WordPress is the most popular CMS online. It not only makes publishing content easier, but it also helps site owners optimize their websites for search. In this video, I’ll share some popular SEO plugins and how you can leverage them to implement schema.org structured data. We will discuss where each excels and what some of the limitations are.

Learn more about Schema.org & Structured Data: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

How to Use Schema.org to Create and Add Structured Data to Your Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQeRA…

Where To Put Schema Markup On Your Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq9Fj…

How to Create and Install Structured Data for Local SEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqcI…

Structured Data Testing Browser Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de…

Video Transcript:

On the latest episode of Hack my Growth, we look at three SEO plugins you can use to create Schema markup for your website. All right, let’s go.

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As I said in the opener, we’re going to be talking about three different SEO plugins you can leverage to add Schema.org structure data to your website. This is really important when it comes to ranking for those rich features in Google search today. Let’s look at which of these plugins you can use, what are some of the capabilities as well as the limitations when it comes to using them on your website?

Okay, so let’s look at three SEO plugins we can use to implement Schema.org structure data onto our website. The first one we’re going to be looking at is Yoast. Yoast can be downloaded from the WordPress plugins tab inside of your site itself, or you can get it in wordpress.org and then upload it. It’s much easier to do it within the backend here of a WordPress site. Go in to plugins and search for Yoast.

Once Yoast is installed, you’re going to see this little icon down here, and to get started with it, you’re going to want to hit “general”. You’re going to want to go through the configuration wizard, and what this is going to do, it’s going to walk you through your site itself to see which type of markup they want to inject into your website. We can give you two different options here. We’re going to go “b” because we’re not indexing this site.

So what’s the purpose of this site? This is where you want to select what your site is about. Is it a blog? Shop? What is it for? In this case, let’s say it’s a small business.

Here is where you’re actually going to be building out your Schema. What Yoast is going to do, it’s going to give you local or organizational schema as opposed to really allowing you to select the different types of structured data you want to add. So Yoast is going to look at it from very broad category, really looking at indexing, your business, improving your business’s visibility in Google’s knowledge graph, making sure that you have the ability to earn a knowledge card. So what you would do here is put in your information, fill it out. You would add your logo here as well. You would also go through and add all of these different profiles that you have: Wikipedia, YouTube, Pinterest, anywhere your site is online. I’m just going to do some test ones here.

What this does, this connects your social accounts to your main organization, your business. It creates a link known as a “same as”, and what this is going to do is say hey, when you see this Facebook page or this Twitter profile or this Instagram URL, it’s actually part of this main business here that we’re talking about. This is maybe where you see something like Microsoft Corporation. You would type, and you’d see this right here, a knowledge card, and you see all their profiles here. This is where that “same as” connections happen, where this information is being pulled into from the structured elements.

Once you fill all that out, you would hit “next. It’s going to walk you through all of the other processes here that have to do with SEO search visibility, authorship. Again, authors could have to do with publishing your content because Yoast will put article markup on your blogs. If you have more than one author, you’re going to want to have more than one author, Schema, or person markup added to your site.

You walk through this entire process, tell it how you want to index, how you want things to work. I don’t want any of this stuff. Thank you very much. Then, that’s it.

Yoast has been configured, and it’s on the website. We can go ahead and open this in a new tab. Now you’re going to want to run this in the rich results test, which is different than the structured data markup tool. This is where Google is moving to now. You want to go ahead and put the website that you’re testing in here or whatever website you just installed Yoast on for your organizational Schema. It’s going to analyze it for a couple seconds, maybe a minute, depending on how large your site is and how many files it’s got to go through. It’s going to tell you if you’re eligible for a rich feature in the search results. It’s almost finished up here, and here you go.

It’s pulling the site link search box, which will say okay, here’s the website, here’s the brand, here’s the description. Here’s the organizational Schema. There’s the same as test that we just put in. It’s got the image object which would have been our logo as well. Everything’s looking the way that it should. It’s also got some search action, stuff that is going to put in there. Like we have search on our site, the ability to pool that into the search results as well. That’s what Yoast did for us. It went ahead and just implemented this straight into the page itself, and now we’re good to go.

Now, this is only covering a very basic level of structured data. It’s only looking at organization. It’s looking at our websites. We have articles and authors. It’s not going to do things like FAQ, how to’s, Q&A’s, reviews. Those things are not something that you’re going to find out of the box with the Yoast plugin. In order to do that, we’re going to have to leverage another plugin. In this case, I would uninstall Yoast and move to the next plugin we’re going to talk about which is SEOPress. Now with this plugin, you’re going to need to upgrade to the pro option in order to really reap the full benefits of Schema markup and structured data.

