Is Schema Markup A Ranking Factor For Google?

Schema markup is a type of microdata that Google may use as a rich snippet in search results to create an enhanced description.

In essence, it’s a common language that helps search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex better understand the content on any given webpage.

Search engines need to be able to understand the content on your page in order to match it to a relevant query.

Is schema a ranking criterion?

Let’s take a look at the evidence.

The Claim: Schema Is A Factor In Ranking

Roger Montti published an update to Google’s “Introduction to Structured Data” resource in early 2018:

In case you’re curious, Google’s help page on how structured data works has been updated slightly — here’s what it says now:

“Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page.”

Now, Google says that by using structured data, “you can help us.”

While SEO professionals had long agreed that schema was beneficial, it was not a ranking factor.

However, SEO professionals in 2017 were perplexed by the above edit, wondering what had changed to warrant updating the text.

The Proof That Schema Is A Ranking Factor

Why is schema important to search engines? According to Schema.org:

“Your web pages have an underlying meaning that people understand when they read the web pages. But search engines have a limited understanding of what is being discussed on those pages.
By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages—tags that say, ‘Hey search engine, this information describes this specific movie, or place, or person, or video’—you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way.”

Rakuten increased traffic from search engines by 2.7 times after “collaborating with Google Search in 2017 to make their structured data even more useful,” according to a case study published by Google.

Google also noted a 1.5-fold increase in time spent on the page.

Dixon Jones’s 2020 experiment found that twice as many sites with schema applied gained rankings than lost rankings over the course of a month.

He also discovered that pages with a lot of content benefited significantly more than others.

Schema As A Ranking Factor: The Evidence

In Montti’s article, he also noted a few things Gary Illyes said at Pubcon 2017:

“…add structure data to your pages because during indexing, we will be able to better understand what your site is about.”

And:

“It will help us understand your pages better, and indirectly, it leads to better ranks in some sense, because we can rank easier.”

Illyes makes it clear that using schema has an indirect ranking benefit.

When Google has a better understanding of which entities appear on the page and what they’re about, ranking becomes easier.

In a tweet response to a question in 2018, Google’s John Mueller reaffirmed that schema is not a ranking factor: SD = structured data:

As a result, simply using schema markup will not improve your ranking.

The next question is whether using schema improves your site’s technical soundness and thus helps with rankings.

Mueller said in a 2019 Google Webmaster Central office hours video:

“On the one hand, we do use structured data to better understand the entities on the page and to find out where that page is more relevant. But that doesn’t mean that just because people are doing things in a technically correct way on the website that the page is a better page than it would be otherwise.
We will try to use it (schema) to show it (your page) in more relevant search results that would perhaps bring more users to your pages that actually match the topics of your pages.
But it doesn’t mean that we would show it to more users or that it would rank better.”

That’s the end of that idea.

The concept of schema as a ranking factor, according to Mueller, is similar to the concept of validated HTML as a ranking factor.

Neither of these elements indicates to Google that the page is more valuable to the user.

Do you require additional proof?

Structured data is optional, according to Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, and has “no impact on web search ranking.”

Our Opinion On Schema As A Ranking Factor

Schema accomplishes exactly what Google promised when it launched Schema.org in 2011: It improves the visibility of websites in major search engines.

Schema can be used to:

Rich snippets can help you improve the look of your search result.
Allows you to appear for relevant queries where you might not otherwise appear if Google didn’t recognize the relevance of your page.
As you are exposed to more relevant queries and users discover more engaging content, your time on page will increase.

Although there is no evidence that it is used by Google to determine search rankings, all of these factors are positive.

Anything you can do to assist Google in better understanding why your page is the best answer to a relevant query will undoubtedly aid your SEO objectives.