Strategies to Incorporate Structured Data in B2B Marketing

All companies and content publishers eventually aim towards higher visibility on search engines. This makes search engines first audience for your published article. Based on its understating, the search engine delivers best relatable result as per the search query. To present best possible results, search engines do permutation and combination of various languages, formats, and vocabularies associated with the website coding.

To acquire top position on search page digital marketers tend to optimize content, provide explicit meta-description, and incorporate similar tactics. Out of all the methods applied to get top ranking, the application of structured data is the latest in the block.

Structured data are extremely organized code blocks that are added to webpages. This, in turn, provides extra page details to search engines. The extra details added to webpages layout information to the search engines in a language they can understand. Doing so enhances the probability of top positioning on the search page.

The traditional process of adding multiple vocabularies and multiple languages used in the webpage intended to create structured data was difficult for search engines to understand. Considering the trouble the process cause, in 2011, Microsoft, Yandex, Yahoo, and Google altogether launched Schema.org. It is an open-source vocabulary that can be integrated with webpages. The open-source vocabulary enables site crawlers to produce relevant page results.

The schema.org project introduced a template that capitalizes structured data, also referred to as microdata, to communicate with search engines. This, further, has turned out to be an effective tool for boosting the visibility of the website.

In short structured data is used as a summary of the content on the website. Usually, it consists of a specific field for a price range, address, description, and logo among data. This information is conveyed to browsers via the site.

Structured Data is Leveraged by B2B Marketers to Enhance Their Visibility on Search Engines

It may be confusing for B2B marketers to incorporate structured data into their content pages. Just for clarification, it can be used as on one of the influential factors to boost the ranking of the page. Schema given in the structured data provides information that plays a vital role in the placement of the page.  To be more precise with the information part here is an example- schema.org object consists of a location tag. This tag supports local listing where the geographical aspect is in search of relevance.

In general, B2B marketers should follow the following pattern while structuring a webpage-

• Address Information
• Local office locations
• Information of regional distributors, dealers, and resellers

Companies operating in the B2B domain can incorporate structured data in their digital marketing strategy to attract prospective audiences to their website.

Here are some of the quintessential tips to use structured data-

1. Blogs- Various B2B companies rely on blogs as their marketing strategy for brand promotion.You can use the schema type- Blogposting and provide all relevant details such as date, image, and blog headline among others. That would suffice to boost the ranking of the content post. It can be practice easily.
2. App- In case your company has an app of its own, use SoftwareApplication schema. Further, provide all the necessary details such as name, rating, availability, and rating. Also, it is recommended to mention the type of the app such as Developer Application, Security Application, Business Application, and Educational Application among others along with the operating system required to use this app.
3. Event- There are different versions of schema available to notify the status of events. For example, you can markup your event as an online event, offline event, mixed online, and offline events using the Event Schema. The schema allows you to put other relevant details as well such as virtual location and timings.
4. FAQs- The Question schema type helps search engines to identify FAQs on a specific website. It is a great way to attract customers who are looking for accurate information.

There are 598 schema available to mark-up different elements on a website. Some of the schemas can be used to tag-

• Videos
• Products
• Job Postings
• Images
• Team Members

Having said all the benefits of structured data in B2B marketing, it does not guarantee a high ranking of a page. It is an indirect approach to enhance the click-through rate and ranking of a webpage by providing page details to google.

In the words of John Muller, a Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google,

“So we will try to use schema to show the content in more relevant search results that would perhaps bring more users to your pages that actually match the topics of your pages. But it doesn’t mean that we would show it to more users or that it would rank better.” Further, he added, content is still king and structured data won’t boost ranking.

Conclusion:

With content to B2B marketing structured data is, indeed, an important tool for optimizing content, webpages, and websites. It should be included in B2B marketing strategy and SEO implementation to generate both inbound and outbound leads. However, one should not only depend on this very factor.

At Valasys Media, we provide a wide range of digital marketing strategies for your business. Starting from a thorough understanding of goals, we provide focus on different marketing practices for brand promotion and lead generation.

Out marketing programs are customized as per the requirement of B2B companies to maximize sales.