Structured data, or schema, is code placed “behind the scenes” or in HTML that users don’t see to help search engines understand content better.
The main SEO purpose is to boost clickthrough rates due to appearing in additional or enhanced search results:
- You may be able to change your Site Name, or how Google shows your brand next to your pages, if any issues exist.
- With Product schema, you can become eligible for free organic listings in product grids & carousels.
- Using Breadcrumb schema enables a clean, insightful URL path that can be written in Title Case.
- For the right businesses & products, you can show review snippets (star ratings) next to your pages.
- Additional information can be shown for companies, events, courses, forums, images, videos, jobs, articles, recipes, apps & more.
Structured data opportunities, like all of SEO, are constantly evolving.
For example, FAQs schema used to be a big SEO play because you could have Q&A directly in search results. This took up a tremendous amount of search engine real estate. However, Google cut way back on this feature as it became a ubiquitous optimization without adding much value for users.
I’ve seen large structured data projects that are a massive waste of time. For example, I’ve never found Local Business structured data affecting local rankings or features with very few exceptions… your focus should be on improving Google Business Profiles. Schema on category pages for e-comm is useless as well.
I’d suggest following Google’s list of structured data features while ignoring the excessive options at Schema.org. You can have web developers add markup to page templates or leverage plugins in some cases. Be selective then use the Rich Results Test to validate.
Keep in mind that for many rich search features, Google wants external validation. Using Organization or Person schema on your site makes you no more likely to have a knowledge panel or to appear in other features that showcase entities… a Wikipedia entry along with notable listings across the web are what matter here.