Compatibility:

WebSite X5 Pro since version 2020.2

Using a Search Engine is really simple: you simply have to type what you're looking for in the search field (query), start the search and wait a few seconds for the Search Engine to report the list of the results in the search result page (SERP).


Google is pretty good at understanding the query and the contents of web pages, but we can help it do even better and get more visibility in return, which means a higher traffic on our pages.


How can we help Google understand the contents of our web pages? What advantages do we obtain for our SEO? Let's find this out together. 


Structured Data and Schema.org

As Google itself puts it on its guide for developers: "Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page".


Structured data are metadata, i.e. data which describe other data. Such metadata need to be reported in the code of our pages so to provide more detailed information used by Google to:

  1. classify and better understand the contents and therefore give more relevant results for the query;
  2. enrich the SERP reporting in its results rich snippets, rich cards e knowledge graphs instead of the simple Blue Links.


In order for the metadata to work properly, these must be used with a shared standard. As far as structured data are concerned, such standard is called Schema.org. On the Schema.org website you will find the complete list of all the markup elements which can be used to structure data according to people, places and things available on the web.


How to add structured data

The markup defined by Schema.org  can be implemented on the pages using 3 kinds of different languages: RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD.


It is usually necessary to use a tool like Google Structured Data Markup Helper to generate the code in the wished format: you then need to report the code in the website pages and publish them.


With WebSite X5 Pro, still, you can manage structured data without any external services or extensions and without working directly on the HTML Code of your pages. Many structured data are directly drawn from the settings defined for the contents, while others can be simply added with the specific options.


Structured data are reported in WebSite X5 using the JSON-LD format, which is the most widely used format suggested by Google.


Structured data in WebSite X5 

There are many markup structures reported by Schema.org. WebSite X5 uses the most popular ones:

  • Article - For the description of the data available in the Blog articles.
  • Breadcrumb - For the description of the path leading to the website page.
  • Carousel - For the visualization in a carousel form of Blog posts belonging to a specific category or of the products of a page.
  • FAQ - For the description of a Q&A page.
  • Local Business - To connect a shop website to the information about its physical presence: address, opening hours, reviews etc. 
  • Logo - To define the logo for an organization.
  • Product - For the description of the products in an online shop.
  • Sitelinks searchbox - To define how to perform a search on a website.
  • Speakable - To identify the parts of a blog post which can be read by a Vocal Assistant.
  • Video - For the description of videos reported in a website.


Advantages of Structured data

As previously mentioned, the advantages for the usage of structured data are basically two: Google better understands the contents of the pages and, above all, enriches the SERP with rich snippets, rich cards and other multimedia formats. 


The fact is that the  rich snippet, as well as the other formats Google can choose, are much more effective in attracting the users' attention than the classical Blue Links. It has been shown that they bring many clicks more and therefore improve the CTR (Click-Through Rate, i.e. how many clicks we get) and bring more traffic to the website.


So, even if structured data and rich snippets alone can't directly affect the raking of your pages, it is also true that they are an element which can definitely contribute to the improvement of their performances.