Skip to content
Schema markup might be the most powerful SEO tool that you haven’t heard about yet. Adding structured data and schema markup to your website can be your key to achieving higher search rankings, improved visibility, and increased click-through rates.
What is Schema Markup?
Why should you care about schema markup? Well, websites with schema have been shown to have, in some cases, to have an 82% higher click-through rate compared to websites that don’t use schema markup. Schema markup is a proven tactic for growing your online presence.
To understand schema markup, you must first understand structured data. Structured data is any data that has a standardized format for efficient access. Basically, this is any data that has been organized using a standardized labeling and filing system.
Schema markup is a type of structured data that uses a standardized vocabulary (primarily from Schema.org) to label different elements on your website. These labels use specific language and set of definitions to describe your content in a way that search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, can readily understand and display.
Schema markup is basically just code that you put on your website to label different things so that search engines can understand the different content on a webpage. While human users see images, headings, and paragraphs, search engines and their crawlers interpret the code on the backend of these things to understand what everything is. By adding the schema to your website, you are explicitly telling these crawlers what everything is, so there can be no confusion.
For example, let’s say that you were promoting a dinner for charity on October 10th, 2025, on your website. Without schema markup, a search engine would be able to read the text on this page and understand that it is an event, but the crawler might not be able to extract the exact date, start time, location, and ticket prices with complete certainty. Adding schema markup to this page would explicitly tell search engines the event name, exact start and end time, the address, the price and availability of tickets, and where people could buy tickets. The extra structure that comes with adding schema would now allow your event to show up in more places, like AI-overviews and voice search responses.
How Schema Boosts SEO
Search engines like Google have one main goal for user experience: to provide users with the most relevant search results to their search query. Your website’s SEO performance is directly linked to how much you assist the search engines in achieving their goal. Schema is a major way to help search engines deliver the best search engine result pages or SERPs, thus winning favor with the search engines. The schema behind a website’s content will give the search engines more context for the content on that page through explicit labeling of everything on the page.
Ranking in Rich Results
A major way schema boosts search engine optimization, or SEO, is through rich results. Rich results, sometimes called rich snippets, are visually enhanced results on Google that are more than just the standard blue link by including elements like images, ratings, reviews, or other interactive features. The different elements that go into these rich results come from the schema behind a webpage. For example, if you searched for waterproof backpacks, Google would use the structured data and schema markup on websites to pull the image, price, and reviews to deliver rich results that look like this:
In this example, these sites are likely seeing an increase in impressions due to these rich results. But these sites are, more importantly, seeing a higher click-through rate due to being featured this way. This is because the people who are clicking on these rich results are clicking in with more information already and are more certain that the result is for them. In this waterproof backpack example, the first non-rich result I received looked like this:
Customers are more likely to click on these rich results because they get to see the product, see reviews about the product, and see the price of the product. Sites that appear in these rich results have been shown to have up to an 82% higher click-through rate than non-rich result sites. This added traffic will likely lead to more conversions on your site. Schema allows you to appear in these rich results, giving you a huge competitive advantage.
Improve Your Website’s Crawlability
Schema also helps boost SEO by improving your website’s crawlability. The crawlability of a website is basically just how easily search engine or AI crawlers are able to scan and interpret the information on a webpage. Schema improves the crawlability of your website by removing any confusion a crawler could run into while scanning your content. The schema will allow crawlers to instantly understand the meaning and purpose of the content on the page. Schema will make it abundantly clear to the crawlers what your content is about and who it is for.
How Schema Improves your Voice Search Strategy
Another way that schema will boost your SEO strategy is by supporting voice search and AI-generated answers. In the U.S. alone, 153.5 million users rely on voice assistants. This is a huge amount of users that could be missing out on your content if you are not using the correct schema on your site. Adding a “speakable” schema to your content will make it easier for voice assistants like Alexa or Siri to extract parts of your content in their results.
Schema’s Role in the Age of AI Search
It seems like you can’t go a day without reading or hearing something about AI, especially in the digital marketing world, but it’s for a good reason. AI is the future for almost everything, and search is no different. AI searches are up a whopping 357% year over year, so now more than ever, it is important to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to be visible in this new age of search. A great way to be on the cutting edge of this new age is by adding schema markup to your website.
Schema markup isn’t just for search engines and their crawlers; it’s about making sure that your content is easily readable by machines everywhere, including AI. All of these AI agents rely on structured data to understand, summarize, and, most importantly, cite your content. Providing these agents with clear and structured information is imperative to appearing and getting clicks in these new-age search results.
Agents like ChatGPT rely on this structured data to extract context and content from web pages. Without the schema markup, these crawlers could easily get confused trying to interpret web pages and serve up inaccurate results or, worse yet, they could get confused and leave your site entirely, not indexing you for anything.
By implementing schema markup, you will assist these AI agents by helping them locate and decipher information almost instantly. These agents, like search engines, are focused on delivering the most relevant search results for each query. They favor content with clear and structured data because they trust it more. So, if you add schema markup to your site, you will be more likely to rank in the growing world of AI search.
8 High-Impact Types of Schema Markup to Use
1. FAQ Markup: FAQ markup structures content in a way that AI agents can easily understand that you are directly answering common questions of other users. This is becoming more and more important for ranking in Google’s AI overview or People Also Ask SERPs, like these:
2. Product Markup: Product markup is an especially important schema for eCommerce websites. It is extremely important to put this schema on each and every product page. As shown in the rich result waterproof backpack example earlier, adding product schema to clearly show crawlers the product name, price, availability, and reviews will give eCommerce brands a competitive advantage.
