What makes you click a particular result on the Google search results page? Ideally, it should be the matching keywords in the title and a persuasive meta description of what you might be looking for!
But there’s more to that –– SERPs (search engine result pages) have evolved over time to accommodate more and more useful information and it’s easy to get drawn to results that stand out with unique features such as rich markup displayed in the results.
A commonly displayed rich snippets markup, for example, are Stars for ratings and reviews seen for product results. Location and event listings are some other commonly seen rich snippet markups in the search results.
Such rich markup displayed in SERPs is made possible by search engine standards termed Schema.org.
Displaying Schema Rich Snippets
So, why should you care about displaying schema rich snippets?
One of the latest researches points out that more than 36% of the Google search results incorporate Schema rich snippets that attract greater attention and traffic when displayed in the SERPs.
Adding such rich Schema markup helps to code your content in a way that can be understood by the major search engines. Among all other benefits, having a rich markup for your content certainly helps to boost the SEO of your WordPress blog.
Optimising your blog and content with proper schema markup can help you;
- achieve a boost in search engine rankings and
- Increase in organic clicks on search engine results pages (SERP).
First, implementing the Schema markup can help your websites and blog rank better on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A study by Searchmetrics revealed that pages with Schema markup rank better by an average of four positions compared to pages that do not have such markup.
Secondly, adding rich and structured markup can significantly increase your click-through rate (CTR). In fact, several studies have predicted an increase of 30% in CTR with markups such as Schema Microdata, GoodRelations, and Google Rich Snippets.
Despite such highly beneficial facts of rich snippets, it’s hard to believe that (according to a Searchmetrics study) only 0.3% of websites are making use of the Schema markups.
In this post, we will go through some of the popular Schema plugins that can help you add such structured markup to your WordPress blogs. We will also test to see if you have done it correctly to make the rich snippets appear towards the end of the post.
But first, you might want to know more about Schema itself and how it can be useful for SEO purposes.
What is Schema?
Schema (Schema.org) is a structured data standard agreed upon by many search engines. It is a standardised markup language to structure data across web pages.
As you can see on the homepage of Schema.org, the project is sponsored by popular search engines including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex.
Search engines developed the data standards and a collection of shared vocabulary which include a series of tags and properties to mark up your products, reviews, local business listings, etc to understand websites and their content better.
You can easily get started using schema manually by using the documents guide page on the Schema.org website. The website also provides a collection of shared vocabularies that can help you learn more about the different types of schemas and their properties.
Here’s a short video from the Google webmasters team introducing you to the rich snippets.
To further improve your understanding, here are the commonly used schema.org item types:
- Person
- Product
- Event
- Organisation, Places, Business, Restaurant
- Movie, Book, or other creative works
- Review, Rating
A Searchmetrics study revealed Movies, Offers, and Reviews as the most supplied schema rich snippets. See other popular rich snippets in the graphics below.
Schema useful for SEO?
Adding Schema markup adds support to display rich snippets that ultimately makes your results stand out in SERPs. What this primarily does is that it makes your results look appealing to the users in SERPs and thus significantly increases the click-through rate (CTR).
For example, Google uses schema markup to display rich snippets for a WordPress app as shown in the image below. The data for rating stars is from the Google play store for WordPress app listing.
Here’s another rich snippet result for the search results for our WordPress coupons page.
Such rich snippets are visually appealing and thus can account for high click-through rates.
A user has only ten results to choose from (on a single page) and standing out in those results can make a difference even if you do not appear in the first position.
Apart from the study cited towards the beginning of this post from Searchmetrics, there’s little evidence that Google uses this as a ranking factor. Nevertheless, helping search engines understand your content can be beneficial in the long term for your SEO.
Now that you understand what schema is and what it can be useful for, let’s explore some useful Schema WordPress plugins that will enable you to implement it on your website.
Schema Rich Snippets WordPress Plugins
If you followed the guide on the schema.org website, you must have seen how difficult it can be to remember all the HTML elements required for different schema types.
