Beat Blogging Competitors with Schema, Tables & Structured Data

Yes, If you have been wondering about a way to actually overtake your competitors and steal the traffic from organic searches, I have come up with a nice trick to do so. It is highly competitive these days to successfully rank your website on the first page for a keyword difficulty of more than 40. But for the keywords, you are already ranking on the first page and still struggling to get more traffic, what about them?

Wining Blogging Competitors —
I also recommend you to read the post talking about 19 Reasons Why Website Rankings And Traffic Dropped Dramatically?, that will help you figer out more insights from your site and tips to optimize its content.

Well, what if I say that there is a way you can hack search ranking easily and steal a BIG amount of search traffic to your website or blog?

Interesting? Right? Follow the page.

What are schema and structured data?

Schema and structured data have become increasingly important for websites in recent years.

By implementing structured data and schema on your website, you can enhance the user experience and help search engines better understand your content.

The advantages of structured data

Schema markup language and structured data help search engines to know and understand your content better. This results in rich snippets that have a higher click-through rate. As you know, search engines use algorithms to sort through billions of web pages and display the most relevant results for a specific search query. So the pages with structured data help people find the best information and content they looking for.

When you use structured data, you have control over what information appears on search engine results pages. This means that you can make sure that the right information is displayed to people who are searching for it.

Adding Article Structured Data

Here you are going to learn to structure your every post, just like the picture shows by using 'Article' data.

You must be thinking about how to do this.

Here the importance of HTML markup comes into existence. This kind of snippet is not possible from manual actions. However, you can structure your web page in such a way that a Google bot can show it.

• Use proper headings
• Images with ALT tags
• Hierarchy of headings, sub-headings
• Adding the author of the webpage

With the structured data added to each page, you will also rank on the 1st page, 1st position, even for the keyword listed somewhere in the 5th position. And this is how using this kind of structured snippet helps you steal most of the traffic from Google.

Add Article structured data in your blog HTML:

You can structure your content in such a way that it becomes easy for Google bot to understand and consider it the perfect choice for that featured snippet.

Add the following 'Article' structured data in your HTML:

Add this code before </body> tag

<!-- Article schema -->
<b:if cond='data:view.isHomepage'>
<script async='async' defer='defer' type='application/ld+json'>
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "<data:blog.url.jsonEscaped/>"
},
"headline": "<data:blog.title.jsonEscaped/>",
"datePublished":"<data:post.date.iso8601.jsonEscaped/>",
"dateModified":"<data:post.lastUpdated.iso8601.jsonEscaped/>",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
    "url": "<data:blog.url.jsonEscaped/>",
"name": "AUTHOR NAME"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "WEBSITENAME",
"logo": {
"@type": "ImageObject",
"url": "ONLY WEBSITE LOGO URL"
}
},
"image": {
"@type": "ImageObject",
<b:if cond='data:view.featuredImage'>"url": "<b:eval expr='resizeImage(data:view.featuredImage, 1200, "1200:630")'/>",
<b:elseif cond='data:blog.postImageUrl'/>"url": "<b:eval expr='resizeImage(data:blog.postImageUrl, 1200, "1200:630")'/>",<b:else/>"url": "ONLY WEBSITE LOGO URL",</b:if>
"height": 700,
"width": 500
},
<b:if cond='data:post.thumbnailUrl'>"thumbnailUrl":"<data:post.thumbnailUrl/>",<b:else/>"thumbnailUrl":"ONLY WEBSITE LOGO URL",</b:if>
"description": "<data:blog.metaDescription/>"
}
</script>
</b:if>
<!-- Article schema -->

After you add your schema tags, you can check if they work correctly by using the Rich Results Tester by Google Search Console. Just enter your URL and choose to test on mobile or desktop. The tester will show you how your schema data appears on Google, any issues that may affect it, and if you qualify for rich snippets.

Using Tables To Have More SEO Attention

Now this one also helps me attract more visits using tables in my content.

Google does the rest.

Why use Tables?

Tables make it easy to understand things.

When you are looking to explain something insightful, statistical, or structured, you may need the help of tables. Just like my teachers used to teach in the classroom on the whiteboard using tables.

Advantages of using tables on web pages:

1. It simplifies the information
2. Not just Google, users also love data
3. When a person is not willing to read the monotonous article anymore, He may be interested to read insights.
4. Our mind is powerful enough to understand through tables rather than paragraphs.

Add table schema in your blog post:

<div itemscope='itemscope' itemtype="https://schema.org/Table">
  <h2 itemprop="about">List of AdSense Alternatives</h2>
  <table>
    <tr><th>Advertising Network</th><th>Type</th></tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Ezoic</td>
      <td>AI-Based Ad Optimization</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Media Net</td>
      <td>Native Banner Ads</td>
    </tr>
    <!-- And so on -->
  </table>
</div>

The problem with adding tables in your content is – Responsiveness. You can overcome this issue by using responsive blogger CSS which lets you add tables to your content without coding. Just shortcodes and done.

You can use your custom styles for tables where you can add styling attributes like column alignment, column width, and table title.

Aggregated Star Ratings to Get Rich Snippet

I hardly have seen a Review post ranking at the first position on Google without having Ratings Schema Markup.

For WordPress, while you may find it difficult to do it with code, it is easier to do with Schema Rating WordPress Plugins.

I personally using to successfully implement the star ratings in my reviews. It not only helps me make more money by adding affiliate links on the button but also lets me add those stars in Google SERPs.

Add Star Ratings Schema for each page:

Add this code before </body> tag

<!-- star ratings schema -->
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "index"'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl.https != data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<script type='application/ld+json'>
{
"@context":"https://schema.org",
"@type":"Review",
"author": {
"@type":"Person",
"name":"YOUR-NAME",
"sameAs":"GOOGLE-PLUS-LINK"
},
"url": "<data:blog.canonicalUrl/>",
"datePublished":"2016-03-13T20:00",
"publisher": {
"@type":"Organization",
"name":"WEBSITE-NAME",
"sameAs":"https://www.YOURWEBSITEURL.com/"
},
"description":"<data:blog.metaDescription/>",
"inLanguage":"en",
"itemReviewed": {
"@type":"Product",
"name": "<data:blog.pageName/>",
"sameAs": "<data:blog.canonicalUrl/>",
"image": "<data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl/>",
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4",
"bestRating": "5",
"ratingCount": "2"
}
}
}
</script>
</b:if></b:if></b:if>
<!-- star ratings schema -->

I have seen some people not getting those stars in SERP even after trying every possible way to get them. You need to follow detailed page To Get Aggregated Star Ratings In Google Search Results [SERP] | Install Review and Rating System to Rich Snippet. When creating a schema, you can rate your page in the Review section by specifying a Rating.

Above picture shows, how it looks on the website and a star rating on Google is like a guarantee after using this code.

Bottom Line

I have added most of my tricks to hack the search traffic and growth of my blog. Adding tables can not only help you rank higher but also help your readers understand the data listed on your website.

And adding Article schema and star rating structured data to each page will impress search bots causing faster crawling and improving search ranking high in SERP.