Search Engine Optimisation is a highly specialised domain that plays a pivotal role in digital marketing campaigns for a brand. Considering that more than 63,000 search queries happen per second on Google, targeting your SEO plan better is highly imperative for better ROI. And one of the key factors here is the way you harness structured data to drive SEO outcomes.
The schema.org is the underlying architecture that gives meaning to structured data on the Web. With this, SEO ranking signals amplify to the benefit of the brand. It helps the Google bot to understand the type of product, its salient offerings, and deals. Some of the commonly used schema include products, ratings, date, recipe, or job posting. The schema.org helps marketers to meet two key goals –
1 – It helps the bots to match billions of web pages to a vast number of queries that happen daily on aspects like relevance and meaningfulness
2 – It helps your digital brand to communicate better with search engine bots, and improve the efficacy of its content
As an outcome, users are served with rich results in the form of rich snippets, rich cards (for mobile devices) and knowledge graph boxes for desktop and mobile searches. This results in a higher number of click-throughs, more traffic, better engagement, and the likelihood of a higher volume of conversions. This is the substantial edge that structured data provides to your SEO campaign and to your business bottom line.
What is the impact seen?
In SERP, it is important to influence purchase decisions. With the rich content output from structurally sound web pages, it is possible for your brand to be displayed on top of your competition at the hero position. The user can extract a lot of helpful information from the rich snippets without even placing a click. As an outcome, when the click actually happens, you can be assured that they would’ve moved closer to the sales funnel in the form of qualified leads.
This fact has been corroborated by the search engine behemoth as well. Google has confirmed that structured data helps the bot to understand the content better and rank it in favour of the brand. It improves Google’s credibility as a search engine, as it now has the ability to deliver more relevant results on the first page of SERPs that provide instant information to users without having them to traverse through too many web pages to find what they are looking for.
It has also helped Google to tighten its audit mechanism to ensure only relevant results are displayed to the users For example, in case of a job posting, the same must be taken down inside 24 hours of the expiry of the ad; otherwise it may face penalties.
How is it relevant to the future?
The future of search is clearly voice. With a huge population of digital users now using voice to search for information, it is clear that Google will adopt an approach that helps it to strengthen its base in this space. And structured data will help it to achieve exactly that.
In voice, semantic search complexities present a few challenges. With the growing influence of AI and machine learning on voice search, structured data can expedite the efficacy of voice search in terms of accuracy and relevance.
Be it the present scenario or the future voice-oriented search landscape, one thing is clear. Structured data will be a key influencer in impacting rankings for organic searches for a brand. Hence, it is a wise move to ensure structural integrity of the data and make it search engine friendly.
