What Is Structured Data (Schema)?

01What Is Structured Data Used For?

When a person looks at your product page, they instantly understand the price, brand and stock status. A search engine sees numbers and words on the same page and has to work out which number is the price and which is the product code. Schema markup removes that guesswork and presents the information labeled.

The most visible result is eligibility for rich results: the product's price and stock status in the search result, cooking time for a recipe, the date for an event, or a breadcrumb trail showing where the page sits. These extra details make the result more eye-catching.

An important fact: structured data is not a ranking guarantee, and Google always decides whether a rich result is shown. Markup makes your page a candidate for these displays; content quality and the overall health of the site remain decisive.

02JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa

There are three ways to add structured data to a page. Google recommends the JSON-LD format because it is the easiest to maintain. JSON-LD is added as a separate script block without touching the page's visible HTML.

03Price and Stock With Product Schema

On e-commerce sites the most valuable markup is the Product schema. Product name, image, description, brand, price, currency and stock status are conveyed through it. If genuine customer reviews are shown on the site, rating information can be added too.

The rule is simple: every piece of information in the schema must match what is visible on the page. Marking up a rating that is not shown on the page or an out-of-date price violates the guidelines and can lead to a manual action.

• Enter the real price shown on the page in the price field; the 0.00 in the example is only a placeholder.
• For products with variants, the price and stock information of each variant must match correctly.
• Generating this markup automatically at the template level is a feature to ask about when choosing an e-commerce platform.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Handmade Leather Wallet",
  "image": "https://ornek.com/img/deri-cuzdan.webp",
  "description": "Hand-stitched wallet made from vegetable-tanned leather.",
  "brand": {"@type": "Brand", "name": "Sample Brand"},
  "sku": "DC-001",
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://ornek.com/urun/deri-cuzdan/",
    "priceCurrency": "TRY",
    "price": "0.00",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
  }
}
</script>

04Business and Organization Schema

On corporate sites the Organization schema, or the LocalBusiness schema for businesses with a physical address, defines the business name, logo, address, phone, opening hours and social media profiles. It is important that this information matches your Google Business Profile and the site's contact page exactly.

LocalBusiness has subtypes such as Restaurant, Hotel and Dentist; choosing the type that fits your business best makes the meaning clear. For corporate presentation sites, setting this structure up from the start should be a standard step of corporate website projects.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Sample Business",
  "url": "https://ornek.com/",
  "logo": "https://ornek.com/img/logo.png",
  "telephone": "+90-000-000-00-00",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "1 Sample St.",
    "addressLocality": "District",
    "addressRegion": "Province",
    "addressCountry": "TR"
  },
  "openingHours": "Mo-Sa 09:00-19:00"
}
</script>

05Article and Breadcrumb Schema

On blog and news sites the Article (or BlogPosting) schema specifies the headline, author, publish and update dates and the main image. This information helps search engines understand correctly when the content was written and by whom.

BreadcrumbList shows the page's place within the site: Home › Blog › Category › Post. In search results this path can be shown instead of a long URL, which makes the result more readable.

• The author name should be a real person or organization, and if possible linked to an author page.
• The update date should be changed only when the content has genuinely been updated.
• The breadcrumb trail should follow the same structure as the breadcrumbs visible on the page.

06Does FAQ Schema Still Work?

FAQ schema (FAQPage) was very widely used for a time because it showed questions as expandable lists in search results. Google later restricted this rich result to a limited group, such as authoritative government and health sites; for most commercial sites this display no longer appears.

Even so, FAQ markup is a valid schema.org type and helps machines understand the question-and-answer structure on a page. The real value lies not in the markup but in the content itself, which gives clear answers to real customer questions. So write the FAQ section for users, not in the hope of a rich result.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [{
    "@type": "Question",
    "name": "How many days does shipping take?",
    "acceptedAnswer": {
      "@type": "Answer",
      "text": "Orders are usually handed to the carrier within 1-3 business days."
    }
  }]
}
</script>

07Which Schema for Which Industry?

Which schema to use depends on what the site sells and what the visitor is looking for. Rather than adding every possible type to every page, it is more valuable to fill in completely a few types that genuinely match the content.

For hotels, the Hotel type can carry details such as address, contact, amenities and price range. This information must be consistent with the data in the booking system; using the same data on the site and in a hotel software system that takes direct bookings makes that consistency easier. For restaurants and cafes, the Restaurant type can include cuisine type, opening hours and a menu link; keeping the QR code menu page open on the web helps the menu stay current and crawlable.

For service businesses, LocalBusiness and its fitting subtype; for e-commerce, Product and BreadcrumbList; for content sites, Article form the basic structure. Building these types into templates from the start is the clearest difference between SEO-friendly web design and markup added later: as new pages are added, the schema is generated automatically.

08Testing and Search Console Tracking

Always test markup before publishing. Google's Rich Results Test shows which rich results a page is eligible for and which fields are missing or wrong. For general schema validation you can also use the schema.org validator.

After publishing, the Enhancements reports in Search Console list valid and invalid items for types such as product snippets and breadcrumbs. We explain in detail how to read the warnings you see there in our Search Console errors article.

1. Test a sample page in the Rich Results Test, either by URL or as code.
2. Fix critical errors; handle warnings in order of importance.
3. Apply the template to all pages and monitor the Search Console reports.
4. Make sure variable fields such as price, stock and date update automatically.

09Common Mistakes

Structured data errors often come from a single template flaw and affect hundreds of pages at once. That is why the fix is usually made in one place.

• Marking up information that is not visible on the page (hidden ratings, fake reviews).
• Adding the same business reviews to every page as a Product rating.
• Leaving an old price or stock value in the cache.
• Leaving multiple conflicting schemas on the same page.
• JSON syntax error: a missing comma or quote makes the whole block unreadable.