What is Structured Data?

This term describes information embedded within a website that is written specifically for Search Engines in a way they can easily understand. Structured data is a way of adding information in a standard format that is universally understandable by the different search providers. It’s hidden from the front-end of a website and is a way of spelling out what certain information on your page means so that search engines such as Google can deliver a more unique and better search engine results.

If your page is displaying products, typical structured data you wish to implement is information such as the price, stock, availability and the barcode/SKU – without that, you’re relying on crawlers such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to guess and pick that data from your pages themselves.

This is often displayed in the search result as a rich snippet.

Some frequently used examples are:

Reviews:

Recipes:

Events:

There are all kinds of structured data that can be used in a range of instances. You can see Google’s search gallery to see some more examples, but it’s worth noting that not all structured data can be shown to the user. Sometimes it’s added to a website to help crawlers understand the web page or business that little bit more.

For example:

Here we’re showing to Google that our website is an organisation named Echo Web Solutions and we’re clearly pointing out our related social media profiles. It’s our way of helping Google connect the dots across the internet about what our website is for.

Big search engines have also created different languages of structured data, for example, Schema.org and JSON-LD.

Languages like Schema.org describe HOW you’re writing information. Structured data is WHAT information you’re writing.

It’s important to note that even if you put structured data onto your webpages, it doesn’t guarantee Google, Bing or other search engines will show it.