What Structured Data Should You Use And Where Should You Use It?

In a recent Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout, Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller answered two questions about structured data.

While the first question was about the medical niche specifically, his response is useful and applicable to websites in any niche.

Mueller also demonstrates how to use the Google Developer Help Pages to determine which structured data to use.

How To Choose Structured Data For A Website The question was about how to choose structured data for a website and what effect it would have.

It’s not so much about what structured data matches a page, according to Mueller. Instead, the decision is based on the type of rich result that is available for that page.

Structured data is extremely adaptable. As a result, the Scehma.org website offers an ever-expanding list of different types of structured data that can be used on almost any webpage.

However, Google only uses a small portion of the structured data available to generate search results such as review stars, image results, and so on.

Read Top 14 Reasons Google Isn’t Indexing Your Website.

Google’s structured data page explains:

“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. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.
Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general.”

And that’s the direction that Mueller’s answer is coming from.

This is the question that was asked:

“How does Schema affect a medical niche’s website? What kind of structured data should be used there?”

Mueller answered:

“So, I would primarily… when it comes to structured data, I would primarily focus on the things that we have documented in our developer documentation and the specific features that are tied to that.
So instead of saying, what kind of structured data should I use for this type of website, I would kind of turn it around and say, what kind of visible attributes do I want to have found in the search results?
And then from there, look at what are the requirements for those visual attributes, and can I implement the appropriate structured data to fulfill those requirements.
So that’s kind of the direction I would head there.”

List Of Rich Results Features In Google Structured Data

Google has a page that lists the rich results that can be displayed for various types of pages.

The alphabetical list of structured data that can be used to generate rich results starts with Article structured data and ends with Video structured data.

One of the best resources for helping publishers and SEOs identify the right structured data to use is Google’s page.

Is structured data required on every page?

The next question was whether structured data is required on every webpage.

Breadcrumbs, for example, are a type of minor structured data that can be useful for nearly any page on a website.

In terms of SEO and structured data, breadcrumbs are a no-brainer. They contribute to a more prominent listing in Google’s search results.

Even though breadcrumbs appear to be insignificant, they can be extremely useful once a site begins to rank.

Breadcrumbs structured data, according to Google:

“A breadcrumb trail on a page indicates the page’s position in the site hierarchy, and it may help users understand and explore a site effectively. A user can navigate all the way up in the site hierarchy, one level at a time, by starting from the last breadcrumb in the breadcrumb trail.
Google Search uses breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to categorize the information from the page in search results. Often, as illustrated in following use cases, users can arrive at a page from very different types of search queries. While each search may return the same web page, the breadcrumb categorizes the content within the context of the Google Search query.”

However, Mueller’s suggestion to review which rich result is appropriate for a page is a good place to start.

This is the question:

“Does every page need schema or structured data?”

Mueller answered:

“No, definitely not.
Like I mentioned, use the guide of what visual elements do I want to have visible for my page, and then find the right structured data for that.
It’s definitely not the case that you need to put structured data on every page.”