What is Structured Data? A Beginner’s Guide

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi i'm jason barnard and i'm here to talk to you about one article that i found today on search engine journal it's this one this is structured data by roger monty i love the title makes me think of this is spinal tap which is one of my favorite films of all time but it also talks about my favorite topic in seo at the moment and it's structured data structured data sounds really boring but roger explains incredibly well and he gives a great description of what it is how google uses it and why it might be useful to you here we go first what is a structured data it's a markup language it's structured information data and then he goes on to talk about schema markup and how schema markup helps you structure organize the information on your page for google to make it much easier for google what he then does is talk about the relationship that google has with structured data and it's a really close relationship google loves structured data structured data is basically google's native language the machine can digest it and understand it like that so it's a really good idea to use it because you're communicating with the machine in a language it truly understands and he goes on to talk about how google actually uses it and for you this is the visible result that you get it's the rich results in in the serps for example the review styles or a recipe or in stock or the price or the date of the publication or the update of your article and that's really great it actually goes way beyond that because you're explaining to google what is in your page in its native language so it truly understands and it's confident it's understood and that's crucial if google is confident it's fully understood the solution that you have or the answer that you bring to its users problem or question it's much more likely to present your content as the solution to that user's problem or the answer to that question that's what you're looking for you're looking for google to recommend your answer or your solution and structured data schema markup really helps with that he then goes to talk about jason l.d i love that because it's my name and ever since i first came across it whenever anyone says jason ld i always turn around because i think they're talking to me but obviously they're not um and he gives this example the information on the web page as a human being this is just so easy to read and it's so obvious and i think we forget how hard it is or can be for a machine google has probably understood most of this but it probably isn't sure that it's understood and that's where this bit of code that roger's kindly written for us that explains that same information in a format that google will understand we're certain it will understand and it will be very confident it's understood so in the case of somebody looking for window washing in massachusetts we'll be sure or google will be sure that it is offering that service on that page and it looks as roger rightly says it looks rather complicated and it scares a lot of people but there are two things to remember one of which is because it's rule-based because it organizes which is what roger says earlier on it's organized incredibly strictly so it makes it difficult for us to understand to start with but once you've understood it it becomes incredibly simple to actually implement and the good news as well is of course there are lots of great tools out there to actually implement schema markup a few that i can mention schema app canadian company in links uh sticks and jones from majestic there's word lift i personally love word lift a lot they're italian company they're really really really smart bunch of guys and another one i just discovered today was schema.dev they've got a nice plugin and i'll show it quickly on the browser there you go uh it actually helps you understand and read here i can just click on article and it shows me the schema markup so it's a really easy way to visualize it and here's another one that i got this one which reads directly and it it checks the structured data and it's a really nice easy way to be able to read that structured data in a more human readable format it's a news article and we can see here all the different properties that it has and as you can see once it's presented like this on the right as opposed to on the left it's much easier for us to as humans to understand and it makes a lot of sense so don't be scared by the code get through that first painful step of getting used to how you write the code and it becomes just like another language for you it's simply a an easier way for google to understand and if you can make that effort for google google will probably make more effort for you so thank you for listening to that that was absolutely lovely article by roger monty and i loved reading it this morning and i was so happy with the title thank you speak to you soon have a lovely afternoon evening morning or night you