Imagine yourself in a pharmacy looking for aspirin because you spent the last hour learning about Schema and now your head feels like it is exploding. You enter the store and are pleasantly surprised with the large size of this store; you are certain that you will find aspirin here.
With that thought in mind, you head towards the first aisle, but as you get closer you realize something very strange about this pharmacy. All the bottles on display are missing labels! How will you find the bottle that has aspirin?
Unfortunately, there is no way for you to find aspirin here. You will have to find a pharmacy has actual labels on the bottles.
This is exactly what happens when a search engine robot comes to crawl your website and doesn’t find any Schema. It ends up leaving without crawling because it did not find what it needed to understand your website. While you may have the best designers and content writers working on your website, search engine crawlers will not be able to complete the process because nothing on your website is labeled, like the pharmacy you just visited.
Schemas are like labels for all the pieces of content you have on your website. Just like a label on a bottle helps you identify what’s inside and enables you to decide to pick or skip a bottle, Schema helps crawlers identify your name, address, phone number, images, content, etc.
Just like you left the pharmacy without finding what you needed, crawlers will stop crawling your website and move on to a different site to find what they need. The biggest advantage of having Schema on your website is that it allows search engines to read and understand your website, which, in turn, allows them to then include it in their index. This means they are then able to display your website in search engine result pages (SERPs) when a potential customer is looking for something that you offer. For example, if you have a restaurant in Santa Clara that sells smoked salmon and there is a user online who is also in Santa Clara searching for a restaurant that sells smoked salmon, if you have schema structured correctly that person will be served your website. This is an example search result for the search “smoked salmon near me”:
When I looked for schema on the first restaurant that showed up in search results, this is what was found:
This restaurant has schema for each of the menu items they sell, which allows search engines to show this restaurant in search results.
To know what structured data your website has I recommend Google’s structure data testing tool. Paste the URL in this tool to populate all the schema on a website. This is how it looks:
Clicking either Store or Review schema gives all the details inside that schema. Let’s see what this website has:
With this kind of structured data, any search engine can understand the name of this business, address, operating hours, start rating, number of reviews received etc.
Milestone CMS automatically appends schema to your website, allowing clients to rank better on SERPs and gain visibility, and traffic.
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