in the travel business (also, notice the FAQ beneath this rich result)
It’s up to users to decide which source they trust more. But we think you can’t go wrong with this hotel, right?
Negative reviews matter too
Asking for reviews, for instance, right from your (support) email inbox, like in the signature of your email, might feel a bit strange at first. However, it will trigger your brand ambassadors to leave a review, after seeing that signature email after email. And yes, you will get some negative reviews as well from people that are not completely satisfied with your product or service. And you want these. Every negative review will allow you to improve your business.
Don’t feel bad when you get one; feel motivated! Negative reviews give you a chance to go beyond yourself in showing how customer-driven you are. They allow you to fix the issue this customer has. After fixing it, ask them to share the solution and/or their experience with your company, so others can see what you have done to turn that disappointed customer into a satisfied customer. Learn how to respond to online reviews of your business.
It’s your job to make your customer happy, and good reviews will follow. Speed up that process by asking your customers for their feedback!
How to get reviews from your customers
Ask your customers for a review in person
It’s really that simple: ask your customers for a review. Yelp may advise against this; Google promotes it. We agree with Google on this. Someone in the coaching business could ask his customers after finishing the coaching process to leave a review on his Google My Business page. This might help him achieve a local #1 ranking — that and an optimized site, of course.
It might feel a bit odd to ask your customers for a positive review. However, we think most of your customers will be more than happy to do this for you. It’s a small token of appreciation for your great service, product, or your friendly staff. If you believe in your business and take extra steps to help your customer, your customer will for sure leave that review for you. Especially in local businesses, where you know your customer and perhaps have been serving them for decades, ask.
Ask your customers for reviews on your website or social media pages
Feel free to ask your customer for a review on your website, for example, right after purchase. If a customer wanted your product so bad they made the purchase, they might be willing to leave a review about their shopping experience as well. Even a simple “How would you rate your experience with our company” could give you that rating you want.
And why not leverage Twitter, Facebook, and other social media? Twitter works pretty well, especially for local purposes. In every town, there should be people talking to each other about happenings in their hometown. Most of these people visit local stores. Not just that, but they’ll probably also have an opinion on these stores. And they might be willing to share that opinion.
Get reviews using email and SMS
Remi from Opinew has put together some great advice for getting reviews from other sources. Opinew is a Shopify app that lets you collect product reviews for your store. You can use Opinew easily with Yoast SEO for Shopify thanks to our in-built integration. Here are Remi’s tips:
Collect reviews with email automations
The most common form of getting reviews from customers is through email review requests that you can send post-purchase. One thing that we recommend keeping in mind:
Set the right timing: Make sure to send it a day or two after the product has been delivered and your customer had the time to test it. If you’re using a tool that allows you to follow the delivery status, bingo! Otherwise, you can build up an estimation based on how your past deliveries went.
Set the right messaging / tone: Make sure to encourage honesty and be straight to the point. Customers are expecting review requests and are used to receiving them.
Add coupons: Incentivizing reviews is your best chance of getting a review! It’s a win-win situation for both, and a great way to turn your customers into repeat customers once they left their reviews.
However, with email marketing being used by every brand nowadays, it’s becoming harder to stand out and you may suffer low open rates on those emails. We definitely recommend diversifying your communication channels and trying different techniques to make sure they receive, read and engage with your messages.
Collect reviews with SMS automation
One of the great alternatives to email marketing is SMS marketing. While a bit more intrusive, it’s also more immediate.
According to Text Anywhere’s study, SMS marketing has an average open rate of about 98%.
That’s a lot more chances of you getting your customers to actually read your message. Of course, nobody likes pending notifications so there’s a chance they might just open it without even reading it, but there are a few ways to optimize your chances:
Timing: Research shows mobile phones are most used between noon and 6 P.M. Start from there and test it for a while, then you’ll be able to study your data and see which time has the best open rate and especially conversion rate.
Send other SMS updates before asking for a review: Send your customers some updates on their order status, and delivery status, so they’re used to you sending them SMS. Make sure to keep a reasonable frequency so they’re not perceived as spam texts.
Send a reminder: without being abusive, one reminder can increase the chances of getting a review. Maybe they were busy the first time they received your request and just forgot about it.
Import reviews from other sales channels
If you’re selling on Shopify, there’s a great chance you are using a review app to manage all your reviews. Some of them will allow you to import reviews from other sales channels such as Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress. If you’re selling on these other channels, you could even synchronize new reviews automatically to your Shopify store!
Want to get a review snippet? Use schema
By adding certain Schema.org elements to your code, Google can add reviews and ratings to your search results. You need to tell which parts are about the review and what that element represents. In Schema.org, a rating is an aggregate value a product gets. A review is a rating with an explanation in the text.
They state that they’re using the following review snippet guidelines (we’ve paraphrased; if you want to, you can take a look at the official guidelines in Google’s documentation).
If you include multiple individual reviews, also include an aggregate rating of the individual reviews. Make sure you use the correct AggregateRating schema markup for this.
It must be clear which product or service the reviews are for, using nested schema markup.
The reviews and ratings you want Google to use must be readily available for users to view, and it needs to be immediately obvious that the page contains review content.
Reviews need to be about a specific product, service or business (not categories or lists of items).
Reviews shouldn’t be aggregated from other websites.
If you have a local business or an organization, you need to follow some additional guidelines:
You cannot use reviews that you are in control of to make use of the star ratings feature.
Ratings need to be obtained from users directly.
Don’t use ratings information which has been created, curated or compiled by a human editor.
As you can see, there is a clear focus on genuine reviews. It’s a good idea to display the name, position, photo, and any other relevant, public information of each reviewer. That always helps in showing that your reviews are indeed genuine. Also, try to keep a fresh stream of reviews coming in. If you get a lot in a short space of time and then nothing for months, that might seem suspicious to Google.
Yoast SEO makes it easier
We’ve mentioned Schema.org structured data quite a few times in this post. Schema is a kind of code designed to help search engines understand the information it finds, and how that connects with other information. It can be hard to work with, especially if you’re not already familiar with it.
Luckily, Yoast SEO can do that part for you, whether you’re working on WordPress or Shopify. So to get those star ratings, you don’t have to go through all the hassle of adding AggregateRating schema yourself. Plus, if you’re using Yoast SEO for Shopify, it’s good to know that we’ve set up an integration with four popular review apps to make life even easier: Opinew, Loox, Ali Reviews, and Judge.me.
Conclusion: Aim for the stars!
Hopefully, this guide has given you some ideas on how to get online reviews and ratings. In addition, we’ve told you how to add them using structured data, so search engines know they are looking at a review. Especially for local businesses, having good reviews is getting more important by the day. Be sure to reach out to your current customers and get them to share their experiences. If you get it right, you’ll soon be admiring your star rating in the Google results.
