Structured data, without the magical thinking
Schema does not improve rankings. It changes how much of the results page you occupy, which is a different and more useful thing.
Structured data is the most oversold item in search. It has never been a ranking factor, and adding it will not move a page up. What it does is let an engine present your result as something other than a blue link, and let an answer engine read your page as data rather than prose. These guides cover the blocks that are worth adding, where they go, and why rich results still fail to appear when the markup is valid.
The 5 guides in this topic
- Is schema markup worth it?: It is cheap, it is not magic, and one specific mistake with it can cost you a manual penalty.
- How to add schema markup, and how to check it stayed added: Generating the block is the easy half. Knowing it is still on all 200 pages six months later is the half nobody does.
- Schema is valid but no rich result is showing: Valid, eligible and displayed are three different states, and most people conflate the first and the last.
- BreadcrumbList schema: what it is for and how it breaks: The one structured-data type whose entire value is in its contents, and the three ways it silently goes wrong.
- Does FAQ schema still work?: Its rich result was largely withdrawn. It is still worth adding, for a different reason than the one you were sold.