How to Set up Schema for Your WordPress News Website

Are you an owner of a local news website looking to subdue the ever-increasing competition and stand out? After a ton of testing and search engine optimization (SEO), you can make your website content appear in the top results.

But what gives you an additional push, determining that a user is psychologically enticed to click on your post, is schema markup. Schema markup has turned out to give the best results for website owners, sometimes increasing the clickthrough rates (CTRs) to up to 40%.

So, what is Schema Markup?

Schema markup helps to produce those rich results on your post when it appears in the search results on a search engine, like star ratings, video thumbnails, and a detailed description.

A search engine is, by default, optimised to adjust your blog post or article to a relevant schema type; however, if you add schema to your WordPress website, it increases your chances of getting traffic to your website by tenfold.

Schema Markup is not necessarily SEO, but it can help in giving your post an upper boost in search results. Where SEO helps rank your website on google, Schema Markup helps enhance your post’s user interface.

How can Schema Markup benefit a blogger?

Schema is an offsite code that gives search engines more information about the content on your website. The search engine then uses this contextual data to create a more detailed and enticing snippet of your post in the search results.

Different schema types can be used based on the type of content on the website. Rich results produced by different schema markups vary; for instance, it might be star ratings for a recipe or the thumbnail of a youtube video for a makeup tutorial.

It is exceptionally beneficial if you have a news website or blog. Due to the proliferation of similar sites on the internet, the competition is immense. In this case, personalised schema markup can boost your chances of standing out to your target audience.

How to Add Schema Markup to Your WordPress News Website?

Install a suitable plugin to add schema in WordPress

You can install many plugins to help add relevant schema types to your content. Since we are explicitly discussing a news website, Rank Math or Yoast SEO turns out to be the best options for it.

These plugins are famous and recommended by several website owners because they allow for a more personalised rich snippet creation and automatic selection of a suitable schema type based on your website’s content.

Let’s consider Rank Math for this example since most of its more compatible with WordPress, and most of its schema components are free of cost.

Choose the ‘Article’ Schema Type as default for your Website.

When you have Rank Math installed, it provides a step-by-step guide to constructing your website’s basic SEO structure, including selecting the overall schema type for your posts and pages.

Click the Rank Math button on your WordPress and turn on the Schema Type switch. This would enable Google to structure schema automatically on your WordPress website. After that, click on the Tiles & Meta and Posts to set up the default schema type.

A drop-down menu will be available for the Schema Type for posts.

The menu will include several options:

Article
Book
Course
Event
Job Posting
Music
Recipe
Restaurant
Video
Person
Service
Software Application

Here you will select the ‘Article’ type as it best suits a news blog. This would, by default, produce a similar type of rich result whenever you make a post on WordPress.

After this, click on the ‘Pages’ tab and use the dropdown menu to select the ‘Article’ schema type for pages.

The ‘Article’ schema type, additionally, asks for more information regarding the nature of your posts, such as:

A standard article
A blog post
A news article

Here you will select the option ‘News Article.’ It would deliver specific rich results according to your news niche. In the end, click on ‘Save Changes’.

Check your rich results right on the spot.

You can always wait for google’s bots to go through your post and then produce a rich snippet. But who has the patience? Rank Math lets you view some rich snippets under the General tab.