Once again, if I go to the dashboard, you will have a setup very similar to what Yoast just walked us through previously. Again, we would click get started. It would tell us, okay, do we want to import stuff? I can actually import it from Yoast. If I’m migrating from Yoast over to this tool, I could do that right here which is really nice. It actually allows you to migrate from any of these other WordPress plugins.

Once again, it’s going to help us configure our site. Are we going to use a pipe or whatever? What’s the title tag going to be? Are we a person or an organization? Then you would walk through here and, again, fill out your information. Make sure you have the photo. It’s not as easy here as Yoast was. Yoast just said okay, here you go. Copy this photo. For this one, you’re actually going to have to go to your media bin and pull out the URL of your logo. It’s a little bit of a pain in the butt, not as easy from a user perspective, but it’s also not the hardest thing in the world to do.

Again, going through this setup wizard here. We’ll do this a little bit different just so we know it’s a different plugin. You can add, again, all the same as like we talked about before. Hit continue. It’s going to walk you through the entire SEO indexing and how you want your pages to be shown and the way you want your title tag set up and all that jazz. Configure XML site maps. We’re going to be done because we’re looking at Schema here.

This is putting in, again, the basic markup. We’re talking right now about organizational markup. We haven’t gone any deeper in the other schemas. This is what SEOPress is going to do for you right out of the box. Once again, if you ran this site in to the rich results test, we can see the results that are populating for us.

Something happened a little different here, as you can see. Before we just had the site links search box, which is going to have the same thing we had before, but as you can see, the organizational markup isn’t here this time. Instead, what we had, we had this box here that showed up for logo. In logo now, we have organization, logo, SMA marketing, and then the same as like we had before when it came to the organizational Schema. What SEOPress did is it actually had pulled it out and injected in its own markup while Yoast actually attached it to the site link search box or the website markup which they had. So they added it here while SEOPress added it as its own separate markup. Now SEOPress and Yoast right out of the box, the free versions, will give you this organizational Schema, but if you spend $39, what you can do with SEOPress is quite in depth and extremely helpful for adding a number of different markup types to your site.

Once you’ve enabled Pro, you have this box here that opens up, it’s called Schemas, and now I can create a number of different Schema types. I can go article, local business, FAQ, a course, recipe, job, video, events, products, service, software application review, or custom as well. So there’s a lot of different things I can do. For instance, if I’ve got a local business, I can go in here and name the business, and I can pull it straight from the WordPress. It puts that we’ve already put in. When you’re selecting the business type, it’s important that you select one that is pulled from local business Schema.

On Schema.org, they’ve got a list of all the different types of supported local business markup right here. Make sure you choose the one that is most specific to your business. Now, some of these areas, if you click down, there are subsets of these more specific types. Make sure you find the one that is most closely related to exactly what your business does. Again, here with the home and contractors, I can get more specific and say electrician, general contractor, house painter, so on and so forth.

For my business, it would probably fit in professional service, and you have to write it exactly like it is here. You can’t say, for example, professional space service. You have to put it together. In this one, you’re going to want to do a manual text and add that in. Now, again, for this image, you could choose a manual image from the library. You could either upload an image or, once again, just attach it through here. You want to do everything that you can as specific as possible. You’re going to need address here. A lot of the stuff you’re probably going to have to put in manually because you don’t have those values in here.

Once you fill this out, you’ll have a local business markup, and you can do this for a number of different types, which is really helpful here. I’ll fill this out, and then we’ll go and see what it looks like.

Once we fill it out all the way, we’re going to hit update. So it saves this structure data type. In order to enable it on a specific page to really create that specific rule, we need to go into the Pro section of this plugin. Go to our structured data types and check this box right here. In the structure data type, this will allow us to edit any of our Schemas, but also make sure that we’ve got the right logo and everything’s set up in here as well. It’s kind of another level of setup. This is our publisher logo that will be shown when we publish pieces of content and be attached to us as an author. Make sure we save changes here.

We’re going to go over to the contact us page, and I’m going to enable the local business markup. It’s now on the contact us page. I can scroll down here, and you see, we have one automatic Schema that’s associated with it. It’s the local business that we created. Now, if we wanted to, we could actually disable this and create something different if we wanted to through manually, but we don’t. We want to keep it as is. So we’re going to go ahead and hit update. We’ll test this page out. Here’s the contact us page of the site. We could either run it in the rich results test, or there’s this really cool plugin in Chrome, and it’s called Structured Data Testing. You click it, and it runs the test right on the page which is really nice.

