Suppose you are an up and coming web professional studying the art of SEO. In that case, you may have heard about schema and its importance. But, what exactly is schema? Schema is a structured data vocabulary that defines actions, entities, and relationships on the web (read more about it on schema.org). You can use schema to markup your page or post, and this can boost your SEO by allowing search engine algorithms to read your content more easily. Another benefit of adding schema markup (this is the term for adding schema to your page) is that Google will supplement your website’s search results with additional information called Rich Snippets, which significantly improves your click-through rate in organic search results.
To first get introduced to schema, it may be helpful to know the different types of schema markups:
- Articles
- Events
- Products
- Organizations
- Local Businesses
- People
- Reviews
- Medical Conditions
- Recipes
Adding schema markup according to the following types, helps a search engine better interpret the topic of your page or post. Then that same search engine can recommend your pages to users, increasing your traffic!
So how do you set a schema for your website? Luckily for you, it is straightforward! First, you will begin by searching “Structured Data Markup Helper.” For our example, we will use schema directions for a local business. You will then choose your category (Local Business, in this case) and then add the URL of the page you wish to mark up.
Begin by highlighting the information the schema tool asks for on the right sidebar. You will click a value, like “Name” and highlight the name of your business.
Continue like this with all the schema information. Once you have completed the schema values to your preference, proceed to click the “Create HTML” button.
Once you have finished, you will receive a result entitled “Structured data as JSON-LD Markup.”
While that completes the process for the Google Structured Data Markup Helper, you can use other schema tools for adding schema to your site. The following are other great tools for adding schema markup:
- Hall Analysis Schema Markup Generator
This tool allows you to enter information about a person, local business, product, organization, or event to create JSON-LD code to copy and paste into your website’s HTML. This schema markup tool is simple, easy to use, and perfect for beginners!
- Microdata Generator.com
This tool is just as streamlined as the others, but it is ideal for those looking to mark up local business pages.
- Merkle Schema Markup Generator
This schema markup tool is a bit more complicated to use, making it better for experienced web designers and SEO professionals. However, the benefit of using this tool is its ability to export your schema code into microdata and JSON-LD formats, unlike Microdata Generator.com and Hall Analysis.
While that is the rundown on schema markup tools and how to use them, schema testing tools are essential!
A useful schema testing tool that TKD Design recommends is Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. To begin, you will search up the “Structured Data Testing Tool” and then enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze.
This tool will then reveal how the most significant search engines are analyzing your schema. You can make the necessary changes or improvements!
To better demonstrate what schema can do for your SEO, let’s use an example. Say you are an event coordinator for a local concert house and promoting your concert house’s upcoming events. Go to Schema Markup and choose the “Event” category. You can use the schema setup instructions to format your schema. The result will be Google presenting your event page like this:
Here is a similar page, but without schema markup. See the difference?
Schema can not only significantly increase your SEO for WordPress, but for your Kajabi course, as well! Implementing Kajabi Schema is a bit different than it is for WordPress. You will need to implement something called “Schema Microdata”. Adding microdata to markup your Kajabi site’s HTML is an excellent method for driving new traffic to your website.
For instance, on your Kajabi pipeline/sales page, you could use the “Offer” schema microdata, allowing a search engine to know that there is a product being offered, making your page more likely to be promoted to users performing transactional queries.
Now that you fully understand the behind-the-scenes of schema and the different categories, it’s time to discuss how to add this data to your WordPress site so that search engines can display extra information about your posts in search results. These results will include ratings next to your results, which can impact your results significantly.
Since you don’t have access to every page’s HTML code, you can’t add all these beautiful defining characteristics. What to do? As usual, there’s a plugin for that.
As we have written about before, we are users of Rank Math for SEO on client sites and our own. This plugin calls itself the “Swiss Army Knife of WordPress SEO.” The plugin allows you to configure 15 types of schema markup that Google will use to create rich snippets. When you arrive on the back end of your site, where the Rank Math plugin lives, you see a row of tabs.
You will typically complete the “General” tab immediately after you finish your article. Therefore, most of the schema work is also complete. When you click on the Schema tab, you’ll see the primary Schema Type, that you configured earlier. Mine is article, but there is a dropdown to change this for different parts of your site. For example, perhaps you have a job opening. ‘Job Posting’ is one of the Schema Types.
The ‘Headline’ will probably be the same as the title of your article. The same follows for the description.
Then you narrow the type of article just a little. We go with Blog Post for our posts.
If you aren’t using Rank Math and are looking for a lightweight solution, Schema is a good one. It’s been download over 70,000+ times, is easy to use, recent updates, and gets a 4.5 rating.
The best part about schema markup, whether it be Kajabi or WordPress, is that you can get as detailed as you want with schema markup and microdata. The more markup you implement, the more readable (and promotable!) your page becomes for search engines!
When you are ready to significantly increase traffic to your posts and pages on your WordPress or Kajabi site through Schema Markup, contact TKD Design!
