Structured data in SEO can do 2 primary things:
Help search engines understand information about your page and business quicker and more efficiently
Generate rich results that can drive more traffic through higher CTR and appear above normal search results
Therefore, we can recognise the power that exists in getting this right - it could mean hitting the traffic targets you have set for the quarter, or even this year.
One thing to remember, then, is that this "structured data" or "schema" is built on JSON-LD code, and it can be so easy to get wrong.
In this case with a global hotel group, they had automated a lot of their schema output, and in doing so without SEO oversight, had proliferated an issue across multiple countries and markets that would have been very simple to correct.
Essentially, the issue was simply down to a missing "," in the code - super simple, right?
The problem is, without an SEO resource at your disposal to check these implementations, something as small as a missing comma can completely break the code and prevent your structured data from generating rich results or passing on vital information to Google and other search engines.
You can see these errors in Google Search Console, in the "Unparsable Structured Data" report - which is also where you can monitor the success of your fixes that you put in place. To get those fixes, you can use the Rich Results Tester or Schema Markup Validator, however, sometimes this will flag an error that is not immediately obvious to those without technical SEO experience.
It is extremely valuable then, to get a technical SEO audit, so that your SEO can identify these issues and unblock your website from getting those coveted rich results.
Below is the immediate dropoff from November - December 2023.
The resulting dropoff took the number of blocked and un-readable schema from ~5,000 cases down to just 36 by December 2023. As of June 2024, this is now 0.
The reason that this isn't an immediate 5,000 to 0, is because Google needs to re-crawl every page on this site to acknowledge the fix and this can take some weeks.
An important factor here as well is future-proofing the development team's approach to structured data, to ensure that these issues do not happen again.
As an SEO consultant, I build out a bespoke best practice guideline documentation for these teams so that we can set a first-class standard for structured data in the future.
If you would like a technical SEO audit, head over to my SEO services page and get in touch today.