Tag: Rich Snippets

Schema.org takes care of all the structured data needs on your website. You can use it to markup products, reviews, events and menu items so search engines like Google can pick up this data and present it in an enhanced way. If you want rich snippets, mobile rich cards or a listing in the knowledge graph, you need to mark up your pages with Schema.org. This ultimate guide gives you an overview of this expansive topic.

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• What is structured data?
• Why do you need Schema.org data?
• Is Schema.org important for your SEO?
• Structured data leads to rich results
  • Rich Snippets
  • Rich Cards
  • Knowledge Graph
  • Featured snippets
• Does it work on mobile?
• Different kinds of Schema.org
  • Creative works
  • Commerce
• The technical details
  • A sample Schema.org hierarchy
• What do you need to mark up?
• How to implement structured data with Schema.org
  • Schema.org with JSON-LD
  • The old ways: RFDa and Microdata
• Structured data and Google AMP
• Tools for working with Schema.org
• External links
• In the end

What is structured data?

Structured data is the data you add to your website to make it easier to understand for search engines. You need a vocabulary to make it work and the one big search engines use, is called Schema.org. Schema.org provides a series of tags and properties to mark up your products, reviews, local business listings, etc in detail. The major search engines, Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo, collectively developed this vocabulary to reach a shared language in a quest to get a better understanding of websites.

If implemented correctly, search engines can use the applied structured data to understand the contents of your page better. As a result, you might get a better presentation in the search results, for instance, in the form of rich snippets or rich cards. However, there are no guarantees you’ll get rich listings; it’s all up to the search engines.

Why do you need Schema.org data?

Marking up your products, reviews, events, and more with structured data in the form of Schema.org makes your site instantly comprehensible by search engines. What this means, is that you can tell exactly what every part of your site is about. Search engines no longer have to guess that a product listing is a product listing, you can now say it is.

Is Schema.org important for your SEO?

To cut a long story short: yes, structured data in the form of Schema.org is important for your SEO. Correctly implementing data might not give you better rankings, but it will indirectly make your site a better search result.

Enhanced listings give searchers an easier way to pick a result from the list of links. If your listing is rich, and your page does what your listing promises, you are a valid result for the customer and that will lead to a lower bounce rate. A lower bounce rate tells Google that your site is a well-regarded result that promises and delivers.

In addition to that, since structured data is just picking up steam, you have a viable chance to get a head start on your competitors. Just think about it, if you have a barber shop and you markup your 300 five-star reviews, you are way ahead of your competitor who doesn’t mark up his reviews. Google picks up this data and shows it directly in the search results. If you are looking for a barber shop in Google, who would you pick? The one with no reviews or the one with 300 good ones?

Structured data leads to rich results

By making your site understandable for search engines, you give them the opportunity to do interesting things with your content. Schema.org and its support is in a constant flow, so changes will happen. Structured data forms the basis for a lot of new developments in the SEO world, so there’s bound to be more in the near future. Below are the kinds of rich search results that are in use at this moment.

Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are the extra pieces of information shown in a search result. In addition to the regular black lines of meta description text, a search result can be enhanced with product information like prices or reviews, or extra navigational tools like breadcrumbs or site search.

Read more: ‘Rich snippets everywhere’ »

Rich Cards

A Rich Card appears on mobile and is a new kind of rich search result developed by Google. Search results for certain types of items, like local restaurants, recipes, movies and courses, can get a special treatment in the mobile results. These are presented in a touch-friendly, swipeable way.

Keep reading: ‘How to get mobile Rich Cards in Google’ »

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph is the big block of information on the right-hand side in Google. This block details different kinds of information about a particular search result. If you have a validated company or if you are an authority on a certain subject, you might see your name, logo and social media profiles appear.

Featured snippets

This might be a sneaky addition because featured snippets are rich search results, but they do not get their content from structured data. A featured snippet answers a search question directly in the search results, but uses regular content from the viable web page to do so.

Does it work on mobile?

