What is structured schema data, and why is it important?
You've worked hard to get your website up and running and hopefully indexed on Google for new users to discover. The next step is to work on optimizing your website's pages to ensure that you are taking advantage of Google's various rich results. These rich results show your pages in different eye-catching and detail oriented ways, and help them stand-out in a search results page that otherwise is just standard text results. For example, your recipes could show an image, ingredient list, calorie count, and star rating; helping to attract more clicks to your website with little effort.
Structured snippet data is the only way to get your pages looking like this. Unfortunately, implementing this structured data is sometimes difficult. Some platforms will automatically generate it for you, but most don't at all - in this case, you'd need to look into a third party plugin or a developer to help you implement the structured data code on your Wordpress site, Shopify store, Squarespace blog, etc.
Once you have the structured data setup on your website, Google should start checking out the data as soon as they do another scan of your website. In the meantime, though, you want to ensure that your structured data code is properly implemented, and that you aren't missing any of the many mandatory fields that Google requires on the various rich result elements.
Once your structured data is implemented, make sure it works!
This is where Schema Test comes in. Once you enter a URL into Schema Test, we automatically scan your page and do our own set of tests ensuring that your structured data for that specific page (eg. your newest cookie dough recipe) is setup properly, and indexable by Google. We generate a report for your page, letting you know of any missing fields, broken code, or otherwise unusable structured data which will prevent Google from indexing and recognizing your page.
Why test your recipe rich structured data?
Since Google released the structured data schema guidelines back in 2016, the advantages of implementing structured data on your website keep increasing. The issue, though, is that if you are missing certain fields, inputting the wrong data, or have the wrong code on your website; Google will penalize you, not showing your pages as rich results in search results.
How does this recipe schema tool work?
Schema Test works by scanning the page that you submit via the form above. Once the page is added to our system, we check the page for structured data, and, if the data is found, we:
- Ensure you aren't missing any required fields for Google. (these prevent Google from even looking at your page).
- Generate a structured data score based on the number of missing fields, the relevancy of the data, and a few other metrics. This score gives you a birds eye view of how we think your page is looking in the eyes of Google.
- Email you a link to a report with your Schema Test score, and any additional information we think would help your page rank better in Google and other search engines.