What Is Schema Markup?
A translation rather than an optimisation. Your page says things in a way people understand. Schema says the same things in a way machines can act on. Everything else follows from that, including why inventing something in it is a serious problem rather than a clever trick.
It Is A Translation, Not A Trick
Schema markup restates what a page already says, in a form machines can read reliably. That is the whole idea. It adds nothing new and it invents nothing, it simply removes the guesswork.
What the guesswork actually is. Reading a page from outside.
A page showing an address, some opening times and a phone number is obvious to a person. To a machine it is a block of text where certain patterns might be an address. Schema states which part is the address and which part is the times, meaning nothing has to be inferred.
Why calling it a translation matters. It sets the standard.
A translation is judged by whether it faithfully carries the original. That framing makes the rest of this cluster obvious: a translation saying something the original did not say is not clever, it is false.
What it is not. A lever.
People arrive expecting a technique that improves performance. It is closer to labelling than to persuading. The benefit comes from being understood correctly rather than from being pushed forward.
Who the translation is for. More things than you think.
Search engines were the original audience. Assistants, aggregators and answering systems now read the same descriptions, which means a page describing itself properly is being read by several kinds of thing rather than one.
What this guide will not contain. Any code.
Nothing here is a markup example, because a business owner needs the judgement rather than the syntax. Anybody writing the markup has the official documentation, which is better at that job than we would be.
Structured Data
Structured data is the general idea. Schema is the shared vocabulary most people use for it. In practice the words are used interchangeably. Very little turns on the distinction.
What structured data means generally. Describing rather than displaying.
Any arrangement where information about a page is provided in a defined, predictable form rather than only as readable text. The concept is older than search engines and appears throughout computing.
What schema supplies. The words to use.
A defined set of terms for things and their properties, so everybody describing a business or an article uses the same labels. Without a shared vocabulary, structured data would be structured differently by everybody and therefore useless.
Why the terms blur. One dominant vocabulary.
Because almost all structured data on the web uses this vocabulary, saying structured data and saying schema usually means the same thing. Anybody drawing a firm distinction is being more precise than the situation requires.
What you will hear people say. Several phrasings.
Structured data, schema, schema markup, markup and rich results markup all get used for roughly this. None of them is wrong. The variation is worth recognising so it does not confuse a conversation.
Where The Vocabulary Comes From
The vocabulary is a collaborative standard rather than one company's product. Several major search companies founded it jointly and it is developed in the open. That explains a great deal about its shape.
Why that origin matters. It is not built for one purpose.
A standard designed collaboratively covers what its contributors and community considered worth describing, rather than what a single search engine wanted to display. The scope is therefore far wider than any one consumer of it uses.
How much of it does anything visible. A small fraction.
The vocabulary describes an enormous range of things. Only a modest portion of it produces any visible change in a search result. The rest exists because somebody had a legitimate reason to describe that kind of thing.
Why people find that confusing. Availability implies benefit.
Discovering that a type exists for your situation feels like discovering an opportunity. Frequently it means only that the vocabulary is thorough, so marking it up will change nothing anybody sees.
What that means practically. Check consumption, not existence.
The question is never whether a type exists. It is whether anything you care about actually uses it, which is a different and much shorter list.
Who maintains it. An open community process.
Types and properties are added, deprecated and revised over time. That is why anything written about specific types dates. It is also why this section carries review dates on the pages describing display behaviour.
It Is An Assertion, Which Means It Must Be True
Marking something up states it as fact on your behalf. A machine reading it has no way to check that statement against reality, which is precisely why misuse is treated seriously rather than ignored.
What an assertion means here. A claim, not a description.
Markup saying a business opens at nine is not describing what the page displays. It is stating that the business opens at nine. Nothing in the process verifies it, so the statement is accepted because it was made.
Why the lack of verification is the point. Trust is doing the work.
The entire arrangement functions because sites are largely truthful about themselves. A system that could verify every claim would not need the markup. One that cannot verify depends on the claims being truthful. It treats false ones as a breach rather than an error.
What this makes possible. Easy abuse.
Stating a rating nobody gave, a price you do not charge or a qualification nobody holds is trivially easy. That combination of easy and untrue is why several types have a reputation problem.
What follows for a business. Every value needs an owner.
Something asserted once stays asserted until somebody changes it. Hours that moved, prices that rose and events that finished all become false statements without anybody doing anything.
Where this is applied. Everywhere in this section.
The rule appears on every type page rather than being re-argued. It is stated most fully on why schema markup stops working, where a false assertion is one of the diagnoses.
Rich Snippets
A rich snippet is a search result showing more than a title, address and description. Schema can make a page eligible for one. It cannot guarantee that one appears. Those two things get conflated constantly.
What the enhanced versions look like. Extra detail in the result.
Star ratings, prices, availability, dates, a readable path instead of an address, expandable questions. Each is a different enhancement drawing on a different type of markup.
What eligibility means. Qualifying, no more.
Correct markup of the right type puts a page in the set that could be shown that way. Whether any given result actually receives the treatment is decided separately, at the point somebody searches.
What decides the appearance. Not you.
The query, the device, the competition and the search engine's own judgement about what is useful for that search. The same page can be enhanced for one search and plain for another on the same day.
Why the confusion is expensive. Disappointment and unnecessary work.
