Consumers’ avidity for the myriad of channels for retail has become a challenge for the merchants and the vendors.

Do you have trouble inviting traffic to your website?

In the recent years, the competition has increased and there must be thousands of websites dealing with the same thing as you are. This challenge has stirred up, in the minds of the website owners, the need to improve their product and the content that describes it.

How do you get the potential clients come to you and not your competitors?

Increasing the traffic is essentially important for all websites and businesses to survive. The search engine optimization (SEO) is the strategy you need to implement.

Most importantly, structured data- rich snippets and schema markups are the key. Many people think that using rich snippets is a part of the SEO strategy. However, it goes way beyond.

Schema markups and the rich snippets will totally boost the traffic on your sites.

We are going to explore and elucidate upon this, further in this article.

What is structured data?

By structured data, we mean the rich snippets and the schema markups. One of the most ascending forms of structured data is rich snippets. Various online vendors, e-commerce website owners and more use rich snippets to provide a succinct, improved yet detailed information about their product and/or website.

Schema markups appear in the HTML code of any website. This is what a search engine discovers while going through your website. Search engines further format it into rich snippets in order to display is as one of the search results.

Schema markups and rich snippets are not only for your potential customers and the existing ones to understand your product and website better but also for the search engine to optimize your content better. In a non-technical language, Schema markups are basically the highlighted content of the website.

They are the micro data that helps the search engines analyses and increase the efficacy of your custom content. Amazing fact: Rich snippets are a result of using schema markups!

What are featured snippets?

This may come a surprise to most of you that many a times- about 70%, the first search result of any of your search on Google is a featured snippet.

As the name suggests, featured snippets are the search results that appear on the top of the search engine result page (SERP).

In case your website content is a featured snippet, it will help you improve your overall ranking and the click-through rate (CTR). Studies show that the featured snippets can increase the CTR by an average of 8% thereby increasing the traffic on the site.

Tips to get featured: keywords, top ranked queries, content based on surveys and third party reviews. Three types of snippet:

List Snippet

Paragraph Snippet

Table Snippet

Amazing fact: According to Ahref’s data, 12.29% of the total search results include featured snippets, which numerically amounts to 14 million search queries

What are the benefits of structured data?

There are many reasons why some companies still don’t use structured data forms like the schema markups and thereby earn rich snippets. One of the major reasons is that they are outdated and not aware of the benefits of the implementing structured data.

Structured data is totally worth it! Want to know why? Because:

• Boosts the click-through rate (CTR):  One of the major goals of any website is to increase its CTR. Rich snippets help display your product and/or content on the Search Engine Result Pages in an improved way by giving out all the highlights of the product and/or content.
• Better understanding:  You can only convey and connect with your existing and potential customers if the mode for the same, that is, the search engine, understands you better. Structured data makes it easy for the search engines to understand your content and thereby highlight it in the search results.
• Knowledge graph:  Knowledge graph refers to the information provided about a specific brand, product or an individual. Structured data helps improve the content that could be easily understood and effectively implemented by both, the search engine and the searcher.
• Higher conversion rates: Rich snippets display all your listings, which if positive lead to increased number of buys.
• Higher profits:  Schema markups and rich snippets ultimately help with earning higher profits. Rich snippets provide tactical parameters and the pricing, which serve as the basis of comparison with other search results. The structured representation of all the parameters of the product could encourage the users to buy.

              Amazing fact: Structured data is not a ranking factor!

Want to structure your data? This is how you do it:

Once you are aware of the benefits of using schema markups and earning rich snippets, you cannot carry on without it. Structuring your data could be an integrated process but it surely becomes easy once you use the best ways to do it, and then, trust me, you will reap the best of what you sow. JSON‐LD: JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is one the easiest and the latest format. JSON-LD reduces the chances of human errors and by implementing the rank-based system; it makes the application of the schema markups extremely easy. The major, as well as the growing search engines, can understand JSON-LD in web pages. JSON-LD enables more useful information about your product and our website to be displayed which would encourage the user to visit your website.

Some other ways for the application of structured data in your content are:

• Resource Description Framework in Attributes (RDFa) – HTML extension syntax
• Micro-data – HTML extension syntax
• Microformat aka μF
• Google data markup helper
• WordPress plugins

5 most common types of schema markups:

As discussed above there are many ways to integrate schema markups in your content. However, given below is a list of six most common schema markups and along with each, we have mentioned their preferred JSON-LD markups.
Schema markup for Recipe:

Properties:

• Image/video
• Name description
• Nutritional value
• Ingredients
• Preparation time
• Review

Example Of Recipe Schema:

Schema Markups for Article:

Schema Markups for Organization:

Properties:

• Name of the organization
• Phone
• Address
• Founders
• Social profile links
• Areas served
• Award, brand
• Location
• Logo
• Email

Example of Organisation Schema:

Example for Local Business Schema:

Example for Product Schema:

The most essential rich snippets for your e-commerce website

• Product: The first and the foremost concern should be the product. The product name and a well-defined and relevant description of the product will help the search engine format your content for the search result.
• Price: Since price is the major concern of any consumer, it should be of the company’s too. Your rich snippet should highlight the price so that the customer immediately gets what he wants to know.
• Availability:  Your snippet becomes more effective and user-friendly if it saves the customers’ from the trouble of visiting the site, scrolling through the products, adding the desired product to the cart only to learn that it is out of stock.
• Rating and reviews: What will help grab more traffic and a higher click-through rate of your website is a snippet that gains the trust of the buyers. If your snippet include the ratings and the third person, probably the existing customers’, reviews then the potential buyers will be swayed more towards your website.

Conclusion

Schema codes and rich snippets are no more optional! They help you increase the efficiency of your website by making its content more comprehensible for the search engines.

Use structured data- schema markups and rich snippets, to increase the traffic on your website which will, therefore, increase the return on your investments.