How Structured Data impacts website traffic and, ultimately, page rank.

Let me cut right to the chase here: Structured Data does not have a direct impact on the search rank of your site. But it very likely does have an indirect impact. Allow me to explain…

A little help for the robots

Text and images, the main components of any webpage, are easy to understand for humans. For robots, such as the search engines crawlers, correctly interpreting these elements can be much more of a challenge. To help them out, leading sites are increasingly using descriptive information that tells the search engine unambiguously what the content is about.

Robots can not simply interpret any type of description. For them to make sense of it all, the information has to be formalized and organized. That is where Structured Data comes in.

What is Structured Data?

Generally speaking “Structured Data” refers to any data that is organized. In the context of a website, Structured Data is “extra” information in an agreed upon “formal” language that enables search engines to better understand the content on a page.

This is not a new concept, for many many years search engines have been relying on data that is invisible to humans for extracting additional meaning about the visible content. XML Sitemaps are a good example of this — not rendered on the webpage itself and therefore not directly visible to the human eye, search engines have been reading these xml files to retrieve more information about a domain’s URL structure and learn about each individual URL.

The main search engines increasingly rely on Structured Data to understand the content they are spidering and indexing. In turn this enables them to improve the results they are displaying for specific search queries and better help people find what they are looking for.

A formalized descriptive language used by all search engines

In their continued effort to improve the search experience Bing, Google and Yahoo teamed up (similar to what they did when standardizing the XML Sitemap Protocol) and launched schema.org. This initiative defines a common vocabulary for describing information — for adding meaning — to website content and HTML Markup.

The additionally supplied information about the content through the schema.org vocabulary provides a structure for search engines (and other robots) that makes it easier to unambiguously interpret the information. Using this vocabulary to describe website content is also often referred to as employing Structured Data.

So, what’s the big fuss now? The schema.org vocabulary stems from 2011, that’s hundreds of Internet years ago!

That’s true! However, recently Google has been getting increasingly vocal about the importance of using Structured Data and how it can impact the search experience and results.

Better page rank…but not in the way you think

Just the factual use of Structured data will not have a direct impact on your page rank. Nor positively, nor negatively. However, since the search engine now better understands you content, you will get a better rank for relevant searches. Especially against sites that do NOT use Structured Data. Or in Google’s own words:

….structured data help(s) Google understand the purpose and content of the page. Structured data can help Google properly classify your page in search results…

With an enhanced understanding of your site, Google can confidently map your content to specific, relevant, searches. This results in more clicks and higher quality traffic (fewer bounces),often ultimately positively impacting the overall search results rank.

But there’s more to it, Google also states that:

Structured data can…also make your page eligible for future search result features.

The “search result features” part is the key here. Google is on a quest to keep enhancing the search experience. Displaying the search results in more attractive and informative ways is a big part of this. For local business, for example, Google can grab relevant items like business description, opening hours and address from the Structured Data. Then the distance is calculated everything the almighty algorithm deems relevant in the context of the search is presented in an intuitive and easy to use way.

Image credit to Google

Without Structured Data, Google would need to guess what information on the site represents the address, what the phone number (not the fax number) is, and so on. There are other examples; every other post about Structured Data shows the ‘Rich Cards for Recipes’ example:

This graphic clearly shows how Google has been improving their display of found Recipes (that use Structured Data). Together with Movies, Recipes are currently probably the most attractively presented Content Type. Currently…when Google talks about ‘future search result features’ they are not kidding—some day other Content Types are likely to benefit from an enhanced presentation as well. Other Content Types include:

• Articles
• Local businesses
• Restaurants
• TV episodes and ratings
• Book Reviews
• Movies
• Software Applications
• Events
• Products

And as soon as Google decides to do so, you better be ready….

The upward spiral

It is not difficult to imagine that pages and sites with these enhanced presentations in the search results get more clicks, resulting in more traffic, more references, ultimately impacting the overall relevancy score. Yauhen on link-assistent.com mentions:

…the snippets with enhancements gain about 30% in CTR over their plain counterpart.

Sites that are ready are well positioned to catch the upward spiral and to continue to improve search rank and website traffic. Sites that are not ready might not be able to ‘tag on’ and will need to wait for a next wave to ride.

The good news? For most websites the choice can still be made…