How Structured Data is Being Used to Increase Political Announcement Visibility
When prospective voters are looking for an individual’s political campaign, there are a few places they are likely to turn. While news outlets across the internet serve as a great place to check out current political announcements, political campaigns must begin to look at enticing prospective voters to visit their site directly from Google. But the key is knowing how to make your political visibility stand out from the rest.
Using structured data is a quick SEO win for delivering those “rich results” to achieve high visibility. By using paid search advertising or attempting to climb the rankings within organic search, structured data can heighten your political announcement awareness.
What is Structured Data?
Structured data is code in a unique format – schema – that gives search engines additional information about your page. Search engines such as Google read the code to understand the contents of a page better and use it to display search results in richer ways.
Defining Schema
On the internet, the language of structured data is schema.org. Schema is an extensive collection of pieces of code. Founded by the big search engines Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, schema is the democratic library of vocabulary for the internet. Vocabularies are used to power rich, extensible experiences for individuals browsing the web. Having a shared language makes it easy for developers and webmasters to decide on a schema to achieve maximum benefits for their efforts.
Why is Structured Data Important for SEO?
Structured data is crucial for SEO. It makes Google’s life way easier in understanding what your website and its pages are about. Using structured data is essentially like striking up a conversation with Google, becoming friends, and telling it all your secrets. Opening up to Google will benefit many areas of your site by creating:
- Rich Snippets: Proper implementations of structured data can increase a website’s click-through-rate.
- Knowledge Graph: With the inclusion of structured data, no longer do you need a Wikipedia page to get a knowledge graph for an individual or brand. A knowledge graph provides panels as boxes that appear on Google when you search for people, brands, places, and organizations. The graph creates structures to properly categorize and tag the content produced from your site. It allows users to discover you without even having to click on your webpage.
- AMP, Google News: Using structured data allows a site to enjoy the benefits of being “newsworthy” when you release new information. Your article or announcement will pop up in the Top Stories slider displayed on search engines if your markup has successful inclusion into AMP or other programs such as Google News.
How Can Structured Data Increase Political Announcement Visibility?
Political campaigns can use structured data to entice prospective voters to visit their site directly from Google. Google encourages webmasters to markup data from addresses to reviews, and more. There are two ways structured data can play a role in your political campaigns and announcements.
- Add the SpecialAnnouncement data type to your web pages. This is a highly recommended form of making an announcement. It is long-term, can be updated, and detailed.
- Submit announcements in the search console. if you do not have access to your site’s HTML, or you need to submit an announcement quickly. These announcements are short-lived and will expire within a month of posting.
Using these two types of structured data can increase the awareness surrounding your political announcement over the competitions.
Are you seeking ways to use structured data in your digital campaign to heighten awareness around a political announcement? Our digital strategists at Kraus Marketing are ready to collaborate with you to create meaningful statements for all to see. Contact us today to get started! Your search results will thank you.