Yes, it works everywhere. Mobile implementation of Schema.org data is in its infancy, though. As of today, there are not many specific mobile-centric applications of Schema.org. However, Google has been pushing mobile rich search results for a while now.

If a page meets the criteria set by Google, you can now book movie tickets or reserve a table at a restaurant directly from the search results. If you implement structured data correctly, you can also be eligible for a new sort of presentation in the form of mobile Rich Cards, as explained above.

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Different kinds of Schema.org

If you look at the Schema.org website, you’ll notice that there are a lot of possibilities to add structured data to your site. Not everything is relevant, though. Before you start implementing Schema.org, you must know what you need to markup. Do you have a product in an online store? Do you own a restaurant? Or do you have a local business providing services to the community? Whatever it is, you need to know what you want to do and explore the possibilities.

Don’t go for the most obscure ones; pick the ones that are relatively easy to implement. Some Schema.orgs appear on less than a thousand sites, but others appear on millions. It’s possible to put the major Schema.orgs into two groups: Creative Works and Commerce. Within these groups, you will find the most common items to markup with Schema.org. These are the most important ones:

Creative works

The first major group is Creative Work and it encompasses the most generic group of creative works. In this group, you’ll find items that have been produced by someone or something. You’ll find the most common ones below, but the list is much longer. In addition to these, you’ll find properties for sculptures, games, conversations, software applications, visual artworks and much more. However, most of these properties don’t have a rich presentation attached to it in search engines, so they are less valuable. But, as mentioned before, if your site has items in the categories below, make sure to mark them up with Schema.org.

Articles

An article could be a new item or part of an investigative report. You can make a distinction between a news article, a tech article or even a blog post.

Books

A book is a book, be it in a paper form or in digital form as an eBook. You can markup every type of property, from the author how wrote it to the awards it has won.

Courses

In the future, anyone offering a type of course can use the new Schema.org. At the moment, Google is holding small-scale tests with selected participants to see how this Schema.org performs.

Music

Music can also receive the structured data treatment. There are a couple of Schema.org of interest for music, like MusicRecording, MusicAlbum, MusicEvent and MusicGroup.

Recipes

By adding Recipe data to the recipes on your cooking website, you can get your recipes featured directly in search results. What’s more, with the advent of Rich Cards, recipes might even be presented in a stunning new way on mobile.

TV & Movies

Movies and TV shows get their own piece of structured data as well. Searching for a movie in search engines will yield a rich result with reviews, poster art, cast information and even the ability to directly order tickets for a showing.

Videos

It’s possible to do all kinds of interesting things with video. Google, in particular, is working on new ways to get videos in the search results, with AMP for instance. Google can use your videos in AMP carousels and Top Stories listings.

Commerce

The second major group is Commerce. In this group, you’ll find several important types to mark up with Schema.org. Many site owners will find the subjects below very interesting and these should be a top priority for many of them.

Events

Marking up your event listings with the correct Event Schema.org, might lead search engines showing your events directly in the search results. This is a must have if you own a nightclub, a venue or any type of business that regularly puts on events.

Businesses and organizations

If you make money with your website chances are you own a business. If you’re a site owner or just work on a company site, you’ll find the business and organization Schema.org’s interesting. Almost every site can benefit from the correct business Schema.org. If you do it well, you could get a nice Knowledge Graph or another type of rich listing in the search engines.

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Read on: ‘Local business listings with Schema.org and JSON-LD’ »

Products

Almost as important as the Schema.org mentioned in the previous paragraph, is the one for products. Using Product Schema.org you can give your products the extra data search engines need to give you rich snippets, for instance. Think about all the search results you see with added information, like pricing, reviews, availability, etc. This should be a substantial part of your structured data strategy, if you have products of course.

Read more: ‘Rich snippets for product listings with Schema.org’ »

Reviews

Reviews and ratings play an important role in today’s search process. Businesses, service providers and online stores all use reviews to attract more customers and show how trustworthy their offerings are. Getting those five stars in search engines might be the missing link to creating a real successful business.

