A guided introduction to structured data

Listen to article

Google, and the other major search engines, are changing the rules of the SERPs

The increased prevalence of enhanced search features mean that search engine marketers need to think beyond the traditional ‘ten blue links’ approach.

Key to this is structured data. All of the search engines’ rich result features are pulled from sites’ structured data, so without it, you’ll stand little to no chance of featuring in these increasingly important rich results.

Despite its importance, however, there’s quite a bit of confusion as to what exactly structured data is, and the correct terminology to use both for structured data itself and the enhanced search results it drives.

The information you need also tends to be scattered around all over the place, with lots of excellent in-depth articles, but no real overall guide as to what structured data is and how it works. So, we decided to put together our ‘in a nutshell’ guide for you.

We’ll cover:

1. The fundamentals: The World Wide Web & search engines

2. Structured data: What it is

a. Structured & linked data

b. Schema.org

c. Microdata

d. JSON-LD

3. Structured data: What it does

a. Better targeting

b. Rich results

4. Rich results: The new-look SERPs

a. Old terminology (rich snippets, rich cards)

b. New terminology (rich results, enriched rich results, knowledge graph results, carousel, featured snippets)

Read full article here.