Google adds more structured data for organisations

Whether you use an “s” or a “z”, organisational structured data is getting an update this week, as Google gleans more information about the place your website represents.

If you ever needed more information that Google was planning to learn more about webpage not by the content they visibly showed to users, but instead by what the code could tell them, you only need to look at this week’s announcement: more structured data support is on the way.

It’ll be a fun week for the folks over at Schema.org, which have been hosting a whole bunch of prospective additions you can give to your pages and site to tell more story that isn’t just written for everyone to see. There are plenty of ways to add extra data to your page over at Schema, but most won’t be accepted by Google, and whether other search engines use them is very much handled on a case-by-case basis.

Google has already added some more structured data to what it can see this week, so why not some more?

Another surprise addition (that also spells the idea that the search engine is going further down the structured data route), Google is expanding its organisational structured data, which is to say it’s not getting more individual structured data uses, but more expanding what it sees when you provide data for structured data marked up under “Organization”.

Yes, we’re fully aware there’s a “z” there and not an “s” — schema is defined in America, where a z is used as opposed to an s — but that’s not the point.

The real point is that Google will now pick up on additions beyond logo and URL, which it has supported since 2013.

The additions Google now supports in Organization structured data include:

• Name
• Address and locality information
• Contact information including email and phone number, and
• Other business identifiers such as a VAT in places where that matters

All of this is here to help Google understand more about your business, and to expand its Knowledge Graph information about your organisation.

If you need this in your website — and you probably do if you’re improving SEO for a business — it might be time to get cracking, or even updating a WordPress plugin so you can.