Structured data (schema markup)
What is structured data (schema markup)?
Structured data, also called schema markup, is code in a page that tells machines what is on it: a product with a price and stock level, a business with an address, an article with an author and a date. Visitors never see it. Google uses it to decide whether a result can show stars, a price or availability, and search engines and AI assistants use it to understand who offers what, and where.
Example
A shoe shop sells 300 models. Every product page carries Schema.org Product markup: name, photo, price in euros, stock status and the average review rating. The code sits in a JSON-LD block, separate from the visible text, and repeats exactly what a shopper sees on the page. Once Google has crawled the pages, a search for a particular model can show the price, “In stock” and the stars before anyone clicks.
The arithmetic, with illustrative numbers: product pages earning 10,000 impressions a month at a 2% clickthrough rate bring 200 visits. If the richer result lifts that rate to 3%, the same impressions bring 300 visits — without climbing a single position.
Why it matters for a business
Structured data does not raise rankings on its own. It does two other jobs. It makes a page eligible for a rich result, which takes up more room on the results page and answers the price-and-availability question before the click. And it describes the business as a clear entity — name, address, phone, services, social profiles — which is what search engines and AI assistants rely on when someone asks who does this kind of work nearby.
There are limits. Google shows rich results for only some types of markup, and it decides when. Markup that claims something the page does not show — invented reviews, a price that differs from the real one — breaks Google’s guidelines and can bring a manual action against the site.
What to ask
- Which types will be marked up — organisation, services, products, articles, FAQs — and on which pages?
- Is the code generated from the site’s own data, or written by hand and out of date the first time a price changes?
- Is it checked in the Rich Results Test, and is anyone watching the rich result reports in Search Console?
- Does every value in the markup match the visible text?
Structured data is part of our SEO and AI search work: we mark up the organisation, its services, its articles and its questions.