Schema advanced because Google, Yandex, Yahoo and Microsoft wanted it to advance. They agreed on a defined standard to describe web pages as accurately as possible so that search robots can get some help disambiguating web pages on a large scale. We have seen people talk about using schema for conversion optimization – as long as it generates rich results in Google search results pages, businesses can gain some tangible “SERP real estate” and encourage searchers to click to their business page online.

We have also seen people use schemas to structure their data more coherently and re-use it further to improve conversational AI systems such as chatbots, AI apps, and various smart dashboards for analytics purposes. But have you read that there are SEO schema markup solutions that help with crawl budget, deduplication, and disambiguation of intent? No? Then you have come to the right place!

How To Use Schema Markup For Crawl Budget Optimization

Do you have an e-commerce site that hosts thousands or millions of URLs? Many products to manage? Then you will struggle with crawl budget and indexing budget optimization. You can try to control your crawls by smart internal linking, deindexing pages or disallowing certain pages in your robots.txt, but if your pages have a strong backlink profile, Google might decide to ignore your hints and display those pages like any other normal page for online searchers.

One way to optimize your crawl and indexing budget is to mark products that are no longer in stock (OOO) and products that are no longer manufactured. There are two SEO schema markup solutions for this: https://schema.org/OutOfStock and https://schema.org/Discontinued. The first one is for products that are no longer in stock, and the second one is for products that are gone forever (discontinued products).

Personally, I have always wanted to use other ways to control my crawl budget when it comes to product management on an e-commerce site, but in practice I have learned that sometimes there’s too much politics and bureaucracy involved. You have to fight for resources from IT, create detailed financial plans for your projects so management can green light or not, explain the technicalities of using 410 for products that are being phased out… too many complications. Sometimes it really pays to start small, in this case with schema markup, to properly label all your products, whether they are out of stock, discontinued or in stock – that’s the trio that makes your first steps possible.

To sum up, instead of using:

You can easily start by marking up discontinued and out of stock products and let Google figure out which pages are important. The less important pages, in terms of their total value according to the previous list that are marked with the discontinued item availability status will eventually drop off the index over time. Start smart.

How To Do Content And Intent Disambiguation With Schema Markup?

Do you have a blog that targets the same keyword but has multiple web pages? Or do you have a large website that suffers from duplicate content? The truth is that duplicate or near-duplicate websites can rank as long as they serve a different user intent or audience. Some SEO schema markup solutions that can help with this are Audience Schema (BusinessAudience and PeopleAudience), Language Schema Markup, Service and TechArticle for example. Here is how:

Audience Schema Markup

This schema markup is typically used when you want to indicate the audience of your content. For example, in some cases you may want to develop content for a higher level audience such as Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Technology Officers, while in other cases you may want to target specialists at a lower career level (e.g. SEO managers, digital marketing specialists, etc.). In other cases, you want a slightly more general audience that fits perfectly with the PeopleAudience schema, while in other articles you want to target a slightly more specific, professional audience. This is where the BusinessAudience schema markup comes in.

Language Schema Markup

Struggle with hreflangs and disambiguating content between language similar countries like:

This is where the language schema markup comes to the rescue. If you combine all the important language scheme markup attributes such as areaServed, availableLanguage, and alternateName (with the correct language code), you can signal to search engines which content should appear in which places. Again, we learned from practice that implementing hreflang might be more difficult than expected, so we proceeded with language schema markup instead.

Service Schema Markup

Do you offer products and services or only services? Then make sure you markup your pages properly!

The service schema markup is kind of an extension of the Language Schema markup, but has other interesting attributes that you can use to further clarify your content, such as availableChannel, isSimilarTo (other service), serviceType, description and alternateName in particular. All of these attributes can help you design your content around similar services or simply differentiate between them when more than 1 service is offered that is similar to each other.

TechArticle Schema Markup

In our Wordlift blog, there are different types of blog posts: some are more general, some are topic-specific, and some are about the latest technological advances, including scripts or experiments that we regularly run at Wordlift. Although all of these articles are eligible for BlogPosting, we may use the TechArticle scheme so that search engines like Google understand that some articles are much more technical than others. If you find yourself in the same situation, it’s time to play with this scheme

We can also use the schema:about and schema:description attributes to distinguish between similar articles, because in practice more complex concepts require multiple angles to describe them (i.e. multiple blog posts), and doing that in a single blogspot is not the best solution for you in certain cases.

Wrapping It Up

We want to clarify that if you use the right type of schema markup, you can see results in terms of traffic, but also conversions and sales. Designing your content to be understandable and usable is not a trivial task, neither for you as a website owner nor for the search engine bots that have to process it.

​WordLift makes it possible to add and use these specific types of schema markup without adding code or going crazy. You and your team do not have to go through a difficult implementation period alone, especially given the fact that more complicated schema markups have yet to be created, as more complex, industry-specific examples are not shown in the schema markup tabs at Schema.org.

There is nothing more powerful than utilizing what you have on your side in the first place. Do you want to learn how you can bring your business to the next level? Book a demo.

Other Frequently Asked Questions

What is the use of schema markup in SEO?

SEO schema markup solutions are used to structure your content on your website, but are also helpful in managing language, audience and crawls.

How do I find schema markup?

The official site for schema markup is Schema.org, where you can find available markups in the schema’s tab. However, we make sure to cover interesting questions about them in our blog that are not answered in online forums or on the Schema.org website itself.

What are the types of schema and how many types of markup are there?

There are many types of SEO schema markup solutions, probably over 100+ on schema.org but some common include the LocalBusiness, Person, Product, Offer, Organization, BreadcrumbList, OpeningHours and so on.

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