In a previous blog, we discussed what schema markup is and how it can help your company display prominently on the first page of search results. We highly recommend reading that article before continuing here.
As a quick reminder in case you didn’t read the previous blog, Schema markup was created to have a “common language” between search engine crawlers and webpages. This allows search engines to understand the content of each page and serve better results to searchers. In addition, this markup can make your pages eligible to be featured as rich snippets, or enhanced display results. These rich snippets have been proven to drive up CTR and bring more relevant people to your page.
Now that you have the basics down of what Schema markup can do for you, let’s discuss how you can implement it across your B2B website.
Before we dive into the how of adding Schema markup to your page, it’s important to mention that there are three types of Schema code language:
To start with, you should know that there are various plugins and platforms, such as Schema Pro and Yoast, that can auto-generate Schema for your pages. While this is much better than not having Schema at all, we have seen better success when Schema was manually added to our pages.
The great thing about adding the markup manually is it’s not difficult and you don’t need a deep knowledge of coding or website development to implement it. In fact, if you have access to the backend of your website, you can simply and easily do it yourself without any developers. And writing the Schema is even simpler!
Thankfully, there are multiple tools that assist you in writing your markup. These tools allow you to add your relevant content into predefined fields and the tool will then spit out the complete HTML code needed to add to your code. Our favorite tools are Merkle and RankRanger. They cover most of the available options and make it very easy to implement, test, and verify your data.
In the example below you can see how we implement an “article” schema for one of our blogs.
With WordPress, things are always a little more tricky. As we mentioned in our last post, you can use plugins that will give you the option to add Schema such as WP SEO and All-in-One Schema. You can also have your developers create a dedicated field where you can add your markup that will automatically be placed into the header.
Another option would be to add your markup manually on your pages by utilizing the “custom fields” option and the code in the header.php. In this case, your developer (or maybe you don’t have one), needs to then take that code and add it to the header.php. While this may sound simple, if you somehow delete or accidentally change something in the header.php, this can cause your site to break. It is because of this that we strongly recommend working with your developer to add schema markup to your WordPress site if you're not using a 3rd party tool to either build you a dedicated field (where you will then be able to copy & paste any code in the future) or if you utilize the “custom field” option.
After you add the code to your page you should then test your page to make sure that search engines are reading the markup correctly. You can do this using the same Schema markup generator as before. This time, click “new test” and choose the “fetch URL” option, put in the URL of your webpage and test. Hopefully, everything comes back all right, if not, then there was a mistake when you copied and pasted your code into your webpage. You can use the same method as previously discussed to find and fix your mistake.
The hardest part about implementing your Schema markup correctly is making sure that you have a proper place to add it. Once you have this capability, it is super simple to start improving your organic results on the SERP and making strides in your SEO strategy.