Structured vs. Unstructured Data — What’s Best for SEO?

Structured vs. unstructured data: which one is better for SEO?

The answer for TL;DR – structured data is the best option for SEO.

There you have it!

Want to know why?

Keep reading this article till the end.

Even though structured data is gaining popularity, the SEO ecosystem still has a long way to go. In fact, 56% of companies are still not employing structured data for SEO.

Image via Semrush

For you, as a marketer, this means that you have an opportunity to improve your SEO and gain an edge over your competitors.

In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about structured vs. unstructured data, as well as semi-structured data. You’ll also discover how to use them to improve your search ranking.

Let’s get started.

What Is Structured Data for SEO?

Structured vs. unstructured data plays a crucial role in how search engines interpret website content.

Structured data, also known as schema markup, is a standardized format for organizing information on a webpage.

It helps search engines interpret and categorize website content more efficiently, making it easier to display rich search results, like featured snippets, knowledge panels, and product listings.

Unlike unstructured data, structured data follows a predefined format with clearly labeled elements. This makes it machine-readable and easily processed by search algorithms.

Schema.org is a primary resource for structured data. It’s a collaborative platform that offers a standardized list of schema definitions supported by all major search engines.

Schema.org provides a blueprint for managing structured data and turning unstructured data into searchable formats.

Here is an example of the schema used to structure the unstructured web page data:

Image via Google

The best part about structured data for SEO is that you don’t need coding knowledge to create schema markups. In fact, you can quickly generate schema for any type of data using our schema markup generator.

Examples of structured data:

• Names
• Professions
• Dates
• Area pin codes
• Email addresses
• GPS location coordinates

There are several advantages of using structured data, including higher click-through rates, increased search visibility, faster indexing, and voice search dominance.

What Is Unstructured Data?

Unstructured data refers to information that lacks a predefined format, making it more complex to analyze and categorize than structured data.

This type of data includes text documents, social media posts, emails, images, audio files, and videos. In fact, most of the data produced every day is unstructured.

Despite its challenges, unstructured data is invaluable. It provides qualitative insights, helps businesses understand customer sentiment, and fuels artificial intelligence models for predictive analytics.

Companies are increasingly leveraging machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to extract meaning from unstructured data, improving data management and decision-making.

Search engines like Google have been attempting to comprehend unstructured data for a long time. One way they do so is by sending bots to crawl websites and understand their content. They are constantly improving at this, but unstructured data is still hard to comprehend.

Examples of unstructured data:

• Text documents, including PDFs, chats, and presentations
• Social media data, like posts and comments
• Audio files, images, and videos

There are many instances where we produce unstructured data. When you take a picture, send an email, or create a voice note, for example.

However, when it comes to SEO, you must always keep structure in mind. That’s because without it, Google might have a difficult time figuring out what your webpage is about.

Ultimately, while structured data helps search engines categorize content, unstructured data enhances engagement by providing rich, natural, and diverse content.

So, even if you don’t use structured data, semi-structured data, such as meta descriptions, headers (H1s, H2s), and alt text, can improve SEO performance and data organization.

Image via Attrock

What Is Semi-Structured Data?

Semi-structured data is a hybrid between structured and unstructured data.

Unlike fully structured data, which follows a predefined format, semi-structured data contains tags, attributes, and metadata. These help categorize and organize information.

While semi-structured data lacks the rigid schema of traditional databases, it still provides enough context for data management and retrieval. Most digital content falls into this category.

Since unstructured data requires additional effort to analyze, semi-structured data bridges this gap. It makes unstructured information more accessible to both business users and data scientists.

For example, an image file alone is unstructured, but when it includes metadata like alt text, geolocation, and timestamps, it becomes semi-structured. Similarly, an email contains unstructured content, but fields like sender, recipient, and subject line provide structure.

Examples of semi-structured data are:

• Images with metadata like alt text, resolution, and date
• Emails that combine textual content with structured attributes like subject lines, recipients, and sending dates
• Zip files containing organized/grouped data with some organizational structure
• HTML and XML web pages with headers, metadata, and semantic markup

Data scientists often work with semi-structured data to bridge the gap between raw, unstructured content and analytics-ready information.

For website owners, implementing structured vs unstructured or semi-structured data can be the difference between being invisible or discoverable in search results.

Pro Tip: Use on-page optimization tools like Surfer SEO and Yoast to ease the content structuring process for better search engine visibility.

What Is Schema.org and How Can It Help Structure Data for SEO?

Structured data, in the broadest sense, refers to a format of storing data in an organized manner. However, in the context of SEO, structured data refers to one thing: Schema.org markup.

Now, while Schema.org is the most popular and trusted SEO-fluent markup vocabulary, it’s worth noting that it isn’t the only one.

There are websites like Microformats.org that facilitate markup for specific data sets. Attrock’s Schema Markup Generator also easily and efficiently generates multiple schema types, helping improve search and rich results visibility.

What is Schema.org?

An initiative to build a better semantic web, Schema.org is a community founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. The four search engines collaborated to develop schema vocabularies for structured data markup across the internet.

Marketers and website developers can easily participate in this initiative thanks to a common vocabulary consisting of schema.org types and properties.

Formats Supported by Schema.org

JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa are the most commonly used structured data markup languages and all are available on Schema.org.

Let’s get a quick look at the top three structured data markup languages for SEO:

• JSON-LD – Because it's lightweight and simple to add, JSON-LD can be inserted into the header of your website without disrupting anything. Google also prefers this format.

