When it comes to SEO, you need a lot of things to get it right. First of all, you have to think about on-site and off-site SEO. But there is also another factor that influences your search engine ranking and the ability of search engine robots to crawl your site, which is known as structured data.
Implementing structured data can be very beneficial for any WordPress website. For example, you can increase your traffic, Click-through-rate and the ability of search engine robots to investigate your site.
Below, we explore what structured data is, why you need it, and how to add it to your WordPress site.
What is structured data
Structured data is data organized from code that gives Google (and other search engines) more information about your site. They are distinguished from unstructured data, which is data that does not have an identifiable structure. The most common way structured data appears in search engines is known as rich snippets. You have probably seen them in the search results.
They look something like this:
Not only do they look great, but having rich snippets in search results really can, even if your position in search results hasn’t changed. Once Google crawls your site containing structured data, it will be able to use that information to create more attractive and useful search results.
In this way, you are giving Googlebot more accurate and useful information about your site. The appearance of the rich snippet will depend on the type of content on your page. For ratings, it will contain things like star ratings, while if it’s a product page, you’ll see details like price and availability of the product.
There are many different types of structured data that you can use depending on the type of content on the page.
How structured data works and its benefits
Traditionally, formatting tags have been used to let Google know what our site is about. These include things like our header tags, choosing a keyword, and .
But even with these types of tags, the context of our pages may not be entirely clear, especially with words or phrases that have multiple meanings.
We add this type of formatting to our sites to give our pages and posts additional context. This will help them rank more accurately in search engines. Also, it will improve our appearance in the search engine, which influences our CTR and other crucial statistics.
With structured data you will position yourself in the most relevant search results, which means higher quality traffic for your website.
Structured data format
Keep in mind that for Google to correctly interpret a URL, certain requirements are necessary. We detail below the formats supported by Google for structured data:
- JSON-LD – This method uses JavaScript notation to encode related data and is the format recommended by Google.
- Microdata: allows you to add additional information through HTML tags to organize the content of your page.
- RDFa – A set of extensions for indicating semantic attributes of data through tag markup. This option is less used than the previous ones.
Available Structured Data Types
There are dozens of different schemes you can implement, and .
Spend some time exploring the list and see what kind of relevant schema you can add to your site. Some of the more common forms of schema include:
- Local business data
- events
- Prescriptions
- movie listings
- Ratings
- Bookings
- Articles
Structured Data Examples
Let’s look at some examples. First, we will look for the movie “The Revenant”:
The first IMDB result has structured data implemented. Look at the stars and rating section. Structured data makes it possible to visualize the star rating, so you can quickly decide if the movie is worth watching or not.
The same type of star rating shows up for any type of rating, whether it’s a restaurant, a movie, a book, or even a recipe. Look at the results that appear when we search for “paella recipe”:
The star rating section is highlighted again. There is also more information about the recipe, including a picture, and the time it takes to prepare the recipe.
Finally let’s search for “Trump”:
Instead of the star rating like in the examples above, you’ll see the news style schema.
So with a schema, you give Google a better idea of what information is worth highlighting, and it will display that information in search results.
How to verify existing structured data
You can use to see if you have an existing schema installed on your site. Sometimes your WordPress theme will have it built in.
You can paste the code from your site or just use the URL.
After verifying your site in the tool, you can see which structured data is active and if there are any errors.
How to Add Structured Data to WordPress
You should now recognize the value of adding structured data to your WordPress site. Next, you’ll learn two different approaches you can use to add them to your site:
1. Using the Schema plugin
The easiest way to add them to your site is to use the Schema plugin. This plugin will work with any existing scheme and will also integrate with the Yoast SEO plugin.
To install this plugin, go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard and search for «scheme«.
Install and activate the plugin, then go to Schema > Settings to start configuring the plugin.
Enter your basic information like the location of your About page, Contact page and upload your website logo.
By filling in the additional sections, content, knowledge graph, and search results, you can optimize your site for each of those areas.
You can then navigate to Schema > Types and add a specific schema to a post type or category.
If the above plugin is not what you are looking for, you can choose from many other options.
Here are some alternative WordPress schema plugins:
2. Manually
You can also do the above manually. It will require more code, but you can add custom structured data on each post and page.
With custom structured data, you can also include multiple different schemas per page. So if you have an event page, but also want to include a grading scheme, you can easily do that.
The most effective way to manually add them to your site is to use JSON-LD. As we mentioned above, this method is recommended by Google.
The JSON-LD method is based on JavaScript. It will add the structured data to your site as a script, making it much easier to read and debug.
If you don’t know how to write the structured data, you can use or to create your code.
To use this approach, go to any post or page where you want to add structured data markup. Click Display Options at the top of the page and check the box that says ‘custom fields’.
Now scroll down to where it says ‘custom fields‘ and click ‘enter new‘ to create a new custom field. Name it ‘scheme‘ and write the following code (this is an example with information from a local business):
Now click on ‘Add a custom field‘ and refresh your page.
Next, you will need to edit your file header.php. Open it and insert the following code before the closing tag:
This will cause your structured data code to load along with your post metadata. Using the above approach, you can add any kind of custom data schema to your WordPress site.
Just remember to check your page in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure it doesn’t contain any errors.
final words
Adding structured data to your site doesn’t take much time and can improve how you appear in the search engine and also help with traffic to your website.
The process can seem a bit technical and overwhelming, but even the manual approach isn’t that difficult once you dig into it. Furthermore, the number of plugins available makes even the basic implementation of structured data very simple.
No matter what type of site you have, there is a structured data type that will work for you.
What results have you obtained after implementing structured data on your site? Please share your experience in the comments below.
Gustavo is passionate about creating websites. He focuses on the application of SEO strategies at for Spain and Latin America, as well as the creation of high-level content. When he is not applying new WordPress tricks you can find him playing the guitar, traveling or taking an online course.
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