To continue with our series of one task you must do in your 2014 online marketing campaign, we come to a slightly technical one… but don’t worry you will be able to complete it on your own and we’ll explain how.
So we want you to implement structured data & schematic markup, but only on your company address as a starting point and although it sounds frightening its easy to do, heres how
Before we tell you how to achieve this, lets tell you why we think its important. With the introduction of Hummingbird, Google is producing more knowledge panel search results. These are typically populated with structured data as its presented in a way Google understands, so to start this process with something easy will set you on the right path.
So this mark up is basically a piece of code that tells Google that your data “020 8090 2229” is a telephone number and that “London” is the city you are in, its that simple. Now if you are happy to put this into your website html yourself the code looks like this (This code taken straight from the Google Webmaster Tools help Section)
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization”>
<span itemprop=”name”>My pizza place</span>
Located at <div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>123 Main St</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Albuquerque</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>NM</span>. </div>
<img itemprop=”logo” src=”http://www.example.com/logo.png” />
Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”>206-555-1234</span>
<a href=”http://pizza.example.com/” itemprop=”url”>http://pizza.example.com</a> </div>
But if that lot scares you then Google had provided us with a simple tool that produces the code for you – you do need to be logged into your account for this but if you go here then you will find a mark-up helper that will do the job for you. Choose the local business and simply enter your url (remember the http:// part) hit ‘start taggiing’
The tool will then present you with your webpage – highlight the relevant areas and pick the category they fit to. When complete Google will present the code to you so that you can copy and paste it into your website.
This maybe something that you won’t want to take on yourself, but it is worth the effort (or money) to get someone to do it for you. At least then you know that you have started the process with the right mark up for your local marketing!