SEO Schema for Recipes – SEO Tips

Have you heard about SEO schema yet? Schema.org is markup that you can apply to your pages and posts to give search engines a better idea of what the page contains as well as get an enhanced looking snippet in the SERPs. You might have seen schema in action before with Google searches you’ve conducted, for example when searching for movies you might have seen detailed info about movie genre, length and main actors and similarly you can use SEO schema for recipes.

This is particularly useful for a client of ours who has an Italian Restaurant in Dublin and so we’ve started to deploy some SEO schema for recipes for them. What I’ll do now is go through main schema you should include for recipes so that your posts or pages have a better chance of being clicked on in the SERPs.

SEO Schema for Recipes – SEO Tips

The best way to explain SEO schema for recipes is to give you a working example and something that you can use and tailor to your own needs. The below is what I use as a template for recipes and just tweak it accordingly.

Once you’ve marked up your recipe with the above recipe schema it’s then time to test to make sure it’s properly formatted and that there are no stray divs messing up the code. You can test your recipe schema using this schema testing tool from Google.

Schema.org for Recipes – Not For…

Like all things that get introduced for SEO they invariably get abused. There are some clear guidelines provided by Google on when not to use schema.org for recipes, they are as follows.

1. The recipe schema markup should be used for just recipes, ie, “green jumper” is not a recipe
2. Recipe markup should be used for just one specific recipe, not a collection of recipes, ie “8 Orange Cake Recipes” is not for this markup.
3. If there is a single review then the name of the reviewer must a valid person or organisation.

Ultimately schema.org gives search engines a better idea of what the content behind the text actually means, or is. By deploying schema for recipes you’re giving your site (and recipes) the best chance of being properly indexed but also the best chance of being clicked on when found in the search results pages. As a WordPress developer and SEO it’s all about the little things and if you can increase your click through rate by utilising some schema markup for your recipes then it should 100% be done!

If you’ve any questions about schema.org for recipes (or any other strand of schema) leave a comment below and happy to help!