Plugins make it easier to implement schema markup on your WordPress websites. Of course, you can implement the markup manually but it would take a lot of time and effort, especially if you have loads of content on your blog.
I have researched a few plugins that can make adding schema markup really easy to display rich snippets in WordPress. Here’re a few plugins that address most of the schema types.
| Rich Snippet Plugins | Schema Types | Download |
|---|---|---|
| Schema Pro | All Schema Types | Download | Paid |
| WP Rich Snippets | Major Schema Types | Download | Paid |
| All In One Schema.org | Several Schema Types | Download | Free |
| Schema Creator | Main Types | Download | Free |
| Rich Snippets CodeCanyon | Important Schema Types | Download | Paid |
| WP Review Pro Plugin | Reviews | Download | Free |
| WP Product Review Plugin | Product Reviews | Download | Paid |
| WP Post Ratings Plugin | Ratings | Download | Free |
Continue reading for a quick introduction and overview of the plugins listed above.
General Schema Rich Snippets WordPress Plugins
More and more webmasters are looking to implement Schema for rich snippets on their WordPress websites, and as such we have seen several plugins over the years in this niche. We try and keep our guide updated with the latest WordPress plugins built with the latest schema implementation requirements.
First, let’s look into general rich snippets WordPress plugins that work with most of the content (schema.org item) types.
1. Schema Pro WordPress Plugin
Schema Pro plugin is built with the latest schema implementation requirements following the recent Google guidelines for implementing Schema in the right way.
More Information | Download Plugin
The plugin uses JSON-LD technology which ensures the schema markup is search engine friendly and accurate.
Unlike the previous Microdata and RDFa Code implementations, JSON-LD doesn’t require you to display the schema data displayed on posts and pages. The code instead is implemented in the backend without having you display any additional content.
Some of the major benefits of the Schema Pro plugin include;
Google Recommended JSON-LD code: Schema Pro is built with Google Recommended JSON-LD code, a lightweight Linked data format ensuring your markup is search engine friendly and accurate to the standards.
Auto Schema Markup Implementation: Schema Pro makes it really easy to implement Schema markup for all your posts and pages in a few steps. The automated process doesn’t require you to edit every single piece of content on your website to add rich snippets of data. Configure how you want and let the plugin automatically apply it to all your selected posts and pages.
Complete Schema Markup: While most of the plugins focus on one or few markup elements, Schema Pro has full Enhancement and Content-Type Schemas. Both site-wide schemas and content type schemas can be implemented with the plugin.
Third Party plugins Compatibility: Schema Pro works together with the popular Yoast SEO plugin opening up Schema markup options that are not implemented by Yoast SEO. It also has special support for other third-party plugins including ACF and PODS.
Advanced Targeting Features: Several advanced targeting features of the plugin makes it easy to set up rules to implement a particular schema Content Type to selected pages, posts, or categories.
Testing Schema Implementation: Schema Pro allows you to instantly test and analyse your Schema implementation with single click built-in tool.
Overall, Schema Pro is a complete plugin built from the ground to meet complete schema implementation requirements. Give Schema Pro a try.
2. WP Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin
If you are looking for a complete solution for schema markup and rich snippets, look no further than the advanced WP Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin.
More Information | Download Plugin
(WP Rich Snippets is kindly providing 15% OFF on their pricing to our WPism readers. Just use ‘wpism’ on checkout. More information on our WP Rich Snippets Coupon page.)
WP Rich Snippets Plugin provides you with complete tools supporting all popular schema.org markup types. Once you install and activate the plugin, you can configure all the plugin options on an information-rich settings page.
You will see a friendly Rich Snippets post meta box below each post, page, or custom post type that lets you configure the options for markup, review, and rating details.
Besides, WP Rich Snippets Plugin comes with a collection of free and premium add-ons, which adds more functionality and integrations with different content types. Here’re different add-ons available for the plugin that you can use depending on your needs.
WooCommerce Reviews: This latest WP Rich snippets add-on allows you to add rich snippets for your products on your WooCommerce powered e-commerce site.
