Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak at SMX London about schema.org structured data and rich snippets. I’ve written about rich snippets before on The Tomorrow Lab blog, and in my SMX session I spoke about some of the ‘forgotten’ schemas that can trigger rich snippets.
In the same session Bastian Grimm spoke about microdata and rich snippets [slides] and quoted research from Searchmetrics that showed how 66% of Google search results include some form of rich snippet that’s enabled by structured data, but only 0.3% of websites actually implement it.
The same research indicated that, despite Google’s claims to the contrary, there are strong indications that implementing Schema.org on your website can help improve your rankings in Google.
This was also confirmed by Sam Quincy, the third speaker in our session, who showed a very interesting case study of implementing the recipe mark-up for Duncan Hines, resulting in a rather substantial improvement in rankings and traffic:
[Source]
All in all this makes Schema.org a very interesting SEO opportunity for websites to set themselves apart from their competitors and claim a greater share of visibility in Google’s search results.
This was my first time speaking at the SMX conference, and it was a real treat. It’s the world’s leading search marketing conference series, and for good reason: there were many great speakers providing expert insights and the whole two-day event was very well organised.
I also got to catch up with many of my friends in the SEO industry, and meet plenty of new people as well. I even managed to get my picture taken with two Googlers – John Mueller and Maile Ohye – without spontaneously combusting.
Flanked by John Mueller and Maile Ohye
I’m looking forward to next year!