How to Unlock the Power of Your B2B Website with Structured Data

The first objective of any marketing effort is to get your message where it needs to go. In digital marketing, your first audience is often a search engine: the powerful, frequently misunderstood gatekeepers of the internet.

Search engines are designed to deliver the best possible results based on what you’re searching for. To do so, automatically, they have to decipher and reconcile thousands of formats, languages and vocabularies associated with website coding.

The addition of “structured data” – highly organized blocks of code added to web pages to provide search engines with additional page details – can streamline this process by “speaking” to search engines directly, in a vocabulary they can easily interpret.

Until recently, these multiple languages and vocabularies used on the web for structured data made this process difficult for search engines and web developers alike.

But in 2011, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Yandex jointly conceived Schema.org, an open-source vocabulary that can be built into pages to help site crawlers produce “richer page results.” The schema.org project ultimately created a template for communicating directly with Google using uniform microdata, or “structured data,” added to any site.

The result is a powerful tool for boosting SEO and unlocking the full potential of your website.

What is Structured Data?

Below is an example of structured data we use on our website. There are fields for address, price range, logo, and description, among others. We use this to provide a summary of the information found on our site to browsers.

How is Structured Data Used?

There are 598 types of schema available in the Schema.org format, so there are a variety of options for marking up content. Google uses this data to decipher web pages, determine search results and add to its own database, which is displayed in the knowledge graph for a business. This graph is the information displayed directly in the Google results, and is created from information received via webpages and structured data.

For example, the SAP software company’s structured data is in JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) form, similar to that found on our site. It can be found in the source code of its homepage which links its social media accounts (highlighted in yellow):

When searching for SAP Software Solutions on Google, a knowledge graph appears at the top of the search results that includes links to the company’s social media accounts. This is an example of information that can be populated by the addition of structured data to the page:

This data can be used to populate your information graph with a wide variety of additional elements including:

• Videos
• Events
• Team members
• Products
• Jobs
• Images
• Articles

How Can Structured Data Boost B2B SEO?

Companies in the B2B sphere can use structured data as part of an overall digital marketing strategy to dramatically improve the process of attracting prospective customers to their websites.

While structured data is not an official ranking factor according to Google and other major search engines, it can indirectly increase rankings and click-through rate by clarifying web page details that Google wasn’t picking up on. It can also help build out the information in your knowledge graph, piquing the interest of potential customers with additional details.

By making your content more accessible and legible to Google, the additional information may cause a boost in Page Rank, which is Google’s overall score for your website on a 0 (low) to 10 (high) scale. Most importantly, structured data is a simple way to amplify your brand’s message and offerings to Google by providing an additional source for data collection.

Ready to Start Optimizing Your Website with Structured Data?

Structured data is an important tool for optimizing website content as part of an overall B2B marketing strategy and SEO implementation focused on generating high quality leads for your business.

At Innovaxis, we bring a full complement of digital marketing strategies to your sales and marketing efforts, beginning with a thorough analysis of your goals and your path from marketing to lead generation to sale.

Our customized marketing programs are designed to maximize the results of inbound and outbound marketing efforts by combining effective digital strategies with campaigns that align the efforts and practices of both sales and marketing. It is a unique and results-driven approach tailored to the needs of B2B clients.

Contact us to learn more about how you can transform your website content into a source of leads and thought leadership for your business.