Have you noticed that, over the years, search engines have been changing the way they show you the results of your search? These results are becoming more visual, notable, and clickable. Which means that it really pays off to be one of these results! The good news is that you can increase the chance of getting these rich results for your website by using structured data. The great news is that we’re launching a free training course about structured data next week! Because we know that this topic can be hard to grasp and we want to help you become one of those attention-grabbing search results.

Before we start: if you sign up for a (free) Yoast SEO academy subscription, we’ll automatically add the Structured data for beginners training course when it’s out:

Using structured data is incredibly important for SEO and it will become even more important along the way. But to a lot of people, implementing structured data can feel quite daunting. That’s why we want to make it easy for you, both by helping you easily add structured data with Yoast SEO and by launching a training course to increase your understanding of the topic. But let’s start by explaining what it is and why we believe you should use it.

Why do you need structured data?

To put it simply: structured data is a way of describing your site so that search engines can easily understand it. By adding structured data to your site, you’re allowing search engines to understand the contents of your pages better than they do now. You might be thinking: “My site is already easy enough to understand, so I don’t need this”. But structured data isn’t going anywhere and it’s getting more important by the day. And if your competitors have it, it could give them an advantage over you.

Even if search engines already have an idea of your site’s content, using structured data helps them present your pages in the form of rich results. Making them more noticeable and attractive to click on, boosting your visibility and number of site visitors! There are lots of different rich results, showing products, reviews, recipes, events and even your business. Which rich results you could get all depends on the type of business and content you have. But to give you an idea of what we’re talking about, here’s an example of what rich results can look like when you do an online search for a good recipe for homemade ice cream:

Because these pages use structured data, Google was able to understand that they had a recipe on them right away. A recipe for homemade ice cream, the type of result the user was looking for. Therefore, Google feels confident to show these pages as a rich result, with ratings, images and at the top of the result page. Making this a very notable result that will be more likely to catch the eye of a user.

Let’s have a quick look at another example, this time the rich results you can get when you do a mobile search on the words home activities. As you can see, Google realizes that the searcher is looking for actual activities to and not only shows fitness videos you can watch at home, it also shows upcoming fitness classes such as a Boxing Workout:

As I mentioned before, there are lots of different rich results and they often depend on the type of content you offer. This means that implementing structured data to get those rich results is a good idea for any business, including yours!

What can you expect from this course?

This course will be all about the basics of structured data. That’s why we’ll start by giving you the foundational knowledge you’ll need to get started. After that, we’ll show you how to add structured data to your site using Yoast SEO. It’s easier than you think, and you don’t have to be a developer to know what’s going on. With this course, you will be able to use structured data without touching any code. You’ll learn:

• why you need structured data to improve the search appearance of your site;
• what concrete results adding structured data to your site can bring you; 
• how to use Yoast SEO (+ add-ons) to add structured data to your site.

This training course consists of several modules that will guide you through the world of structured data. Every module consists of several lessons. Each lesson contains videos, in which our SEO experts explain everything you should know. These videos are accompanied by reading materials in which we explore the topics discussed more broadly.

To complete a lesson, you take a short quiz about the material discussed. This way, you’ll know for sure whether you understand the theory and are able to put it into practice. Finally, once you’ve finished the course, you’ll receive a Yoast certificate and a badge that you can proudly display on your website.

In short, this course will help you gain the knowledge to confidently use structured data to get your site in those great looking rich results!

When can you get started?

We’re adding the finishing touches to our training course as we speak. Our Structured data for beginners course will be launched next week. That’s just a few more days before you can get started. And don’t forget that it’s free! So get started with this course the moment it’s launched, I can’t wait to see all of your awesome rich results in the search engines.

Stay up to date on the release of this training course by signing up for our newsletter under this post, or read more about the use of our Yoast SEO blocks to get rich results.

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