Keep reading: ‘Grow your business with ratings and reviews’ »

The technical details

To get started with making up your pages, you need to know about how Schema.org actually works. If you look closely at the full specs on Schema.org, you’ll see that there is a strict hierarchy in the vocabulary. Everything is connected, just like everything is connected on your pages. Scroll through the list to see all the options at a glance and note down the ones you think you need.

Let’s look at the hierarchy. A Schema.org implementation starts with a Thing, this is the most generic type of item. A Thing could be a more specific type of item, for instance, a Creative Work, an Event, Organisation, Person, Place or Product.

For example, a movie is a “Thing” and a “Creative Work”, which falls under the category “Movie”. You can add a lot of properties to this, like a “Description”, a “Director”, an “Actor”, a poster “Image”, “Duration” or “Genre”. There are loads of properties to add, so you can get as specific as you want. However, don’t go overboard, since not every property is used by search engines – not yet anyway. What you should do, is look at the specifications in Google’s documentation, for instance, to see which properties are required and which are recommended.

A sample Schema.org hierarchy

If we put what we know now in a hierarchy, this is what you will end up with:

•  Thing
  • Creative Work
    • Movie
      • Description (type: text)
      • Director (type: person)
      • Actor (type: person)
      • Image (type: ImageObject or URL)
      • etc.

If it would be a local business, you could use something like this:

• Thing
  • Organisation (or Place)
    • LocalBusiness
      • Dentist
        • Name
        • Address
        • Email
        • Logo
        • Review
        • etc.

For local businesses, you could pick a more specific type of business. This makes it easier for search engines to determine what kind of business you own. There are hundreds of types of local business, but your business might not fit one of the descriptions. Using the Product Types Ontology you can get more specific information if your listing is too broad.

Sticking to the local business example, you’ll see that Google lists several required properties, like the NAP details of your business. In addition to that, there are loads of recommended properties, like a URL, geo-coordinates, opening hours, etc. Try to fill out as much of these as you can, only then search engines can give you the full preferred presentation. If you need help with your local business markup, you’ll find our Local SEO plugin very helpful.

What do you need to mark up?

When looking at Schema.org for the first time, it might feel a bit daunting. The list is enormous and the possibilities are endless, so it’s easy to become overwhelmed. To overcome this sensation, you need to go back to basics. Find out what your site, business or product is about and write down the specifications and properties you deem important. Work your way up from there.

Having said that, there are a couple of sections you should prioritize in your plan to add structured data to your site. If you start off with these three, you’ll have the basics covered and gives you the opportunity build on that. You should absolutely start with structured data for your business details, products, and reviews. These will have the biggest effect in the short run.

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How to implement structured data with Schema.org

Don’t be frightened, but here comes the technical part of the story. However, there’s nothing scary about adding the data to your pages, not any more thanks to JSON-LD. This JavaScript-based data format makes it a lot easier to add structured data since it forms a block of code and is no longer embedded in the HTML of your page. This makes it easier to write and maintain, plus it’s better to understand by both humans and machines.

Schema.org with JSON-LD

JSON-LD is the preferred method of adding Schema.org to your site. However, not all search engines are quick to adopt it; Bing is the odd man out. Let’s hope Microsoft will soon come about and add support for this rather efficient method.

Below you see a sample product listing of our flagship SEO plugin: Yoast SEO. This is just a small product listing with only the basics; you’ll see a type, name, image, description, and brand. At the end of the code, you’ll also find an offer to buy the plugin, which has a price of $69.

If you want to learn more about working with all of this on your site, you should read Michiel’s article on how to use JSON-LD to add Schema.org data to your website.

The old ways: RFDa and Microdata

The classic way of writing structured data for inclusion on your pages, involved direct embedment in your HTML. This made a really inefficient and error-prone process. It is part of the reasons why the uptake of Schema.org hasn’t been particularly fast. Writing and maintaining it via RFDa or Microdata is a pain. Believe us, try to do as much as you can in JSON-LD.

Here’s a Microdata example for marking up a movie. Because the code needs itemprops to function, everything has to been inline coded. You can instantly see how that makes it hard to read, write and edit.

