Website schema is a type of structured data that you can add to your website’s HTML code that helps search engines and AI tools better understand the content on your pages. It organises the information into a more machine-readable format, giving search engines more specific context when they analyse your pages.
There are several data formats to choose from when adding schema data to a website. Google recommends using JSON for Linking Data (JSON-LD), but Microdata and RDFa are also accepted.
Below we’ll explain why search engine optimisation services use schema information to help SEO efforts and how it helps content appear in generative search results produced by AI.
Why schema markup is important for SEO
While schema markup doesn’t directly boost your rankings, it does tend to improve how your listings appear in search results. Enhanced listings with extra details—such as ratings, prices, or FAQs—tend to stand out and attract more clicks. This higher click‑through rate can indirectly support your overall SEO performance if search engines then determine that your webpages really are what users are looking for. Over time, higher engagement from these improved listings can strengthen your site’s overall search performance.
Search engines use hundreds of signals to decide what will make for the ideal search results. So anytime you are spelling it out for them by using markup like schema or structured data, you make it easy for their crawlers to accurately contextualise content.
Once you start moving beyond the basics of SEO best practices, it is tactics like these that really begin to compound and help you outrank your competitors.
How Google uses your structured data
Google is one of the search engines that reads and processes schema markup to better understand your pages. It may use this data to create rich results, show business details, and match your content to relevant searches. Display of rich results isn’t guaranteed, but valid, high‑quality markup improves your odds.
Appear in Generative Answers and AI Overviews
Schema markup can help feed accurate and relevant information to AI‑powered search features, including AI Overviews. While these ‘features’ can intercept users who may otherwise visit a website, they can also encourage people to click the source link for more information.
When your data is clearly structured, search engines are more likely to pull and present it in their AI responses. This gives your company a better chance of being discovered via these new types of search results.
Structured data markup supported by Google Search
While there is a broad range of markup options available, as seen in Schema.org’s full schema hierarchy, Google supports only a subset of these options. These Google supported structured data types are candidates for being shown is search results pages. They call these augmented sections of search engine results pages rich results.
In addition to the rich results, there is an even more enhanced class called enriched search results. Examples of these enhanced classes are job posting, recipe and event.
Stay on top of supported markup types
Once you have implemented schema markup or structured data supported by Google, check their documentation every six months. Google occasionally makes changes and even deprecates structured data types if they are not commonly used.
As I am writing this post there are seven structured data types due to be phased out. This doesn’t mean you need to remove the markup from pages where it is already added. Just be aware that these types will no longer be eligible to show in Google’s rich results once they are finally switched to unsupported.
Bing supports structured data too
While not as popular as Google, Bing’s search engine is worth thinking about. Fortunately, Bing also supports structured data, albeit with an even more limited subset than Google.
Bing supports an additional markup type that Google doesn’t—Open Graph. Furthermore, they don’t recommend one markup type over the others. But if you are already supporting Google’s recommendation of using JSON-LD, then it makes sense to just stick to that markup format and know that Bing will happily read it too.
Again, make sure your markup is validated because any code with mistakes will be ignored by Bing’s crawlers.
How to check a website’s schema markup
We suggest using free tools such as Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator to confirm your markup is correctly installed and valid. These tools show which structured data types are detected on a given page and flag any errors or warnings. Validation testing is crucial because structured data parsing is completely unforgiving of errors.
When testing you have two options:
- Cut and past your structured data code snippet into the tool for testing.
- Paste the page URL where the structured data code is already added into the tool.
It doesn’t matter which method you choose. As long as the code that goes live on your website is validated, you’re in good shape.
Below is an example of a Rich Results Test showing JSON-LD code inside some basic HTML.
This tool is really useful because you can make edits and test your changes as you develop your code. This is the exact process that we use when creating or editing schema data for our SEO clients.
Monitor your Enhancements in Google Search Console
Once you have added your markup to your website and tested that everything is properly formatted using one of the tools mentioned above, you should monitor the website. In the Enhancements section of Google Search Console you will see information on the Google supported structured data that has been detected. Just keep in mind that this data may take a few days to a few weeks to first appear.
Frustratingly, not all officially supported structured data will be displayed in Google Search Console. For example, the Organization type doesn’t typically show.
For the structured data that is listed, click on each type and check for anything marked as Invalid. If something is found to be invalid, get the errors fixed as soon as you can. Errors won’t break your website, but broken schemas won’t serve their purpose either.
Getting some help with schema for SEO
If you aren’t confident with creating, editing or error checking structured data in general, you may want to consider hiring our schema markup experts. There are some real benefits to doing so:
- Your markup will be correctly formatted and tested by an expert.
- Appropriate markup types can be determined for you, based on your content.
- Quality guidelines will be correctly followed.
- You avoid breaking any schema spam rules (yes, these exist).
- Multiple items on a page will be handled correctly, if they exist.
An agency like ours can do all of the work for you. You won’t need to worry about getting things mixed up, be left wondering if you chose the correct types or if you are breaking any rules. So, we are here if you need us.