This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Mariya from Irinjalakuda, India, who asks:
“How much time does it take for schema to go live on a SERP?”
Great question Mariya, and an easy one to answer.
Schema “goes live” on a search engine ranking position immediately once the search engine has refreshed its current version of the page which includes a crawl and the index updating with the new code. Once this happens the new code with the schema deployed is shown.
For authoritative pages that get crawled and refreshed regularly, it could be a few hours. With newer sites, it could be a week or two. But schema does not help you rank. The job of schema is to help search engines know what the page is about, what is in each section of the page, and in some cases, why the page should be trusted.
A common misconception about schema is that it is a ranking signal or a magic bullet that helps you gain positions algorithmically.
It does not, adding FAQ schema (which was deprecated and is no longer used by Google at least) did not help you get featured in people also ask results. Instead, it would help search engines know when to add relevant questions under your site’s listing in the SERP which extended the depth of a listing.
If your pages are not already ranking, and the content quality is not good, schema isn’t going to help you. If you do have rankings, deploying proper schema may give you more visibility via featured snippets and rich results.
When FAQ schema did exist, the questions nested to your search result would help you stand out from the pack, so some users may click on your listing vs. the one above you because you were more visible.
Schema can also help recipe sites that have high trust and a great UX to get their recipes shown in a carousel.
If you have a page where the video is the predominant content on the page, and the video matches the topic including the title and H1, using video object schema will signal to the search engine that you have a video about that topic. That video may start to show up at the top of the search results, inside a “people also ask”, “things to know”, or videos search result.
That is where schema can help with SEO, but increased rankings from schema on its own are unlikely.
Schema isn’t there to help you rank, it is there to help search engines know:
- What your page is about.
- Who created the content or information within the page.
- Which queries to show your pages for include informational, service and leads, ecommerce shopping, comparisons, and reviews, as well as music, images, videos, sounds, and media.
- The types of visitors may have the best experience with that specific page or a section of the page.
- Where you offer services, the times you offer them, and who they’re best for.
If you’re a local business, you can deploy area served schema to show the area you offer services for. If you operate during specific hours, and modify them for the holidays, this can be shown through schema.
Organization schema lets you associate your brand with your social media channels, reference third parties like wiki data to build associations with what your company or publication offers topically, and allow authors, executives, and others to show credibility if they’re known and notable.
But if your website is not a trusted resource, and your pages do not already rank, schema is not going to help you much. When you do have trust for your website, you still have to hope that the search engine will pay attention to the code and consider it. Knowledge panels for example could be influenced by schema, but also by third-party sites.
One thing I look for, after updating a page is the refresh and discover report in Google Search Console. Discover is when Google is looking to discover new pages, and refresh is when it is looking to see if you’ve updated the content of the page. The report contains a date, which is helpful.
Once it has been refreshed, look to see if any changes are currently showing up in search results. If you modified the title tag, for example, you could see when the new one begins showing, assuming Google doesn’t write its own for you. The same goes for the meta description. I also use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to show when featured snippets and rich results start to populate.
By paying attention to crawl data including discover and refresh, and making sure your site has a good user experience on every page, not just a few, chances are your schema is going to be picked up regularly, and even same day.
I hope this helps answer your question, and thank you for reading.
More resources:
- What Is Schema Markup & Why Is It Important For SEO?
- Extending Your Schema Markup From Rich Results To A Knowledge Graph
- The Complete Technical SEO Audit Workbook
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
