Reaching the first page of Google isn't enough anymore. As your pages rise to the first page of Google, you still need to capture the eyes of the user. How can you influence a user to click on your page? The answer is to use structured data to generate rich snippets. Rich snippets are small pieces of information that appear in search results.
When search engine crawlers are crawling your site, structured data helps the crawlers to better understand your site. Essentially, structured data gives context to the numbers and words on your website. For example, a crawler crawls the words, “the creative momentum.” Unless you tell the crawlers that, “the creative momentum,” is the business name, the words are up for the crawlers to interpret. Structured data brings context to the information on your website. You can read more about structured data here.
What does Google do with the contextualized information that it receives? Google may decide to use the information to change the way your web page appears in the SERPs. For example, if you’re selling a 4-out-of-5 star product on your website; Google may add the product’s star ratings to the SERP. It may also add a photo to your article or influence your knowledge graph. What does this mean in terms of KPI’s? It means that more relevant searches will be served to users. As for the business owner, it can mean a higher average CTR. It also means a decrease in bounce rate since the webpage is more transparent on the SERP.
Any business that is serious about growing an online presence should make it a priority to wrap important information and fields with structured data. However, implementing structured data is not so easy. Implementing any type of structured data or schema requires that the you know HTML and/or JSON. Thankfully Google found a solution to implement structured data for the everyday user. Google has blessed the code-illiterate with the Google Data Highlighter tool.
The main benefit of using the Google Data Highlighter tool is to affect how your web page is served for users. Rich snippets were designed to help the user experience. If you’re leveraging rich snippets, it should yield more clicks and higher average CTR. Apart from those benefits, the Google Data Highlighter tool benefits you in two more ways:
Although the Google Data Highlighter tool is great, it isn’t perfect. I'm sure Google is working on ways to perfect the tool, however there are two things about the tool that bother me.
Structured data generates rich snippets and as a result, can help drive traffic to your site. It is without a question that every business should implement structured data. Now you need to decide if Google’s data highlighter tool is right for your business or not. If you are code-illiterate, don’t have a developer on the team, or need a temporary fix until schema code can be placed on the site; then I recommend using the Data Highlighter tool to mark up your website. However, if your team has a developer that knows how to write out schema & JSON, then I recommend not using the Google Data Highlighter because any change of code will wipe away all of your efforts.
If you’re looking for experts to handle the structured data implementation on your website, then contact The Creative Momentum to talk with an expert to see how we can help drive more traffic and conversions to your website.