Which schemas do I need?

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From time to time, people ask me what schemas I would recommend. The answer is: you need to decide that yourself. Since Structured Data is part of technical SEO, it depends on your plans on your overall holistic SEO strategy. Here are a few tips.

The first thing I would do is to check Googles search gallery for Structured Data. It shows you what Schemas do show a Rich Snippet in search results.

If you don’t know what Rich Snippets are, please take my Structured Data Course. It’s free and you’ll learn a lot about the whole thing.

Once you’ve read through the search gallery, you should decide what kind of Rich Snippets you want to have in search results.

For example: if you have business (which most of my customers have), the Organization schema would fit. If you have a local business, you can use LocalBusiness instead.

If you have a website that publishes recipes, you can work with the Recipe schema.

But don’t overdue it! A page about a recipe should inherit the Recipe-Schema. It should not contain other “main” schemas like “Article”. However you can use BreadcrumbList, Organization, etc. side-by-side. Find out more about this topic in the following blog post: How many rich snippets can be displayed simultaneously?

2. Other schemas

Of course, schema.org has a lot more to offer. Because of the fact, that other schemas are not listed in Googles search gallery doesn’t mean that search engines cannot crawl and/or index it.

For example I have a customer who writes about beaches and uses the schema.org/Beach schema to declare that the post is all about a certain beach.

Check out the full list of all schemas on schema.org. SNIP supports all of them. So you’re free to use that one “Thing” that helps you most.

How do I start?

I almost always recommend to watch the Structured Data training as it explains everything that I’ve written above in a video. It also shows how you can use SNIP to build certain schemas.

In version 2.x you can install some predefined snippets that come shipped with the plugin. If you missed to install them, then re-install them. You can work with them as a starting point.

With the import functionality you can also just import snippets from the snippet archive and use them as a starting point.

Also use the search below to search for certain FAQ articles that may help you: