Structured data

Adding structured data is one of the most effective ways of getting your site noticed by search engines. This data makes it instantly clear for search engines who you are, what your site is about, and how everything on your site connects. By describing your content and connections in the right format, search engines can use these insights to generate rich results for your site. 

Why do I need structured data?

Schema.org is sort of like a dictionary for search engines, which describes all kinds of structured data. It helps them figure out what every part of your site means, who it belongs to, and how everything connects. So if you have products on your website, you can use product schema to indicate that to Google. There are loads of examples; you can markup your event as an event and your FAQ as an FAQ. You can define the writer of a particular article on your site, and describe when and where that article was published. 

Manually applying structured data can be rather complicated. With Yoast SEO, we’ve taken the guesswork out of applying schema.org code. We make sure what we add automatically is valid, and precisely as Google wants. We want to make using structured data as straightforward as possible. Now, you only have to pick the type of content you need, and you are good to go.

Did you know?

Yoast SEO is the first WordPress plugin that automatically generates structured data as a single, interconnected graph instead of individual blobs of data. That’s more efficient and more connected than any other schema tool. We output some of the most sophisticated schema code you’ll ever see, all behind the scenes!

Google needs types of structured data for rich results

Search engines increasingly look for structured data to present your site in a highlighted way. Recipes, FAQs, reviews, and products, among other things, can all be made to stand out in search results. We’re working on ways to make all these applications of structured data more accessible to users.

Structured data is getting more important by the day

Structured data powers many of the recent additions to rich results. Plus, there is no sign of it stopping. It might be the other way around; adoption will speed up. Every major search engine now looks at the structured data and uses it to power new ways of presenting the information.

Yoast SEO structured data makes all the right connections

It is important to remember that search engines are looking for ways to connect the information. They want to know how everything relates to make sense of it. One way of providing these facts is by weaving a giant web of data for your site. Schema helps you identify every individual piece, while Yoast SEO ties everything together in a neat package.

Yoast SEO comes with a schema framework to extend

We put a lot of effort into our schema implementation. Months of research led to a revolutionary concept in the form of a brand-new schema framework. But we haven’t built this framework just as a cool feature for Yoast SEO — which it is —, but we want to help others to use this framework as the foundation of their plugins, products, and sites. Our goal is to make the web more understandable for search engines, and this framework helps!

We’ve made it really easy for other plugins to integrate into and out of Yoast SEO. Now, everyone can extend our schema code to power their own additions.

Extra features

Set the type of content you need in the Schema tab

Yoast SEO always works following a set of sensible defaults. Where possible, we give you the option to finetune the settings. This also goes for our Schema implementation: our default settings cover a wide range of applications. Of course, there are cases where you need to fill in a little more to get the result you are looking for. Now, the Schema tab in Yoast SEO — visible in the meta box and the block editor sidebar — holds the key to these settings. Here, you can determine for search engines that your Contact page is a ContactPage or that your Checkout page is a CheckoutPage.

Yoast SEO comes with structured data content blocks

Users of the WordPress block editor are lucky as Yoast SEO uses the block functionality to offer our very own blocks. These blocks for the WordPress block editor let you easily build specific types of content like FAQ pages, or how-to articles. We automatically output all of the relevant schema in the background. Of course, it integrates seamlessly into the rest of your schema markup. Simply select the block, fill in the fields with steps, and even images and you’re good to go! 

For developers, the plugin comes with a full schema framework, including an API to extend the implementation of structured data. Of course, there’s ample documentation to get you going.

We currently have content blocks for FAQ content and how-to articles, but we have more on the way.

Yoast SEO add-ons have structured data for local, video and WooCommerce SEO

Our modular approach to describing content makes it easy to alter or extend our schema markup. That means that our extensions and add-ons ‘bolt-on’ their own schema, automatically. Our Local SEO plugin makes sure that all the business details of a site get the proper localBusiness structured data appended to it. For WooCommerce SEO, we override the schema generated by WooCommerce and add additional details about products and eCommerce functionality. For News SEO, we change how we describe your posts and articles, to add all of the required news schema code.