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Explaining schema mark-up for better website performance

Here’s a question you never thought you’d ask – what is a schema markup and how can you use it on your website? Nelly Berova has the very important and useful answer...

Nelly Berova

Schema markup - coding - image

As an estate agent, your website is probably your biggest asset when it comes to attracting business, whether buyers, sellers, landlords or tenants. For much of the past decade, online searches have been crucial to most property lets and sales, but since the coronavirus pandemic, the trend has been even more pronounced.

Nelly Berova - Art Division

Nelly Berova

This digital saturation means heavy competition, with agent websites vying for traffic. So, anything that can give you the edge when it comes ranking on search engines and attracting leads has to be worth considering. This is where schema markup comes in. If you’ve never heard of it, schema markup is a type of code that helps search engines understand your content better and represent it in search results.

Schema markup does this by creating ‘rich snippets’. These are search listings with highly relevant content, which are often much more clickable than the average result, meaning more traffic to your site.

Schema markup gives search engines a better understanding of your content.”

To explain; if you’ve ever searched for a term on Google, and seen a result that contains direct links to things like reviews, FAQs or event bookings, you’ve been looking at website which uses schema markup.

While this is all great for your business, the primary function of schema markup is to give search engines a better understanding of your content. This is because the schema markup code effectively joins the dots about your content in a way that is easier for Google to understand than plain text alone – which means that users get more relevant content and you get higher rankings for your blogs and web pages.

One thing to bear in mind before you jump straight in to the world of schema is that it is most effective if your pages already rank well and/or your brand has a strong presence.

That said, estate agencies have an advantage over other industries when it comes to using markup as there are several specific schema types, which are especially relevant to the sector. Here are five we’d recommend using:

Video markup

At Art Division we have created a website add-on for video markup to improve the search ratings of estate agent blogs and webpages, which incorporate embedded YouTube videos. The add-on means that when users find your YouTube content via a video search, they are taken direct to the post, not your YouTube channel, increasing traffic to the blog you want to make visible. Examples of how you might use this function include tours of properties and video content created to complement a blog topic – how to find a new tenant, for example.

Event markup

Anything you can do to make it easier for a potential customer to take the next step along their journey with you is going to help with conversion. Using the events markup means specific events can be listed in your search result, enabling a customer to click straight through to book. The event schema can be used by any organisation that hosts events whether concerts, festival or webinars. For real estate, it is great for promoting things like open house viewings and 3D property tours as well as online events for prospective vendors or landlords.

Organisation markup

The organisation schema helps you showcase your business with more impact. It allows important details such as your address, logo, phone number, and reviews to appear in a Google knowledge panel on the right of the search engine results page (SERPs). These panels jump out at the customer, giving you a greater opportunity to get noticed.

FAQ markup

We all know that FAQs are great for drawing in customers, by answering the pressing queries that brought them online in the first place. The frequently asked questions schema markup creates an interactive Q&A box within the search result. The benefits include a larger, more visible SERP listing which pushes your competitors further down the page and offers customers more relevant and quality content to boost your click-through rate.

Review markup

This schema enables you to add an excerpt from a customer review for your business, along with an average of the combined rating scores from many reviewers. Assuming your reviews are all great, this is another useful tool for giving customers an instant snapshot of your business, helping build trust and encourage clicks from a search result.

A word of caution. While these schema markup benefits all sound great, bear in mind that this is a fairly complex area of SEO programming and one where you may need to think about consulting the professionals for advice and expertise.

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January 24, 2023

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