Shortcodes: The Shortcodes add-on lets you display the rich snippets wherever you want inside your post using the shortcodes.
DataTables: The DataTables add-on makes it possible to display a table of entries based on DataTables jQuery.
Software Specs: If your post or page is about software, this add-on allows you to display rich snippets that include your Software specs and a useful code changelog.
Locations: Locations add-on can be useful for businesses looking to display location-related info and markup in rich snippets. It also makes possible for your location to appear on Google maps.
Box Shortcode: The box shortcode option gives you more advanced options than the simple shortcodes option to help your display the review box wherever you want inside your post or page.
Anonymous User Reviews: If you accept user reviews on your website, you can use this add-on to allow anonymous user aggregate reviews. This makes the Name and Email fields optional for your reviews.
Customizer: The Customizer add-on allows you to change the colors of ratings and link buttons using the default WordPress Customizer.
Front-End Entry Submit: This add-on allows you to enable users submit products and listings on your website.
User Reviews Image: This simple add-on allows you to let your users add an image along with their reviews.
Call-To-Action: This add-on allows you to display a call to action after each review on your page or post
Ranking Table: The ranking table add-on enables you to add a sortable table with reviews for different products.
Display Rating: The display rating add-on allows you to display star rating by filtering content and excerpts.
Compare: The compare add-on makes it possible to display a comparison table for your products with reviews and other details.
Like you see with added options of several add-ons, WP Rich Snippets aims to be a complete solution for your rich snippets needs.
More Information | Download Plugin
3. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin
As its name suggests, this is all in one schema.org rich snippets plugin for WordPress. This plugin makes it really easy to define the schema markup for your WordPress posts.
More Information | Download Plugin
The plugin also highlights the important aspects such as a boost in CTR and improved SEO & ranking benefits.
It is a pretty popular plugin with more than 30,000 active installs at the time of writing this.
The plugin asserts that it supports almost all of the content types released by Schema.org including Review, Event, People, Product, Recipe, Software Application, Video, and Articles.
Once you download and install the plugin, you should see a configuration page as seen below. Here you can define all the settings as per your need.
Now in terms of making use of the plugin, you should fill the meta boxes below each post by choosing the appropriate schema type.
Here’s a simple illustration guiding you to define two important boxes of the plugin.
4. Schema Creator by Raven WordPress Plugin
Schema Creator by Raven is another popular WordPress plugin to add schema markup to your content.
More Information | Download Plugin
Unlike the previous “All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin”, this plugin also outputs the information within the post.
To use the plugin, you need to click on the Schema Creator icon above the rich text editor.
This will initiate a pop-up with a schema creator form as shown in the image below, where you have to choose schema type and fill in the related details before you can insert the information in the post/page.
The plugin thus lets you create schema.org friendly microdata for your content that you can easily insert into your post.
5. Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin CodeCanyon
One general paid plugin that I would like to recommend is Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin, which is available for only $11 on CodeCanyon. The plugin seems to be pretty popular, as it has been purchased by more than 600 at the time of this writing.
Like its description says, the plugin helps you pimp the search engine results of your website. The supported snippets of the plugin include Reviews and Ratings, People, Products, Businesses and organisations, Events, and Music.
The plugin comes with pre-installed shortcodes showing you results for different schema types. This is how you can use the plugin in three simple steps.
Niche Schema Rich Snippets WordPress Plugins
While the above plugins are good for overall usage as they support a variety of schema item types, there are also niche plugins focusing on a specific type of schema markup.
Reviews, videos, and offers are the most common types of schema markups as seen in SERP and there are several plugins focused on just one type of schema markup.
Yoast’s plugin Video SEO for WordPress, for example, that I use with this website adds video schema markup among several other features.
You can search for other specific niche plugins for different schema types but here’re a few other plugins that I want to highlight for review type.
6. WP Review Pro Plugin
WP Review Pro lets you create ratings and reviews that you can show within your post. Apart from the nice and clean reviews, this plugin adds schema markup to your reviews.
