Does Structuring Data Alone
Add Value to Your Site?

by DRM2

NYTimes

Help Google help you. That is the philosophy around Schema.org and structured data on your website. The question is, how much value is there in structuring your data? I’ve talked to a number of developers that want to charge a lot to build schema into existing templates. Is that cost worth it? If you did no other on-page optimization to a website, what benefit would you receive? Would your site see more traffic from Google with this change alone?

The New York Times had an internal digital innovation document leaked last week with over 90 pages of the NY Times having a heart-to-heart conversation with themselves. On page 44, they drop this little nugget:

“Just adding structured data, for example, immediately increased traffic to our recipes from search engines by 52 percent.”

Which goes to show the easier you make it for Google to understand the data on your site, the more benefit you’ll receive from them. This is one of the only examples I’ve seen where structuring data lead to a direct increase in traffic while presuming little to no other optimization efforts were in play. Did this happen because they are the Times, or would other sites see relative increases in traffic by just structuring the data? If you have other examples of the benefit of structuring data, please share in the comments.