3. Local Business Markup: This markup is incredibly important for local SEO. Local business schema is markup that helps crawlers pull and display important information about your business, like the address, hours, and phone number. This is especially important for location-based searches like “ice cream near me”. This will help your business show up in the “Places” rich results like this:
4. Article Markup: Article schema markup is a structured data markup that applies metadata to blog posts to indicate the headers, publication dates, author information, and the body content of the article. This will allow for your blog posts and articles to appear in rich results like news carousels or top stories like this:
5. Review and AggregateRating Markup: These two types of markup are for customer reviews on your site that customers leave for products or services. Adding this schema will help your products and services appear with little star ratings beneath them in search results, like in the local business and product example above.
6. Event Markup: Event schema is essential when you are promoting events through your site. This schema will apply to items like the event name, start and end time, location, and then the ticket availability and pricing. This schema will allow your events to show up in “Events” rich results, like in the example below:
7. BreadcrumbList Markup: This schema is nowhere near as flashy as the others, but it is still a powerful SEO tool. BreadcrumbList markup will let search engines and users know where the page that they are clicking into sits on your website. This improves user experience, or UX, by making the hierarchy of your website clear to users like this highlighted search result:
8. Recipe Markup: Recipe schema is structured data that labels food-related content with ingredients, cooking instructions, nutritional information, reviews, and exact cooking times. This schema will allow recipes to rank in rich results like the ones below, and be more accessible to voice searches made through agents like Siri or Alexa.
How to Implement Schema on Your Website in 5 Steps
- Identify the Markups Needed. The first step is to review your webpages and identify what schemas you will need to implement. Look through Schema.org to decide what types of schemas apply to your content.
- Choose a Schema Format. There are a few formats, JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa, but JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the format that is recommended by Google. JSON-LD is easily embedded within your website with a <script> tag in your HTML.
- Generate the Schema Markup. Next, you will want to actually create the schema markup. There are a few ways to do this step: manually writing the code using Schema.org as a guide, using tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to generate the code, or using plugins like Yoast SEO, which have built-in schema generation for common content types.
- Integrate the Schema Markup. The easiest way to do this is through Google Tag Manager (GTM). In GTM, you just create a custom HTML tag and paste the script from the previous step into the HTML tag. Then all you have to do is choose the pages you want the script to apply to. If you use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, use a custom HTML block within the page editor to insert your JSON-LD script there.
- Make sure it’s up and running. The last step is to review the schema to make sure that it is correctly implemented. You can do this by using Google’s Rich Results Test and pasting the URL in and making sure that your data is eligible to rank with rich results in SERPs. You can also monitor any rich results that you are eligible for in Google Search Console (GSC).
Important Schema Tools to Utilize
Google’s Rich Results Test: This is a test that Google provides that lets you know if your URL supports and is able to rank for rich results.
Schema Markup Validator: This structured data testing tool on Schema.org allows you to check your schema code for any errors that the crawlers would encounter.
Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper: Although it is a mouthful to say, this tool is incredibly helpful when it comes to tagging content with schema. All you have to do is paste the URL that you want to add schema to, choose the schema type you want to apply, and then highlight the parts you want to tag. The tool will then generate a script to add to the head section of your HTML.
Best Practices for Schema in 2025
Make sure that your schema supports your business’s goals. It is important to make sure you are appearing in the right rich results. For example, if you are a local lawn care company, you will want to make sure that every schema on your page aligns with local service and local business schemas.
Only use relevant markup. Do not try to stuff your schema full of keywords to manipulate search engines. While this seems like a good idea on the surface, search engines are becoming better and better at catching manipulative and irrelevant markup. This can lead to loss of rich results or, in severe cases, penalties to your website.
Keep your schema up to date. Making sure that things like event dates, product prices, and business information are up to date will ensure that your content will continue to show up in rich results in SERPs. Keeping everything up to date will also help to keep your content on the cutting edge for the new age of search. Continue to stay up to date with what practices will keep you in good favor with the AI agents.
Final Thoughts: Why You Should Add Schema to Your SEO Strategy
As search continues to evolve, schema markup has changed from a “nice to have” to a necessity if you want to compete. Labeling and structuring your content in a way that explicitly tells search engines and AI agents what content is and who it is for will allow you to gain positions in rich results, voice searches, and AI-overviews.
Having the right schema strategy can be the difference that makes your brand stand out in front of ready-to-convert customers. When you add schema markup to your website, you are making your content eligible for rich results, improving the SERPs in which your site appears. It has been proven that pages with rich results have an 82% higher click-through rate than non-rich results pages. This is because the results are more visually appealing and informative, leading to more users wanting to click them. More user traffic to your site will, in time, indirectly raise your rankings because it will signal
Although Google has come out and said that schema is NOT a direct ranking factor, you will improve your SEO ranking by helping the search engines understand your content better. Providing search engines with additional information improves the search engine’s understanding of your content, which allows them to match it to more search queries with greater success. As stated previously, a search engine’s main goal is to deliver the best search results possible to users, so the better it understands your content, the better it can match it up with what users are searching for. Schema is the most explicit way you can tell search engines about your content.
If you think you might need help with your SEO strategy at all, contact us here at Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing. Our SEO specialists can help you grow your business. We know the SEO best practices that empower opportunities for business growth, including how to drive website traffic, boost keyword rankings, enhance click-through rates (CTRs), and more.
