Highlighted as a growing trend at the start of the year, schema.org markup is increasingly valued by search engines to help them better understand content relevancy, as well as a method to distinguish between fake news and trusted content. We look at how finance brands can take advantage of schema to boost their organic visibility.
What is Schema?
Over the last decade, the complexity of Google’s search results pages has continually evolved – from ads to images, videos, maps, shopping and more recently additional schema-driven information such as ratings, featured ‘snippets’, lists and tables.
Schema.org is a markup language that you can add to your web pages to help search engines better understand your content and its relevance to potential search queries. It is a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help webmasters provide better information about their sites to the search engines. Adding schema markup to your site has the added benefit of potentially improving visibility in search engines results by enhancing the way your results are displayed.
Schema.org is a markup language that you can add to your web pages to help search engines better understand your content and its relevance to potential search queries.
Some schema you may already be familiar with, such as ratings and reviews, but there are many more different ways in which schema can show within the search results; and a whole section dedicated to finance-specific schema for banks and financial institutions. You can choose what schema markup is most relevant to the type of content you have on your site and it will be recognised by all the major search engines.
Below is an example of what a schema snippet describing an Investment Fund would look like, using the suggestions from schema.org. The fund is identified by a name and a description. The details of the typical investment can be marked up with specifics such as “minAmount”, “maxAmount” and “interestRate”. This then provides a lot more specific information to the search engines, increasing visibility in search results.
Why does Schema matter?
The more information search engines have from how you mark up your content with schema, the more likely they are to use your content in their ‘snippets’. Should this happen, it can lead to your content sitting far higher on the page than it would normally rank.
Content with schema markup provides greater value to the user by showing at a glance whether your content addresses their needs; and whether to click through or not. As a bonus, voice-enabled assistants generally rely on schema to help them find the most relevant answers, so content with schema is far more likely to be returned in a voice search; a key future-proofing opportunity for your brand. Some examples of snippets include:
The Featured Snippet Paragraph
The Featured Snippet Table
The ‘People also ask’ Snippet
How can finance brands use Schema?
Although it can look overwhelming, schema is relatively easy to implement. There are a number of tools out there that you can use to simplify the process; although you will need to work with a developer to update your site. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool will help generate your schema code based on your existing content; while Google’s Structured Data Testing tool can be used to check that your schema is implemented correctly.
The use of schema will help search engines better understand your content, which could lead to more information being shared in search results, the potential for higher rankings and inclusion in voice search results. The effort is certainly worth the reward.
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