Google itself has published a case study on how Rakuten's home chef recipe service improved results using structured data. According to a Google report, Rakuten started using structured data in 2012, but in 2014 it began to focus on the recipe schema. In 2017, Rakuten worked directly with Google Search to maximize the usefulness of structured data. Rakuten reported that traffic to the recipe page increased 2.7 times, while average session time increased 1.5 times. They believe they have succeeded in the ability of the schema to help users "match more recipes". 3. Double traffic with ItemList schema Alan Bleiweiss shared a traffic comparison before and after this as an example of the dramatic increase in traffic due to the addition of schemas.
Example of traffic increase due to ghost mannequin effect schema Bleiweiss explained that he added the ItemList schema because the page contains a list of items. This was the only change made to a page in the year when its unique pageview more than doubled. Schema.org defines the ItemList schema as "a list of all kinds of items (for example, Top 10 movies about Weatherman, Top 100 party songs"). Do not confuse it with an HTML list that is often used only for formatting. " Bleiweiss knew that the schema itself wasn't a ranking element, and speculated that adding an ItemList could have helped the page qualify as a featured snippet.
This explains the surge in traffic. With full disclosure, Bleiweiss acknowledged that many improvements across the site were achieved in the same year, so this increase cannot be attributed solely to the addition of schemas. In response to that criticism, he provided the following results: This is narrowed down to the two weeks before and after adding the ItemList schema to the page. Before and after adding the schema to the page Bleiweiss added that this page was the only page on the site that had a significant increase in traffic during that period, and Google Search Console showed a dramatic increase in CTR results for test pages over the same period. rice field. advertisement Continue reading below 4.