How to Improve Website Content Using the Schema.org Vocabulary

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, website owners and content creators face a persistent challenge: identifying gaps in their existing content and continuously optimizing it for success and visibility in search.

With user behaviors and search engine algorithms constantly changing, it is crucial to ensure that your new and old content remains comprehensive, relevant, and helpful to humans and machines.

Enter Schema.org, a collaborative, community-driven initiative launched in 2011 by tech giants Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. The Schema.org vocabulary provides a standardized framework for structuring and organizing data on the web. It offers a comprehensive set of Types and properties that website owners can use to describe the entities and content on their site.

While Schema.org is widely known for helping search engines and machines understand the content on your site, its potential extends far beyond that. This vocabulary can be a game-changing checklist for improving your website’s content and formatting and identifying information gaps on your pages. By aligning your content with relevant Schema.org Types and properties, you can identify opportunities you may have overlooked, enhancing your overall content strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore how you can leverage the Schema.org vocabulary to develop a thorough and robust content strategy for your website.

Identifying Content Gaps on Your Website

Your primary focus should always be creating high-value content that serves your users’ needs. That said, the Schema.org vocabulary can serve as a roadmap during the content creation process, outlining information commonly found on certain types of web pages.

The Schema.org vocabulary provides a detailed framework for describing the entities on your website and their relationships. By examining the properties associated with relevant Schema Types, you can:

• Identify potential gaps in your existing content
• Fill those information gaps for your audience
• Add depth to existing page content
• Create new, supplementary content

Whether you’re creating new content or revamping existing pages, Schema.org can provide valuable guidance. Let’s explore a few examples.

For a healthcare organization creating a new page about a medical condition, you’ll need to decide what information you should include. The MedicalCondition Type in Schema.org has a list of properties such as signOrSymptom, possibleTreatment, and more that capture information that is commonly found on these types of pages. Reviewing the full list of properties associated with a Type can spark ideas about what entities are well-suited for supplementing your content.

Recall that you can only mark up content that exists on your page. Therefore, if you want to incorporate content for these properties to give readers more comprehensive information about the subject, you’ll want to identify those opportunities early in the content creation process.

Our customer, Sharp Healthcare, successfully applied the Schema.org vocabulary to form a long-term content strategy. During their website migration process, the Sharp team ensured that each page focused clearly on a specific Schema.org Type when establishing their content structure. They also incorporated content for the properties suggested by Schema.org for each chosen Type.

Enhancing Rich Results Potential

Aligning your content with Schema.org properties not only helps fill content gaps but also improves your rich result eligibility on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Rich results can lead to enhanced visibility on the SERP and increased click-through rates for your website.

To be eligible for rich results, specific content elements must often be present on your pages. Each rich result type typically has both required and recommended properties:

1. Required properties: These are essential for eligibility and must be on your page.
2. Recommended properties: While not mandatory, Google has stated that including more recommended properties can improve the quality of rich results for users and that rich result ranking takes extra information into consideration.

By incorporating both required and recommended properties into your content strategy, you can simultaneously improve your content quality and rich result eligibility.

Let’s look at product snippet requirements and recommendations as an example:

Product Snippet
To be eligible for product snippets on the SERP, it is required that you include the following:

• name (of the product)
• At least one of the following is required, but all are recommended:
  • review
  • aggregateRating
  • offers

You can further enrich your product rich result by adding content around the pros and cons of your product. That way, you can markup the content using the positiveNotes and/or negativeNotes properties and potentially have these pros and cons show up on your product rich results.

CAPREIT successfully leveraged Schema.org to enhance their rich result potential. By structuring their content according to Schema.org guidelines, they were able to improve their visibility in search results for their property listings and job postings.

Continuous Content Optimization

While Schema.org is an excellent tool for identifying content gaps and structuring information, it’s crucial to remember that creating helpful, high-quality content should always be your primary goal.

You must have substantive, relevant content in place before implementing Schema Markup. Without this foundation, you won’t be eligible for rich results. Moreover, attempting to markup non-existent or irrelevant content could be seen as spammy, potentially leading to penalties from Google.

Use Schema.org as a starting point to spark ideas and ensure your content is comprehensive, but don’t let it constrain your creativity or limit the value you provide to your audience.

By balancing user-focused content creation with Schema.org’s structured guidance, you can develop a content strategy that provides genuine value to your users and enriches the Schema Markup on your site.

Schema App Provides Content Recommendations Using the Schema.org Vocabulary

The digital landscape is constantly changing, and with it, Google’s structured data documentation and the Schema.org vocabulary continue to evolve. By keeping up with the latest updates, you can continually refine your content strategy and ensure your website content remains aligned with best practices.

At Schema App, we help our customers stay current with the latest changes in Schema.org and Google’s documentation. We also provide content recommendations to help our customers improve their rich result eligibility and enhance the richness of their content.