A business believing markup produces the appearance concludes something is broken when nothing is. That is the commonest reason people arrive at the troubleshooting page in this section.
The accurate formulation. A ticket rather than a seat.
Markup gets you into the draw. It does not reserve anything. No supplier can promise otherwise, however confidently they put it.
Do They Help
Schema is not a ranking factor in itself. Adding markup does not move a page up the results. The benefit is how a result appears and whether somebody chooses it, which is real and different.
Why the distinction is not a technicality. It changes what you should expect.
A business expecting to climb the results will judge the work by something it was never going to affect. Expecting a better-presented result and more of the available clicks is expecting the thing that can happen.
What better presentation is worth. Choice among equals.
Where several results answer the same query, appearance decides a proportion of the choosing. That is worth having, operating at the point of selection rather than of ordering.
The indirect argument, stated carefully. Behaviour is not a promise.
Some argue that more clicks eventually influence how a page is treated. That is an inference rather than a documented mechanism. This section rests nothing on it.
Why we are firm about this. The claim is everywhere.
A great deal of published material implies markup lifts positions, including by carefully not denying it. We would rather state the limit plainly than sell the work on something that will not happen.
What it does affect. Being understood.
Whether a machine knows what your page is about, rather than inferring it. Block eight makes that case, which is the one that holds.
What A Results Page Is
The results page is what appears after a search. The term is worth knowing chiefly because what it contains has changed considerably.
What it used to be. A list.
Ten results, each a title, an address and a short description, in order. That model is what most people picture. It describes very few searches now.
What it contains now. A great deal more.
Answer boxes, question lists, map results, image rows, video panels, product listings, information panels and paid placements, arranged differently depending on what was asked.
Why that matters here. Position is not the whole story.
Being first among the ordinary results means less when several features sit above them. That is why appearance and presence in features matter alongside ordering.
Where the detail sits. Its own page.
Each feature works differently and only some involve markup at all. Google SERP features explained covers which is which. That distinction is the most useful thing in this section.
Why It Matters
Three reasons, none of which involves positions. Each is worth something on its own and the third is becoming the most important.
Better presentation in results. The visible one.
A result carrying a readable path, a rating or a date occupies more space and gives somebody more reason to choose it. Modest per search, cumulative across every search.
Being understood correctly rather than guessed at. The underrated one.
Without markup, a machine infers what your page is about. Inference is usually right and sometimes wrong. Where it is wrong, the page gets treated as something it is not. Removing that risk is the quiet benefit.
Being usable by systems beyond search. The growing one.
Assistants, aggregators and answering systems all need to know what a business is and what a page says. Structured descriptions are how that happens. The number of things reading them is increasing.
The entity argument. Becoming a thing rather than a string.
Describing your organisation and connecting it to its other presences helps systems treat it as one identifiable entity. The semantic material in our advanced SEO guides makes that argument properly.
What none of this requires. Believing a ranking claim.
Each reason above stands without one. That is deliberate, because an argument resting on something untrue collapses when the reader checks.
What It Will Not Do
Four things markup is regularly expected to achieve and does not. Knowing these prevents most of the disappointment attached to the subject.
It will not fix a page nobody wants. The main one.
Describing a thin, unhelpful page accurately produces an accurate description of a thin page. Markup is a translation, so translating something weak yields something weak.
It will not raise positions on its own. Covered above.
Worth repeating because it is the expectation that survives everything. Nothing about adding markup moves a page up.
It will not make a result appear a particular way on demand. No control.
You cannot select an appearance, request one or reserve one. Eligibility is the extent of what implementation achieves.
It will not produce an information panel. A common hope.
Describing your organisation does not create one of the panels that appear beside results. Those draw on many sources and cannot be requested, which the organisation page covers.
It will not keep itself current. The one people forget.
Nothing about markup notices that your hours changed or your prices moved. Every value in it stays exactly as it was until somebody edits it, which is how accurate implementations become false ones without any decision being taken.
What it does reliably. One thing.
It states, unambiguously, what your page and your business are. Everything worth having follows from that rather than from any promised appearance.
Where It Sits In Our Own Builds
Every page we build carries structured data as standard. It is part of the build rather than an addition sold separately, which is why this section explains the subject rather than selling it.
What every informational page carries. Three descriptions.
One describing the page as an article with its author and dates, one describing its questions and answers, then one describing where the page sits in the site's structure. Those three are fixed on every guide.
What the site carries once. The organisation.
A description of the business itself, its contact details and the other places it exists online. That belongs site-wide rather than per page. Local business markup covers the related type for premises and service areas.
What we add where it applies. By type.
A location page carries the local business description. A product page carries product details. A page with genuine step-by-step instructions carries those. Each is added because the page contains that thing.
What we do not add. Anything the page does not contain.
No ratings without reviews, no questions that are not on the page, no author who did not write it. That is the assertion rule applied to our own work rather than only recommended to clients.
Which format. The separated one.
All of it sits in its own block rather than being woven through the page, for reasons what is JSON-LD sets out.
Markup states
things as
fact.
Nothing in the process can check a claim against reality, which is why everything in it has to be true of the page. Structured data is part of every build we do rather than something sold separately. We add nothing a page does not actually contain.
On every page we build:
We will not claim markup raises positions, because it does not.
Every guide.
One practice.
What structured data is, which types apply to your business, how to test it, where the results features come from and what to do when nothing appears.
