Schema markup

Structured data does not make a page rank higher. This is worth saying first because it is the single most common misunderstanding, and because a lot of proposals have been written on the opposite assumption.

What it does is remove ambiguity. A page about a product contains a price, a rating and an availability state somewhere in its text, and a search engine can infer all three imperfectly. Markup states them, in a vocabulary agreed between the major engines, so there is nothing to infer.

The commercial consequence comes one step later. Unambiguous data makes a page eligible for a rich result: review stars, a price and stock state, a breadcrumb trail, an event date, a recipe card. Those change how the result looks on the page, and how a result looks changes how many people click it.

So the honest chain is markup, then eligibility, then a richer result, then click-through rate. Every link in it is real and none of them is ranking.

Valid markup makes a page eligible for a rich result. It does not oblige Google to show one, and the gap between those two states is where client expectations go wrong.

Google chooses per query, per result, and can decline for reasons nothing to do with the markup: the query does not suit the format, the site has not earned enough trust, the layout of that particular results page has no room. A page can validate perfectly and never show a single star.

Support also gets withdrawn. In 2023 Google sharply reduced FAQ and HowTo rich results, limiting FAQ display to a small set of authoritative health and government sites and dropping HowTo on desktop. Agencies that had built FAQ markup into a standard deliverable lost it overnight, and clients who had been shown the accordion in a pitch deck asked where it went.

The way to sell this without being wrong later is to sell the markup as description rather than as a feature. Describing the page accurately is worth doing regardless, it is cheap once automated, and the rich result is the upside rather than the promise.

Structured data must describe content that is genuinely on the page and visible to the user. That is the rule, it is written down in Google structured data guidelines, and breaking it is a spam violation rather than a technical error.

The version that happens most often is an aggregate rating assembled from testimonials that live somewhere else, or from an internal figure nobody publishes. The stars appear in the results, the click-through rate improves, and the markup is describing something the page does not contain.

Prices and availability drift into the same territory by accident. Markup written once and never regenerated will keep declaring a price the page stopped showing months ago, which is the same violation reached by neglect rather than intent.

The consequence lands on the client domain as a manual action, and it is the sort that removes rich results across a whole site rather than one page. Worth being explicit about in a proposal, because a competitor offering review stars on a site with no reviews is offering the client a risk they will not have priced.

Markup is easy to add and easy to leave behind. The failure is almost never the initial implementation; it is the second content edit, or the template change six months later.

The structural answer is to generate the JSON-LD from the same data the page renders from, rather than writing it alongside. If the price in the markup is the same variable the page prints, they cannot disagree. If it is a hand-typed string in a template, they will disagree within two edits and nobody will notice, because the markup is invisible to everybody reading the page.

The other habit worth having is validating after deployment rather than only before. The Rich Results Test tells you whether a live URL is eligible, which is a different question from whether the JSON validates, and template changes break markup silently.

For an agency, the useful posture is to own the shape of the markup and hand the generation to the developers, with a check in the monthly reporting. Structured data that nobody looks at again is the normal outcome, and it is the reason so many sites are still describing a layout they stopped using.