Start a project
Insights
7 mins

Structured Data for SEO: Schema for B2B Guide

19 December 2020
Man working at computer
Back to insights
Man working at computer

Once someone types their query on a search engine, it crawls the web searching for reputable and relevant results. Major search engines, including Bing, Google, Yahoo, and Yandex, collaborated to come up with a comprehensive labelling system that's aimed at making sense of every bit of the available content.

The vocabulary and framework are referred to as Schema.org, while the associated code is known as Schema Markup or Structured Data. Essentially, structured data ensures search engines understand your content more. Understanding boosts findability, which in turn drive search results.

What is Structured Data, and How Does It Work?

In essence, structured data refers to a type of markup implemented in a website code to present search engines with the appropriate pieces of information about an organisation, page, or website.

Enhancing a search engine's knowledge about a particular site or webpage provides users with the relevant information they're looking for when searching the web. It also means that companies that invest in Schema Markup throughout their sites stand to enjoy higher levels of more relevant traffic.

Here are more benefits of using structured data on your site pages:

  • It drives business results – companies that leverage the Schema Markup in their SEO activities report plenty of enhancements. Improvements that can be directly attributed to Structured data include an additional 35% impressions, 20% increased CTR, 26% extra clicks, and an increase of 3.6% in the interaction between users and their content.
  • Enhanced "findability" – Human audiences can easily understand the message conveyed on a webpage. However, search engines and machines usually have a difficult time grasping the context of a webpage. Adding schema markup to your page will tell the search engine and applications the context of your content, and you're likely to rank higher.
  • Your site will stand out – Standard search results include three primary bits of information: the title, URL, and meta description. On the other hand, rich results offer additional details alongside eye-catching visuals that attract the attention of your prospects in search. All these make you stand out from your competition in organic search.
  • Enhanced brand control – The chance of achieving a great first impression with your prospects begins at the search engine results pages. As such, it would be an excellent idea to own this customer experience right from the start. Schema for businesses offers you more control over your brand representation. This means you're free to define how your brand message will be understood, test various strategies, and control the distribution of Schema Markup to your sites.
  • Influence the Google Knowledge Panel content – Sometimes, the Google Knowledge Panel appears as a collection of information on the right side of the search results. In essence, it contains details that users frequently search for alongside a particular query. The knowledge panel content offers prospects a quick snapshot of data based on the search engine's understanding of your web content.
  • Voice search optimisation – According to ai, more than half of adults have utilized voice search. About 33% of respondents acknowledged using it every month in 2019, an increase from the previous year's 25%. Optimizing your website for organic search using structured data also optimizes for voice assistants. Google will deal with speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU).

Besides these, using structured data for SEO also grants you access to Google's Knowledge Graph. The approach also supports semantic search as well as your expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T). But how do you apply it to your business and get excellent results? Read on to find out.

Schema for B2B

Marketers can leverage schema for B2B to achieve higher click through rates. Currently, more B2B enterprises are beginning to offer a mechanism for clients to purchase online. As B2B marketers continue evaluating the available online purchasing options, schema markup integration continues to be a crucial factor that shouldn't be overlooked.

Schema Markup can be ideal for products, corporations, ratings, reviews, events, authors, locations, videos, and much more. Here are some of the recommended structured data elements for B2B entities:

Product

Structured data allows search engines to gather relevant details about brands. By employing product schema, a rich snippet will come up providing the necessary product details, including reviews, description, price, and offers. These help the customer ascertain whether a particular page is worth visiting.

Video

More companies now feature videos as a crucial component of their marketing campaign. You can markup video and the rest of the surrounding content by opting for the "VideoObject" schema type.

Organisation

Various types come under this markup, including corporation, airline, GovernmentOrganization, EducationalOrganization, NGO, SportsTeam, LocalBusiness, and PerformingGroup.

Events

Events taking place at a particular time and a specific location can bring about this markup. These include shows, concerts, theatre, conferences, webinars, lectures, etc. Event schema allows you to be specific about the event type you're describing.

Person

The "Person" schema (CEO, CMO, CFO) allows you to interpret several pieces of personal details about staff pages. The first areas to mark up are the names and job titles. You can also mark up descriptions and headshots, and define other fields like date of birth, address, email, awards, nationality, children, and many more.

Software and Mobile App Listings

Structured data can also help you add trust and authenticity to your mobile apps and software applications. Google will use the marked-up information on your page website to display the critical software and app details better.

Schema for B2C

While every site may benefit from implementing schema markups, several of these are specific to eCommerce sites, and you can use them to optimize your pages to their full potential. Here are the crucial markups for B2C sites:

Organisation Schema

This can be used to offer crucial company information such as the business' name, date established, the trading name, address, logo, contact details, and links to social media pages.

Sitelinks Searchbox Schema

These can help enhance the appearance of your homepage listing on Google. The platform may automate it, and your listing may consume up to double the usual space. This allows users to search for your business directly in the Google listing.

Breadcrumb Schema

These markups aid site navigation, and will always lead up your website's hierarchy to the homepage. It should be used on all your site pages except the homepage.

Product Schema

This crucial markup for product pages offers useful information to users concerning the specific product. This may include its availability, price, product description, and reviews.

Review Schema

You can add this markup to review a single product or go for the AggregateRating Schema that effectively pulls in vital data from various reviews to offer an overall rating.

Article Schema

This is specific to guide and blog content, and can be an excellent way of pulling articles into SERPs' enhanced features like featured snippets, visual stories, and carousels.

Structured data offers lots of significant benefits to your brand, but you need to be sufficiently knowledgeable of the concept to get it right. A digital agency with the experience and reputation of reliability in ensuring brand visibility will come in handy, and you don't need to search anywhere else.

Please schedule an appointment with us today so we can start discussing your project right away.

Related Reading