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How Does Google Decide What Schema Markup To Show In SERPs?
So you’ve got all your structured data set up correctly. Now how does Google decide what to show in search results?
What type of search performed decides different sets of schema markup that will show up in search results.
According to Google, there are guidelines for setting up your structured data. You can read more about their policies and what they show here.
It can be frustrating to see your website show up as a blue bar with no extras around it. To get your extensions, site links, and other data enhancements to show, you will need to make several efforts.
These efforts are much like the efforts you would put into organic search engine optimization.
Understanding Google Trust & Authority
Have you ever noticed the more prominent the company is, the more data seems to show up about them underneath their website?
Google trusts these websites more than they do a new business.
Probably even more based on statistics we were familiar with by now, like domain and page authority.
Some other factors would include:
- Content reading score
- Semantic phrases within the content to boost user experience
- Linking to the page with structured data on it
- Having a third-party authorities website confirms your same schema markup on a listing about your business.
Why Your Schema Markup Might Not Be Showing Up
Some areas of getting your websites structured are well within your control. Other regions are outside of your control, and ultimately, you could spend a lot of effort on each page set up only to be disappointed when a page never gets traffic.
On-Page SEO guides are pretty good about explaining that you should use this kind of data markup. The reality is that if you are not getting any traffic to your website, then your strutted data is not very likely to show up in search results.
Consider that if you’re not getting traffic to a web page, then your extra search parameters probably aren’t considered worthwhile to publish.
Some major areas to cover with the way you set up your Schema include:
- Double-check that Google has indexed your website recently. It isn’t hasn’t made sure to follow up in your search console. Refer to Site Map Submission Guide for more places to repeat this process.)
- Media is either not in the correct sizing parameters or not allowed to be indexed. For exact accepted dimensions, please refer to Ondyr.com.
- Missing parts of structured data aspects within your markup code can also cause your data to not appear in SERPs. It sounds redundant sure, but if your code itself has errors, you’re not likely to show up anywhere intact.
- Consider checking if Google is currently showing any data markup for keywords you are targeting. Depending on what shows up, Google may have already decided not to deliver structured data snippets under these search results. It may not show that they have agreed that schema markup will not add to their user experience. If this is the case, you are very unlikely to get your markup to show up in SERPs.
Other Steps To Get Your Schema Markup To Show In Search
Should you complete all the above checks and efforts but your markup is still not showing up then it may be time to concentrate on digital marketing efforts to build up your traffic. Getting traffic to your website shows that you are relevant for the keywords you want anyway, ranking for them is a solid effort to get your rich data snippets to appear in search results.