Structured Data: Marking Up Content for Rich Results
Key takeaway
Structured data doesn't directly improve rankings, but it earns richer search listings — ratings, prices, availability, FAQs — which substantially increases click-through. Mark up only what's genuinely visible on the page; marking up content users can't see is a policy violation that removes the feature entirely.
Structured data is a machine-readable description of what a page is about, embedded in the page. Search engines use it to display enhanced results, and increasingly to understand entities rather than just text.
What's worth implementing
- Organisation and site-wide identity — name, logo, contact details, social profiles. One-time work, broadly useful.
- LocalBusiness for each physical location, with address, hours, and geographic coordinates.
- Product with price, availability, and aggregate rating for retail — the highest-impact markup in commerce.
- Article and author details for editorial content.
- FAQ and HowTo for pages that genuinely answer questions in that form.
- Breadcrumb, which improves how the URL path is displayed in results.
- Event, Recipe, JobPosting, and Course where they apply — each has its own enhanced display.
Implementation notes
- Use JSON-LD in a script tag rather than inline microdata. It's easier to generate, review, and keep consistent.
- Generate it from the same data that renders the page, so the two cannot drift apart.
- Include the required properties for each type, and the recommended ones where you have the data — partial markup often isn't eligible for display.
- Validate with the official testing tools, and monitor the search console report for errors after release.
What gets you penalised
- Marking up content that isn't visible on the page. This is the most common violation and it removes rich results for the whole site, not just the page.
- Ratings that aren't from real users, or aggregate ratings on pages that aren't about a specific product.
- Marking up the wrong entity — a category page described as a single product, for instance.
- Prices or availability that don't match what the page shows, which erodes trust and triggers manual action.
Set expectations
Rich results are granted, not guaranteed. Valid markup makes a page eligible; whether the enhancement appears is the search engine's decision and varies by query and device. Measure the effect on click-through rate rather than on position, because that's where the benefit shows up.