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Structured data and Google AMP

The open source AMP project (Accelerated Mobile Pages) has been causing quite a stir these last few months. The project’s goal is to get pages to load lightning fast on mobile. To do that, the project uses a special kind of HTML. Google is pushing AMP pretty hard and also mentions its reliance on structured data. If you want to use AMP and completely give your pages the once over, you need to add structured data. Google uses several Schema.org items to take care of the more interactive parts of AMP elements. You can use Yoast SEO in conjunction with our AMP Glue plugin to take care of most AMP needs.

Tools for working with Schema.org

Schema.org is not too hard to work with, but if adding code by hand seems scary, you could try some of the tools out there. If you are still not sure how to go about this, ask your web developer for help, he’ll probably fix this for you in a couple of minutes.

• Generators
  • Google Data Highlighter
  • Google Structured Data Markup Helper
  • JSON-LD Schema Generator by Hall Analysis
• Validators and test tools
  • Yandex Structured data markup
  • Yandex Structured data validator API
  • Structured Data Testing Tool
  • Google Search Console Rich Cards
• WordPress Plugins
  • Yoast SEO Local (Our Local SEO plugin adds Schema.org for your business details, like address, geo-location, opening hours, etc.)
  • Yoast SEO (Yoast SEO uses JSON-LD to add Schema.org information about your site search, your site name, your logo and your social profiles to your web pages.)

External links

Most search engines have their own developer center where you can find more information on the inner workings of the structured data implementations. Read these to see what works and what doesn’t. In addition to that, you should adhere to their rules, because a bad Schema.org implementation could lead to a penalty. Always check your code in the structured data test tool to see if it’s correct. Fix errors and regularly maintain the code on your site to see if it is still up to scratch.

• Google’s Introduction to Structured Data
• Bing’s Marking Up Your Site with Structured Data
• Yandex’ Schema.org for Webmasters

In the end

You can’t run away from structured data anymore. If your site means anything to you, you should look into it and figure out the best way to make use of Schema.org. Implemented correctly, it can do great things for your site, now and in the future. Search engines are constantly developing new ways to present search results and more often than not do they use Schema.org data to do so.

Rich Cards are the newest addition to Google’s enhanced search results. Using structured data in the form of Schema.org, certain types of subjects can get an enhanced presentation in Google. Rich Cards, not to be confused with rich snippets, are search results in card form that the user can swipe through and mostly pop up on mobile. At first, only recipes and movies had rich cards, but now local restaurants and courses joined the club. The results are still only available in the US, though. Let’s see what all the fuss is about.

What are Rich Cards?

Rich Cards on Google.com (US).

Rich Cards are a sort of extension of the rich search results we know as rich snippets. On mobile, a card is the basic presentation unit of a search result. Rich results are the search results that have extra information attached to it, this could be aggregate ratings, prices or availability. The end result is a well-structured presentation that is easy to grasp and quick to act upon. Another type of rich result offers a direct interaction with the search result. For instance, some restaurants now offer the possibility to reserve a table directly from the search result. In the future, there will be even more interaction possible, thus making for a much more user-friendly and efficient search experience.

The primary driver of this type of innovation is the enormous rise in mobile searches. Mobile has eclipsed desktop and search engines are working hard to tap into the vast possibilities this brings. One of these innovations by Google is Rich Cards, where a user finds a neatly presented and quick to use search result. Swiping through the cards makes it possible to locate the result that best fits the user’s intentions. As a site owner you can make individual results available, or a list of items within a particular category. After that, a user can swipe through the results to find the best results within that category on your site.

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Which cards are available?

When Google introduced Rich Cards, they only made them available for movies and recipes. In November 2016, it became possible to add local restaurants and online courses. However, these are still only available for US search results. Cards present themselves in a carousel or a vertical three-pack that displays courses. Cards can be marked up individually or as a series of articles within a category of your site.

Check out the screenshots below to see the four current rich cards:

How does it work?

