Schema.org – Why You’re Behind if You’re Not Using It…

Posted by CraigBradford
If someone told you that there was a quick and easy way that many of you could improve your SERP CTR for minimal effort, you'd all stop in your tracks and give them full attention. Yet, Schema.org and rich snippets are still horribly under-utilized.

Since Google (and Bing!) officially introduced schema.org in June, it?s fair to say motivation to implement it has been mixed. However since its introduction Schema.org has already evolved a lot, adding a lot of new stuff that people haven?t paid attention to. Here I try to persuade you there are few downsides and plenty of upsides.

Myth: Schema.org markup doesn?t get rich snippets!

A common objection I hear to people not using Schema is that there?s no point because Google don?t use it for rich snippets. WRONG!

This was true, but is no longer; lots of websites in different markets have taken a leap of faith and are seeing the benefits in the form of rich snippets.

Examples of Schema.org Rich Snippets Showing in Google

The following are all examples of websites that are currently using the Schema.org vocabulary:

E-Commerce

Image Source | See The Example Page

TV Series

Image Source | See The Example Page

Movies

Image Source | See The Example Page

Events

Image Source | See The Example Page

Recipe

Image Source | See Example Page

As you can see Schema.org is definitely being used by Google.

Schema.org is not a language.

Schema.org is a Microdata vocabulary; not a language in and of itself. Let me explain the difference, as there is still a lot of confusion in the SEO community.

There are various languages that do the job we're discussing:

Microformats

Microdata

RDFa

When marking up any content on a page for rich snippets or similar machine readable reasons, the method of doing so is always a mix between one of these and a vocabulary. See the example below of using Microdata with the schema.org vocabulary.

Of the language and vocabulary