Do you have standards? If you’ve ever traveled to a foreign country, you’ve experienced a “standard” when you plugged anything requiring power into a wall socket. If there weren’t standards, you’d be traveling with two pieces of luggage….one for your clothes…and one for your 50 wall adapters!
With the Internet, there are MANY agreed upon standards you’ve probably heard of: HTML, JavaScript, USB…and maybe a few you haven’t…IEEE 802.11, SMTP, and Schema.org.
What Is Schema Markup?
Schema.org is an agreed upon standard/specification for structuring data on websites. Google, Bing and Yahoo started the initiative back in June 2011, and has been working for years to improve the breadth and adoption of the standard.
In the last 12 months, Google has started to expand the technical options companies have for delivering the markup on their website, which is in turn driving adoption. From calendar information to people to reviews…web content can benefit from being structured in a way that provides search engines the ability to offer up more relevant, content rich results in their search experience.
Why Should We Care?
For reviews and SEO, search engines like Google take structured information they’ve crawled to another level by modifying the search engine results page (SERP) to include the star rating (also known as rich snippets) of the product/item in organic search.
This has shown to increase click-through rates up to 30%, and with an average site getting up to 60% of their traffic from organic search, every little bit helps.
How Do We Get It?
The good news is that if you’re a PowerReviews client and have Inline SEO enabled, you’re 95% of the way there. We can enable the feature for your account(s) so that the next time your periodic content delivery bundle is generated (usually nightly), Schema.org flows with it.
Then it’s as simple as unpacking the file like you normally do and publishing on your website. If you’re a current customer, contact the Client Success team and request this feature on your account.
That Easy
PowerReviews is continually adding capabilities to its products to help brands and retailers drive traffic, increase sales, and create actionable insights. We also work to make it easy for our customers to adopt new features that will help them meet their business goals. Schema.org is a great and easy way for clients to drive more organic traffic with just a little effort and no additional cost.
