At a Google IO conference, a session titled “How to Stand Out in Search with Structured Data” revealed that in several case studies, the sites showed up first because of their schema data implementation.
In fact, some interesting numbers that were shown are
- 25 percent higher CTR on pages with markup.
- 35 percent increase in visits for recipes with markup.
- 1.5 percent increase in more time spent on pages and 3.6x higher interaction rates.
- 82 percent increase in CTR for rich snippet results.
- 20 percent increase in clicks for pages with schema markup.
Schema markup also called structured data is essentially a form of microdata embedded into a webpage.
It helps Google and other search engines better understand attributes of the object the page represents.
An example would be a product page that may have attributes like title,description,price,SKU number, color, size and so on..
You can find all available types of schema at Schema.org.
How to add schema is beyond the scope of this guide.
You can use an extension if you are using a popular CMS like WordPress.
It is highly recommended that you identify any type of pages that you can markup with schema.
Implementing schema is a very high ROI activity for the purposes of SEO.