To get any rich result, you need structured data on your page. Just like rich snippets, rich cards use structured data to tell search engines what your page is all about, so they can use it for the enhanced presentation. You need structured data to tell search engines about the meaning of the elements on your page and not just what they say.

The big search engines, Google, Yandex, Yahoo and Microsoft, came up with a shared vocabulary called Schema.org. Schema.org is often in a data format like RFDa or Microdata. However, everyone seems to favor JSON-LD these days. Not without reason, because it is easy to write and readable for both humans and machines.

So structured data makes rich results possible, but it is not certain that you’ll get rich results if implemented. It’s all up to the search engines. Just make sure that your data is correct and keep your fingers crossed.

Get started with Schema.org

To get started with Schema.org in JSON-LD, you need to determine what you want to markup and how you want to do it. There is a Schema.org for almost everything, from products to courses and services to local businesses. Be sure to take a gander at the Schema.org website to get a birds-eye view of all the schemas.

If you want users to perform an action after they have found your search result, you should determine what this action should be and how you should handle it. If you do, it is possible to reserve a table in your restaurant or a buy a ticket for a movie in your movie theater. Actions are in a pilot program, but you can express your interest if you’d like to join. See this Google page for more information on that. In Google’s documentation, you’ll also find great example code to get you started, for recipes for instance.

To help you with your quest for rich search results, we’ve written some articles on adding structured data. Check out the following articles for your reading pleasure:

• Use JSON-LD to add Schema.org data to your website
• Grow your business with ratings and reviews
• Rich snippets for product listings with Schema.org
• Local business listings with Schema.org and JSON-LD

Our Yoast SEO plugin uses JSON-LD to add information about your site search, your site name, your logo and your social profiles to your web pages.

Swiping with AMP

Google is increasingly pushing AMP, even in the rich search results. A search for [chocolate cheesecake recipe] on mobile shows two carousels, the one on top with regular search results to be swiped through. The second one, somewhat further down the page, consists of AMPlified content and makes it possible to swipe through the results, even after tapping on a link. It makes for a beautiful and fast experience, but AMP is not necessary to get this type of rich card. However, you do get a few benefits; Google likes sites that use AMP, plus your site loads lightning fast and the swiping actions are solid.

AMP is very much a work in progress, and Google is figuring out how to incorporate it into the search results. There will be a lot going on in the coming months, and we are trying to keep you informed on all of the changes in the SEO/structured data worlds.

Left: an AMP carousel with only recipes from Allrecipes.com. Right: a tap leads to the relevant AMP page.

Track progress in Search Console Rich Cards report

One interesting recent development is the new Rich Cards report in Google’s Search Console. In this new tab, you will find everything related to the performance of your structured data. You can see how many cards are indexed and if there are critical or non-critical problems.

Cards fall into three categories: ‘Invalid’, ‘Enhanceable’ or ‘Fully Enhanced’. If your cards are invalid, you should check the structured data and fix all problems. Enhanceable cards have only non-critical errors in the additional, optional data fields. These cards will still display, but not in the most optimal way. Fully enhanced cards render correctly and perform as they should. Keep an eye on your report at all times and fix issues when they pop up.

Before you add your code to your pages, you should always check it in the Structured Data Testing Tool. In any case, you should follow the rules, because failing to do so and presenting incorrect data, could harm your site.

Conclusion

Mobile rich cards offer searchers an intuitive way to browse the search results. Cards are very visible and naturally catch the users eye, begging for a tap. Carousels group the relevant results together and make them swipeable.

The implementation of rich cards is still in development and could change at any moment. This is a fairly new paradigm for previewing and navigating search results, and it’s not easy to predict if searchers will adopt this. In the end, carousels don’t have a really good reputation…

At the moment, Rich Cards only apply to a small sampling of subjects in one target market: the US. This means that all your efforts will only affect search results in that one country. If you have the means and capacity to implement the structured data for Rich Cards, go right ahead. If you don’t, or if you are not in the target market, it may be better to watch the developments closely and jump on the bandwagon when Rich Cards get a worldwide release.

