Here’s how to test your schema markup, so you can be sure it is working and search engines are able to understand your webpage content with the schema code applied.
What is Schema Markup?
Schema markup is an important technical element of website pages.
It is recognised as a ranking factor because search engines use schema markup to help understand the topic of a website page which helps search engines to display on results pages that are relevant to users search queries.
You can mark up every page on your website with relevant schema markup including product pages, articles, Q&A pages, FAQ content and more if you know how the schema vocabulary works.
If you ordered a Lemonade from a vending machine but got Cherry cola you’d assume there was something wrong with vending machine.
Schema is the language search engines use to understand websites and help ensure you get the right search results relevant to the query you have inputted.
How to Test your Schema Markup
Testing the schema markup on your website is much easier than it sounds and because most websites CMS systems can implement structured data for you, however many don’t and customisation options for templated schema markup can be limited.
Check your schema code by navigating to the schema.org validator tool and enter your URL or add a code snippet to test what schemas you have running on your webpages.
You should see the types of schema you have running and the elements that each schema script references.
Is there a Google Schema Checker?
Google previously had a structured data markup validator of their own. However, this was replaced in favour of the schema.org validator.
Google instead offer a rich results testing tool that can help you understand which of your pages are eligible for rich results.
You can also check the schema markup applied to pages individually or in bulk using Google search console.
Use the inspect URL feature to check individual pages (it resembles a search bar at the top of the page) or scroll down to the indexing section to see details on video page schema, product structured data markup and more.
Look Out for Errors in Google Search Console
Another way that you’ll find errors with your schema is through Google Search Console errors and warnings.
You might get an email informing you of issues with schema on important elements or you could check google search console enhancements where critical page elements are flagged with warnings if there are issues.
Need Help with Your Schema Markup?
Would you like more help with your schema markup strategy? Are you struggling to get to grips with creating relevant schema for your website pages? Are you having trouble getting your schema markup to validate?
Try our, how to write schema markup course which will give you specific examples and instructions to help you develop an d publish valid, relevant and useful schema for your pages.
If you’d rather we wrote schema for you, check out our schema markup writing service to bespoke schema delivered digitally to you for your website when you need it.
by Ben Ullmer