The plugin is feature rich, mostly targeting those who want to create review websites. It provides a way to display multiple rating systems in the post that can add the markup required for rich snippets to show up in the search engines.
The plugin is very helpful if you review products on your blog and want to add both the Rating within the post and make it schema complaint.
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7. WP Product Review Plugin
WP Product Review plugin can be really useful if you review several products on your blog or website. The plugin allows you to display ratings, pros and cons, affiliate links, rich snippets and user reviews along with support for the schema markup.
Free Lite Plugin | Download Premium Plugin
The WP Product Review Lite plugin has a free version available to install directly from the WordPress plugins repository. The free plugin is one of the most popular rich snippets plugin used on over fifty thousand WordPress websites.
The premium plugin comes with advanced features such as shortcodes options, review tables, comparison tables, the ability to import Amazon product information and more.
You can also activate user reviews from the General Settings page of the plugin.
8. WP Post Ratings Plugin
Another commonly used plugin just for the post-rating feature is the WP Post rating plugin. The plugin adds a simple AJAX powered rating system for your posts and pages in the WordPress blog.
WP Post Ratings plugin adds a schema markup for Article type by default. There are also instructions to change the default schema to other types in the installation and FAQ section of the plugin page. The plugin is available to download for free from WordPress.org.
Apart from the above two plugins, there are several other ratings and review plugins for other niche that are capable of adding schema markup.
Testing Schema Markup Data
Now that you have installed the plugins and made your content schema markup complaint, you might want to go ahead and test it if you have done it right.
Of course, the results on Google search engine pages for your website won’t change immediately but here’s a tool that you can use to test the structured data of your website.
Head over to the Structured Data Testing Tool from Google Developers to check if your structured data markup can be correctly parsed and displayed by Google in its search results. Enter your URL in the Fetch URL box and click on validate. The tool will validate the rich markup and will let you know under results.
Adding Rich Snippets Manually in WordPress
Additionally, Google also provides another tool called Structured Data Markup Helper that makes it really easy to add structured data markup to the HTML content.
You can just select the data type you want to mark paste the URL and start tagging the content.
The markup helper will then open the content with appropriate data items listed on your right that can be selected and defined as shown in the image below.
Once you are done, you can click on the “Create HTML” button on top and get the HTML code that can be placed manually.
Although convenient, the markup helper tool can be useful only if you are looking to add codes manually. For the rest of us, WordPress plugins are the best way to go!
I hope the article helped you to learn more about Schema Markup and implementing rich snippets on your WordPress blogs.
If you use any other plugins to add rich snippets or have any other feedback, I would really appreciate it if you could drop a line in the comments below.
Schema WordPress Plugins Review Summary
Several WordPress plugins make it possible to add schema information that allows you to display rich snippets in search results.
Once you add the rich snippets to your site, how long before you start seeing them displaying on Google?
Hi Jose,
I don’t have a definite answer for that. I would say it entirely depends on Google.
As per my personal experience, it only took few days for some results of WPism to show rich snippets.
But again, I didn’t have the same luck with few other websites.
All we can do is make our content schema markup complaint and wait to see when results kick in.
indeed.
hi. Please tell me. How can I implement rating star / reviews on a simple html blog, for my articles?
Can it be made without wordpress?
Hi Suzan,
It can also be done without WordPress. You can, for example, use this tool here – https://schema-creator.org/review.php
You can fill in all the details and it will generate you a code that you can then place in your review page. I hope it helps and let me know how it goes.
hi, thanks for reply. Please tell me. About this Review/Rating, should I have already a rating script on my website/blog?
Or I can implement this rich snippets without any kind of Review/Rating star on my website?
If I have 100 articles, how can I implement this code? I copy on every page?
Hi Suzan,
Not sure what you are asking in the first part. But yes, you will need to generate different code for each of those 100 articles (that you want the review schema) and paste them in.
The URL section is not for your entire website, you will need to define it per post.
and I am not sure I understand how it works.
So, I have to put this rich snippets code in each of those 100 articles. This is all?