Read more: ‘Rich snippets for product listings’ »

Rich search results are everywhere. Years ago, search engines presented search results without much adornment. Today, the search results look very different, especially on mobile. We see extra information beneath the links, plus a couple of big blocks of rich — often visual or action-oriented — content, depending on what you look for. In this article, we’ll briefly go over some of the different rich results and what they mean for SEO.

Update: Since the 11.0 release, Yoast SEO builds a full structured data graph for every post or page on your site! A graph is a complete piece of structured data with well-defined connections to all the different parts. Search engines now not only know what all the parts mean but also how they fit together. Want to know what it does for your website? Read all about Yoast SEO 11.0!

What are rich results?

Rich results are a special brand of search results — made to stand out and help users achieve their tasks or get their answer more quickly. These results range from recipe carousels to complete interfaces from things as jobs and flights. Search engines are expanding the number of subjects that trigger a rich result. Getting featured in a rich results is rewarding since it is located in the so-called position zero. This way, they are bound to attract a lot of attention.

A closer look at rich results

First, let’s look at what regular search results a.k.a snippets are. A snippet is an individual search result with black lines of text beneath the title. Here you’ll read a piece of text introducing the search result. Rich search results are the results that stand out due to formatting or on-screen location. Rich results is a catch-all term search engines use to describe parts of the search results that have a highlighted presentation.

There are a lot of them, and new ones keep popping up. Search engines are looking for the best and fastest possible way to get an answer to a user. For instance, if you search for a product, you get product-oriented rich results like reviews and availability. While if you search for a particular recent movie, you see where it’s playing and it even lets you book tickets right away.

Here’s an example of a full desktop US search result for a specific product, namely a Fender American Professional Precision Bass. It’s got a lot of stuff going on (image is cropped, click the image for the whole enchilada):

• Video overviews and reviews
• A sponsored shopping panel to order it online
• Editorial reviews
• User reviews
• Rich snippets for product listings in the organic search part
• A local pack showing where you can buy it locally
• An overview with similar products
• Related searches

Omnipresent on mobile

There are a couple of other enhancements to the search results pages. Especially on mobile, for instance, you’ll find an incredible amount of rich results. These results provide a lot more actionable information, directly from the search results page. Rich results are available for almost all verticals, from movies — you can see an example of that below — and recipes, to local restaurants and online courses. You can check the results of your rich results in Google Search Console.

Featured snippets and answer boxes

Now there are also featured snippets and answer boxes — the latter will show when Google itself knows the answer to a question itself, often directly coming from the knowledge graph. These boxes will show at the top of the page to answer a query directly. Last but not least, there’s the knowledge graph card; this is the big block of information on the right-hand side.

Building blocks for rich results

To increase the chance of getting rich results, you need to add structured data to your site. The structured data is in a vocabulary called Schema.org and can be added to your page in different ways. First, you can use the classic formats: Microdata and RDFa. However, Google favors JSON-LD. This is a JavaScript format to easily markup structured data in a way that’s readable for both humans and machines. On Schema.org you’ll find a neat getting started guide.

Our Yoast SEO plugin uses JSON-LD to automatically add a lot of structured data information about your site. Plus, it marks up how-to articles and FAQs among other things via structured data content blocks. We stitch everything together in a neat graph. A graph is an interconnected overview of your site and how all its entities — company, authors, etc. — are connected to that. Read our Schema documentation to get up to speed.

What do rich results do?

In addition to telling the search engine what all the pieces of your site mean, the main goal of rich results is to inform the searcher. A rich result might entice the searcher to click on the link. Users can now judge directly from the search results if a certain result is the one they are looking for.

Let’s say you have a business delivering flowers. You have done a lot of work to rank well in the search engines for the term [flower delivery to the netherlands]. You rank pretty well, but your competitor has rich snippets, and you don’t. He shows his reviews directly in the search results and his flower shop rates 4,4 out of 5 stars. His stars just naturally catch your eye. With his high rating, he might attract more clicks from searchers, just because he has a more ‘trustworthy’ profile. You know what you have to do.

