Structured Data (Schema Markup)

Structured data is code — usually JSON-LD in the page head — that uses the shared schema.org vocabulary to explicitly label what a page is about: this is an Article, that is a Product with this price, this is a Person, these are FAQ questions. It translates human-readable content into machine-readable facts.

Mark up the things that are genuinely present and visible on the page — Product, Article, FAQ, HowTo, Breadcrumb, Organization — to become eligible for rich results like star ratings, prices, and FAQ dropdowns that lift click-through. Validate with the Rich Results Test and monitor the enhancement reports in Search Console. Never mark up data that is not on the page or invent ratings; that is a manual-action risk, and Google has tightened FAQ and HowTo eligibility, so chase the rich results that still render.

Structured data does not directly boost rankings, but it does two strategic things that matter more every year: it earns SERP real estate that raises CTR at a fixed position, and it feeds the entity graph that both classic knowledge panels and AI answer engines draw from. Clean, consistent entity markup — sameAs, organisation identity, author entities — reduces ambiguity about who and what you are, which is increasingly how LLM-powered search decides whether to cite you.