Do I need to have another Rating/Review form on my pages?
From what I understand from this is that the shortcodes for each page/post then gets placed into the text panel of the editor. Does it need to go at the top or bottom of the HTML code? Or am I missing something?
Hi Michel
You should place it where you want the text to appear.The Shortcodes also add schema markup compatibility.
yes! step-by-step information just make it easy as I am going under my website optimization. I also bookmarked this article.
This is a nice list! I have one question – is it somehow possible to show rich snippets even for a homepage of a WordPress blog? I mean the page, where posts are listed.
Hi Jan,
I have seen many WordPress powered websites showing up with rich snippets for a list of event posts but not exactly for blog posts.
Thank you for the quick reply, Pradeep. What I mean is to show snippets to the blog homepage. Maybe I could go with the manual implementation of snippets directly to the template file index.php.
Yes, it would best if you could implement it manually.
You can use the Structured Data Markup Helper tool
(https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/ ) to generate the codes and then add them to your template.
Thanks for the useful info to rank in google
I’ve read articles regarding adding Schema markup directly to WordPress themes claiming that (at the time the article was written) “currently there isn’t a plugin that’s complete” I also understand I can add code to H1 tags and other per page content. Do I need to?
So, my question is, am I taking full advantage by using a plugin such as the, All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin? Should I be doing more?
Hi David,
Thank you for your comment. I agree that there isn’t a complete plugin to make the most out of Schema markup that is possible.
It’s definitely possible to do more. You can build the markup directly inside the theme (or use one that has good markup) depending on our needs and nature of your website. I guess the plugins are good for all-purpose general schema markup – serving mostly the review niche.
Hi Pardeep,
First, Congratulation for such an interesting article. Actually I am new WordPress user. This is an informative post about ‘how to work schema markup – rich snippets’. I would like to try it on my blog.
Hi Pradeep,
Great article.
Thanks Raj! I am glad, it was helpful to you.
This was very helpful, thank you! Question to which I’m pretty sure I know the answer. For those of us running a blog through WordPress.com rather than self-hosting (guilty as charged) … our only real option is to go through our Webmaster Tools account? I can’t add Plugins and I’m not sure I want to mess with the CSS even if I can get at the right pieces of code through the upgrade. Best,
Brilliant article and something that I am looking to implement on our website on such pages/posts as goo.gl/GbucYS
We sell tickets for shows etc over a range of dates – the venues, dates, show names etc are provided on a sub-domain which website visitors click through to…
is there a schema plugin that will pull the data from a relevant sub-domain url? such as
goo.gl/tp8DmC
to be provided as the rich snippet for the main domain urls…
or does the data HAVE to be on the domain page of the schema?
Thanks for your sharing!
I have a few questions.
I wonder if it is possible that schema markup can be implemented via end-user CMS (GUI)?
Also, any ways that we can insert it dynamically? Or I have to do it on page by page?
If I want to add the knowledge graph, schema markup us only need to be added on the homepage?
Thank you!
I recently red your article and added the rich snippet on my site and boom i see those 5 starts in google search. Thank you guys.
Very helpful and informative post about rich snippet, Thanks for share this valuable knowledge. 🙂
Hi Pradeep,
I used “Adding Rich Snippets Manually in WordPress” and get html, but I don´t know where I put html in my wordpress blog.
Can you help me?
Hello,
I´ve found another schema plugin “WP SEO Structured Data Schema Pro”
How it compares /compete with schema Pro Plugin?
I am trying to find the right one for my site.
Rich Snippets ?
i heard google have removed Rich Snippets few months ago 😐
Thank you for the awesome article but I am having 1 doubt. Can I use multiple schema on the same page? Will, it hurt my SEO? Thank You.
Hi PuGaGo,
This shouldn’t be a problem at all! Of course, Google can decide to display the most relevant schema on its search results.
I’ve been looking into schema markup for quite sometime but can’t find any good articles or advice on how best to implement it for B2B service based websites. I get it for ecommerce sites but what if what you do is a service and each webpage is unique?