• Microdata – Google phased out this format in favor of JSON-LD due to its frequent failures. Because the structured data is integrated into the main HTML of a page using this format, it is more likely to cause a page to crash if it’s not implemented properly.

• RDFa – In HTML5 documents, RDFa publishes data linked using HTML5. Google does not prefer this option.

Pro Tip: Use JSON-LD data format, as it’s preferred by most search engines.

What Is Structured Data Used for in the Context of SEO?

Here are some of the common use cases of structured data for SEO.

Knowledge Panel

When you search for a person, place, or company on Google, you will come across a knowledge graph or knowledge panel — a comprehensive summary of data sourced from reputable sources.

Image via Google

Having Google create a knowledge panel for your brand is out of your control. However, once they do, you can control the data they share by connecting them to structured data on your site.

You can click on “suggest an edit” to instruct Google on what information you want to be displayed on the panel.

Image via Google

Rich Snippets

Google provides rich results that go beyond the standard blue link. A carousel, an image, or other non-textual elements can be included as part of a rich result.

Here’s an example of rich snippets on Google SERP. See how they stand out.

Image via Google

Do not confuse rich snippets with featured snippets. Both are different in context and SERP placement.

There can only be one featured snippet for a search query, and that too when Google considers your content so valuable that it displays it at the top of the search results, like this:

Image via Google

Google determines the most valuable content to display for featured snippets without the use of structured data. Instead, factors such as clear and concise content, well-organized information, and how effectively a page directly answers a question are more influential.

Rich Cards

Structured markup is used in rich cards to display SERP content in a more engaging and visual format. The focus is on delivering a better mobile user experience than rich snippets.

Just like rich snippets, rich cards are built on schema.org. They appear like this on the SERP:

Image via Google

For instance, if you have a recipe site, you can create a visual representation of each dish on the site to build a richer preview. Users who are searching for a recipe will be able to find it right away, thanks to this visual format.

However, we recommend using both rich cards and snippets to give users a comprehensive web browsing experience.

Interactive Search Results

Google Search also supports a more interactive and enhanced type of rich result known as enriched search results.

A very common example of an interactive search result featuring an immersive pop-up experience or other advanced interaction technology is the results for ‘jobs in an area.'

Image via Google

Google uses structured data to create an advanced filter feature that includes thousands of websites.

If you want your job result to appear in this location, you must include the appropriate markup and ensure it is as comprehensive as possible. This also applies to results for recipes, events, etc.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

An Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) is a lightning-fast and mobile-oriented version of your web page that can be substituted for the original page in mobile search results.

Image via Google

Google Search can show AMP pages as rich results, just like other web pages. To help Google comprehend your web page better, you need to add structured data to it.

However, Google doesn’t guarantee that using structured vs. unstructured data, for instance, will result in a favorable outcome in search results. For more info, see Google’s Structured Data General Guidelines.

Structured vs. Unstructured Data: A Comparison

Structured data is predefined and can be arranged in a spreadsheet like a date, name, address, barcode, and other similar data.

Unstructured data, on the other hand, refers to raw information captured in its initial form (like text files, photos, audio files, etc.)

Here is a quick comparison of structured vs. unstructured data:

Now that we’ve compared structured vs unstructured data, you know that the former is generally better. Now, let’s learn how to use structured data for SEO.

How to Use Structured Schema Markup for SEO

Here is a step-by-step process on how to use structured data for SEO:

1. Open our schema markup generator tool (it’s free to use) and select the data type you want to use.

2. Then, fill in the page elements and assign tags.

3. When you fill in the details, the HTML is generated in real-time. You can copy the HTML and add it to your web page. You can also choose a format, though we recommend JSON-LD.

That’s it.

FAQ

Q1. What are the most common types of structured data or schema markups?

A. The following are the most commonly used schema markups for structured vs unstructured data:

• FAQs schema markup
• Recipe schema markup
• Breadcrumbs schema markup
• Video schema markup
• Event schema markup
• Organization schema markup
• Article schema markup
• Person schema markup
• Product and offer schema markup
• Local business schema markup

Q2. Structured vs. unstructured data — what’s the difference?

A. Here is a comparison of structured vs. unstructured data and their key differences:

• Nature – Structured data is quantitative in nature, whereas unstructured data is qualitative.
• Searchability – Structured data is quick and easy to search for, whereas unstructured data is complex.
• Analytics – It’s easier to analyze structured data than it is to analyze unstructured data.

Q3. What is structured data used for in SEO?

A. You can use structured data formats for the following SERP features:

• Knowledge panel
• Rich snippets
• Rich cards
• Interactive search results
• AMP

Q4. What is Schema markup?

A. Schema markup is a semantic vocabulary of tags added to HTML that helps search engines understand the meaning of content on web pages. It’s a specific type of structured data that follows Schema.org standards and enhances search results with features like rich snippets and knowledge panels.

Q5. What are examples of unstructured data?

A. Here are some examples of unstructured data:

• Text documents, including PDFs, chats, and presentations
• Social media data, like posts and comments
• Audio files, images, and videos

Wrapping Up

When weighing structured vs. unstructured data for SEO, structured data clearly offers distinct advantages. Implementing schema markups will help your search results stand out on SERP and attract more clicks.

With today’s user-friendly tools, leveraging structured data for SEO has never been easier. Don’t miss this opportunity to improve your search performance.

Ready to optimize both data types effectively? Our search engine optimization services can help you execute the perfect strategy.