You can see here, we’ve got the website and the organizational’s markup, but we’ve also now got this professional service local business markup that this is being pulled from what we just injected using SEOPress. I can click on that, and I can see all the different elements here. Now you can notice that we need to have a telephone. It’s going to tell me when I’ve got a warning or an error so I know exactly what to fix as well. This is a really helpful plugin that can help you when you’re testing and implementing structured data on your website. Highly recommend this plugin. I’ll also have a link to this in our blog post on our website so you can check it out and just download it and enable it. Didn’t create it, but the people who did, did a great job.

That’s one way that SEOPress can do it. You can also do it directly onto a page, just customize wise. Let’s say you had an FAQ or something on this page that you wanted to add. You could do that straight within the SEOPress tool as well. You would go down here, and you would select a manual type. You could say okay which kind do I want to do? I could do an FAQ or a job or a video on that page, and it would just walk you through. What’s the name of the video The description? Everything that you need to do to have that updated, and you can even validate it right here on the page as well.

This is a really flexible plugin. It not only does a number of the things that Yoast does, but this is really one of my favorite SEO plugins that’s available for WordPress right now. I really like the fact that it allows you to easily integrate the main types of structured data that are being used right now in order to help improve our listings on the web.

The next plugin we’re to look at is just called Structured Data for WP & AMP. This one is really 100% for enabling structured data on your website, and it’s pretty easy to use. All you need to do is enable it. Now again, you can start to build out your different structured data types.

Again, just like the other ones, it’s going to have us start here as kind of the setup process. We could choose the type of structured data that we want to do. By default, it’s on this accommodation one. We can also do creative work if that’s what we’re doing. Can have product, place of worship. There’s a lot of different options here. Again, we would do organization in our case. It’s going to walk us through this entire process. Pretty easy to do, just follow the steps as you go through it.

As you can see, after we’ve set up this organization, you’ve got this opportunity to add reviews, which you have to attach using a little of their documentation, but you also are missing a number of other elements like the same as properties or the logo property. Some of the things that were pulling up naturally within Yoast, as well as SEOPress. Now, you can manually modify this, but that ends up being quite a lot of steps. It almost would be easier just to write the JSON yourself and add it to the page instead of walking through this process because it doesn’t even walk through what the next output should be. So for somebody who’s new to structured data, they might not know that, hey, I need to add this or what’s actually important.

Things that you need would be a logo, and you can add a featured image or a manual image or fixed image, all important stuff, but it’s not as intuitive for somebody who’s not used to using this or really wants to automate it as much as possible. If you’re a little more familiar with it, you may find this process very easy to do, but really from a new user standpoint, this one is not as intuitive.

Now, one thing that this plugin does enable you to do right out of the box without having to pay any extra is adding some of that markup directly to the page itself. If you want to go ahead and create your own custom Schema, you can do that here, and it just gives you this box where you can insert through your markup wherever you want. Again, this is really going to be used for somebody who is maybe writing their own JSON-LD code, wants to add it directly into the page and allow them to continue on with their work that way.

If you’re somebody, honestly, more like myself who likes to create their own JSON-LD and inject it directly into the pages, this plugin actually may be something very good for you. It’s not as user friendly from a new person using it wanting to walk through step by step, but it is something that you can do by implementing your own structured data code. So I’m going to get a piece of code. I’m going to inject it into here, and then we’re going to run the rich results test, and we’ll see how it all plays out.

Once we have our code written, we can go ahead and dump it right in here and hit update. Now we can take this, once again, and we can run it through our rich results test. Paste the code in and run it again.

Once again, now we’re going to see this logo box pop up, very similar like we did to the SEOPress example. Organization. Here’s the name. Here’s the URL, the logo, and something I do add is alternative names. Again, that’s going to create a semantic connection so the search engines know that these two things are the same. You’d also want to add social profiles and probably a contact point into your organizational Schema as well. Again, the benefits of this tool is it allows you to inject your custom Schema right into the page.

Building out your structured data types over here, you need to have a little deeper understanding of how structured data works in order to ensure that you have all the correct fields, but overall, this tool is pretty cool.

That wraps up this video on the three SEO plugins that you can use to inject structured data and Schema.org into your website. There’s quite a few other ones out there, a lot more than we covered in this video, but those are three of the most popular right now across the web. If you have any questions on these plugins or how to manually install Schema.org structured data to your website, please comment on this video. If you were using a different plugin, you’ve had some success with that, please share that with us as well. We’d love to have that conversation and continue the growth here on this community.

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