Do rich results have benefits for SEO?

Adding structured data does not directly result in better rankings. Sometimes, you might get a rich result without having any structured data on your site. It does, however, make you more visible in the search results. Search engines understand your pages better and can, therefore, give you a better presentation. This, in turn, might lead to more focused traffic, extra sales, links and in the end; better results from your site.

If your listings get rich results, searchers will notice you better because you stand out from the crowd. This might lead to a higher click-through rate (CTR). In addition to that, if your snippets are really good, your bounce rate may potentially go down. The reason for this is that searchers can make better judgment directly from the results. If your listing is not up to scratch, searchers might skip you. If it is, they know your listing should promise what it says. All you have to do is deliver the result it promises.

Keep in mind that it’s up to the search engines to determine if your listings get rich results. There are no guarantees you’ll get them.

What types are there?

There are different types of rich results. Here are some prominent examples. You can see some of these in action in Google’s Search Gallery.

Products

Mark up products with Schema.org/Product and you can get rich results in search results. Your product can be enhanced with ratings, pricing, and availability, for example. In this post, we explain how you can enhance your product listings in search engines.

Reviews and ratings

Do customers give your product ratings? Then you could collect them and mark these up as ratings or reviews with Schema.org/Review. This way search engines recognize the product reviews and might show them in the search results. We’ve written a post on reviews and ratings as well. Remember, reviews must be present and visible for visitors of the page. Also, Google recently put the cap on self-serving reviews. This means that, for the organization and localBusiness type, collecting those reviews yourself to get them in the search results is not allowed any more.

Businesses and organizations

Your local business should present the correct structured data to search engines (Schema.org/LocalBusiness). If you use this data, search engines will pick it up and might highlight your business in the results. If you want to mark up your local business, you should read the article on local business listings. Don’t have the time or knowledge to add all this information yourself? Our Local SEO plugin can do it for you.

Recipes

You can now see recipes directly in the search results. If you are searching for a recipe for cheesecake, you can now find it without leaving the search engine. To activate this on your cooking site, you need to add Schema.org/Recipe data.

Events

Event listings have been around for quite a while, but Google recently revamped and expanded the listings. If correctly implemented clubs, venues or other social and cultural entities can show multiple upcoming events directly in search results. Check out Schema.org/Event.

Jobs

Marking up your jobs with jobPosting Schema might lead to inclusion in Google Jobs interface. This’ll highlight your jobs in a section of Google Jobs.

Courses

By adding Schema.org/Course data you can highlight your course in the search results. Among other things, you can show a description, tutor, price and the institute that facilitates the course. You can find a couple of example sites, including markup at W3.org.

New: FAQ & How-to

There’s a lot going on at the moment, with Google adopting new rich result formats. The latest additions to the roster are FAQs and How-tos. You can easily build the content for these pages with our FAQ content block and How-to content block.

How can I add them myself?

It used to be fairly hard to add the data needed for rich results, but times have changed. Yoast SEO has now stepped in to help you add valid structured data by automatically generate the most important data in the background. In addition to that, we have built our Schema structured data implementation to be as extensible as possible. If you or your developer has built your own structured data it’s possible to add this to the graph. Our Schema integration documentation has examples on how to do that.

Having said that, you should always be careful when adding structured data for rich results. If you markup hidden content, or don’t follow the rules one way or the other, you could receive a penalty.

Our Structured data training course helps you get to grips with the concepts and technology behind all this. In addition, Google has a Codelab on structured data showing you the ropes.

Conclusion

While adding structured data for rich results doesn’t directly lead to better rankings, it will lead to a better understanding of your site by search engines and visitors alike. As with a lot of SEO related things, you are still in the hands of search engines. They will determine if a site gets rich results or not.

Don’t let this stop you, though. Adding structured data to your site is always a good thing because you are making your site clearer to search engines and thus creating a bigger chance of them presenting your site in the best possible way.

Read more: Structured data with Schema.org: the ultimate guide »

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