SEO tip: Avoid losing the top spots on the SERPs to your competitors because of your bad structured data.
Implementing and maintaining your structured data correctly is important to get an edge over your competitors in search results.
If your website markup has errors, crawlers will not be able to understand it properly, and you may run the risk of losing the chance of gaining rich snippets and getting more favorable rankings.
The good news? It’s easy to diagnose and fix these issues. Here’s how:
Step 1. Open Semrush and run a Site Audit
Just input your domain and after the audit is done, you’ll see a full dashboard with your site health score, errors, warnings, and other vital SEO metrics.
(here I used a client domain and blurred it for confidentiality)
Step 2. Expand the “Markup” tab to diagnose any structured data issues
You’ll see the markup score – which is based on the “Invalid structured data items” check and uses the Site Health algorithm.
In the Pages by Markup Type, you’ll see how many of your website pages use a specific markup type. Only pages with a “200 OK” HTTP status code are considered when determining the total number of pages.
At the bottom, you’ll find the Structured Data Items chat – this shows all of the structured data items discovered on your website. The list is sorted based on the number of pages with invalid items.
Step 3. Click through to any invalid items to see what pages need to be fixed (and how)
Step 4. Go through step-by-step and fix the structured data issues
You can expand the “Affected Fields” for every result and see a description of the issue.
Then in the Actions tab, click the icon that looks like this: </> to be redirected to the Rich Results Test tool in Google Search Console. Here you can preview how your result will look in the SERP.
You can also run a simulation of your updated code in the tool to see how it will change the appearance of the rich search result.
Step 5. Either update the code on your site or send the task to a developer
You can send the task directly from Semrush, either to the Semrush CRM, your Trello board, or through Zapier.
And that’s it! Repeat this process for all of the structured data issues you have so you can be sure you have rich snippets that stand out from competitors.
-Jeremy
Thanks to Semrush for partnering with me on this strategy breakdown! You can run your own Site Audit here.
