What is Structured Data in SEO?

Structured data, sometimes called schema markup, is information that makes it easier for search engine robots to understand the content of a site. This data is presented in the form of semantic elements and constitutes a real common language between website administrators and search engines.

How does structured data work in SEO?

Despite the constant (and sometimes astonishing) improvement of search engines, they can still have difficulty understanding the meaning of a page's content and especially extracting very important information from it. Aware of their shortcomings on this point, the search engines Google, Yahoo! and Bing have developed a common, almost universal language to facilitate communication between webmasters and search engine robots. They have thus deployed a “structured data” language; the standard format is schema.org.

What is the role of structured data for natural referencing?

In addition to tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) and semantic content, search engines can also rely on structured data to refine the understanding of each web page. As you will have understood, adding structured data for Google is an asset for natural referencing (SEO). These are code elements that facilitate the exploration, understanding, indexing and display of a site's pages for search engines. However, the easier you make their task, the more likely you are to attract their favor.

In addition, if Google is sure of the content of your page because you use the same language as it (structured data), it will be easier for it to highlight your site on relevant queries, generating qualified traffic. The use of this specific data promotes obtaining enriched results on the Google SERP:

  • Rich snippet (or Featured snippet)
  • Rich card – Enriched cards
  • Knowledge Graph
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Carousels

Overall, all organic results benefit from a higher click-through rate when Google displays rich results with structured data.

How to Integrate Structured Data?

While integrating structured data into your website may seem complex without technical knowledge of HTML code, there are tutorials and tools to help you do this task that is so beneficial for your SEO. Depending on your site (CMS or not), your technical knowledge and your needs, several markup solutions are available to you.

For the more experienced, you can directly integrate them by scrupulously following the Schema.org format available by choosing the right data type and filling in the expected fields.
Many plugins are flourishing if you use a popular CMS (WordPress, Prestashop, Joomla, etc.). It's up to you to find the one that suits you best!

Google provides two useful tools to achieve a good markup of your site. The first is the markup helper tool, which allows you to add a relevant data type according to your activity, generate HTML code and integrate it into your site. The second is a feature of the Search Console (Data Marker). It allows you to mark up a set of pages on a website.

Remember to test your structured data with Google's structured data testing tool!