Schema and Structured Data Guide
Schema is the part of SEO entirely within your control. It costs nothing beyond accuracy, it is invisible to your visitors plus it is increasingly what an AI answer reads before it decides who to quote.
Schema tells a search engine what things on your page are rather than leaving it to work them out. That this is a business, this is its address, this is a review, this is the answer to a question. It is one of the few parts of SEO with no competitive element at all: nobody can outbid you for it, nobody can take it from you plus it is either accurate or it is not. Which is also the warning, because structured data is read as an assertion. Marking up something that is not true is not an optimisation, it is a claim.
What Is Schema Markup?
The entry point for everything else. What schema markup is, what structured data means, what rich snippets are plus whether they genuinely help. Also covers what schema.org actually is, since it is referenced constantly and explained rarely. Six subjects in one guide because they are genuinely one subject viewed from different angles.
How It Works
Two guides covering the mechanics. There are three ways to write structured data plus only one of them is worth using, then there is the practical question of how you get it onto whatever your site is built on.
The Types We Use Every Time
Six schema types form the standard set on our own builds, whatever the business. Between them they establish who a company is, where it operates, who wrote a page plus how that page sits inside the rest of the site.
If your site has none of these, that is where to start rather than with anything more exotic further down.
The Types For Specific Businesses
Seven more types, each worth adding only where the business actually has the thing being described. Marking up products you do not sell or events you are not running is not clever, it is inaccurate.
What It Actually Produces
Schema is invisible on the page plus visible in the results, which is the whole point of doing it. These two cover what the features are called plus how to earn the two most commonly asked about.
One caution worth carrying into both: nothing here is guaranteed. Correct markup makes a result eligible for a feature rather than entitled to it.
When It Goes Wrong
Schema fails silently. Nothing on the page breaks, no visitor notices plus the feature you were expecting simply never appears. So testing is not optional here in the way it might be elsewhere.
We Do This On Every Site We Build.
Schema is part of our standard build rather than an upgrade. Every client gets the same set marked up properly: the business, the organisation, every service, every article with a named author plus the breadcrumbs that hold the structure together. Accurate, tested before it goes live plus checked again at every quarterly audit.
What we mark up as standard:
One clear retainer. No setup fee. Never an invented rating.
