It goes without saying that the world of SEO is becoming ever more technical, and over the past decade, webmasters, SEOs, and in-house teams have been widening their knowledge and skillsets to help their sites compete in search engine results pages.
One of these areas, which has seen the most development since its launch in 2011, is, of course, schema.org markup.
Although it has been eight years since the data schema was introduced, whether due to lack of development capability or technical knowledge, many popular brands are still to implement structured data to their websites.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at what structured data is, and the benefits that the markup can provide for websites.
A brief introduction to structured data
Put simply, structured data is a form of markup that is implemented in the code of a website and provides search engines with specific pieces of information about a page, site, or organization.
By improving the knowledge that a search engine has about a particular page or site, it can, therefore, provide users with the information that they need when conducting a search.
It also means that if a business invests in structured data throughout its site, it could enjoy higher and more relevant levels of traffic.
But how does this happen?
Structured data can enhance AMP pages
Despite structured data not being a direct ranking factor[1], it can, however, influence other elements of your website which are ranking factors.
In a world where a lot of searches (even the biggest part) are made through mobile devices, site speed has never been more important, especially when you consider that users will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
For this reason, many businesses have implemented Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)