For many years we have been recommending the use of structured data on websites to enable a richer search experience. When you add markup to your content, you help search engines understand the different components of a page. When Google's systems understand your page more clearly, Google Search can surface content through the cool features discussed in this post, which can enhance the user experience and get you more traffic.

We've worked hard to provide you with tools to understand how your websites are shown in Google Search results and whether there are issues you can fix. To help give a complete overview of structured data, we decided to do a series to explore it. This post provides a quick intro and discusses some best practices, future posts will focus on how to use Search Console to succeed with structured data.

What is structured data?

Structured data is a common way of providing information about a page and its content - we recommend using the schema.org vocabulary for doing so. Google supports three different formats of in-page markup: JSON-LD (recommended), Microdata, and RDFa. Different search features require different kinds of structured data - you can learn more about these in our search gallery. Our developer documentation has more details on the basics of structured data.

Structured data helps Google's systems understand your content more accurately, which means it’s better for users as they will get more relevant results. If you implement structured data your pages may become eligible to be shown with an enhanced appearance in Google search results.

Disclaimer: Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly. Using structured data enables a feature to be present, it does not guarantee that it will be present. Learn more about structured data guidelines.

Sites that use structured data see results

Over the years, we've seen a growing adoption of structured data in the ecosystem. In general, rich results help users to better understand how your pages are relevant to their searches, so they translate into success for websites. Here are some results that are showcased in our case studies gallery:

• Eventbrite leveraged event structured data and saw 100% increase in the typical YOY growth of traffic from search.
• Jobrapido integrated with the job experience on Google Search and saw 115% increase in organic traffic, 270% increase of new user registrations from organic traffic, and 15% lower bounce rate for Google visitors to job pages.
• Rakuten used the recipe search experience and saw a 2.7X increase in traffic from search engines and a 1.5X increase in session duration.

How to use structured data?

There are a few ways your site could benefit from structured data. Below we discuss some examples grouped by different types of goals: increase brand awareness, highlight content, and highlight product information.
1. Increase brand awareness One thing you can do to promote your brand with structured data is to take advantage of features such as Logo, Local business, and Sitelinks searchbox. In addition to adding structured data, you should verify your site for the Knowledge Panel and claim your business on Google My Business. Here is an example of the knowledge panel with a Logo.

2. Highlight content If you publish content on the web, there are a number of features that can help promote your content and attract more users, depending on your industry. For example: Article, Breadcrumb, Event, Job, Q&A, Recipe, Review and others. Here is an example of a recipe rich result.

3. Highlight product information If you sell merchandise, you could add product structured data to your page, including price, availability, and review ratings. Here is how your product might show for a relevant search.

Try it and let us know Now that you understand the importance of structured data, try our codelab to learn how to add it to your pages. Stay tuned to learn more about structured data, in the coming posts we’ll be discussing how to use Search Console to better analyze your efforts.

We would love to hear your thoughts and stories on how structured data works for you, send us any feedback either through Twitter or our forum.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate

Today we are rolling out support in Google Search’s AMP web results (also known as “blue links”) to link to signed exchanges, an emerging new feature of the web enabled by the IETF web packaging specification. Signed exchanges enable displaying the publisher’s domain when content is instantly loaded via Google Search. This is available in browsers that support the necessary web platform feature—as of the time of writing, Google Chrome—and availability will expand to include other browsers as they gain support (e.g. the upcoming version of Microsoft Edge).

Background on AMP’s instant loading

One of AMP's biggest user benefits has been the unique ability to instantly load AMP web pages that users click on in Google Search. Near-instant loading works by requesting content ahead of time, balancing the likelihood of a user clicking on a result with device and network constraints–and doing it in a privacy-sensitive way.

We believe that privacy-preserving instant loading web content is a transformative user experience, but in order to accomplish this, we had to make trade-offs; namely, the URLs displayed in browser address bars begin with google.com/amp, as a consequence of being shown in the Google AMP Viewer, rather than display the domain of the publisher. We heard both user and publisher feedback over this, and last year we identified a web platform innovation that provides a solution that shows the content’s original URL while still retaining AMP's instant loading.

Introducing signed exchanges

A signed exchange is a file format, defined in the web packaging specification, that allows the browser to trust a document as if it belongs to your origin. This allows you to use first-party cookies and storage to customize content and simplify analytics integration. Your page appears under your URL instead of the google.com/amp URL.

Google Search links to signed exchanges when the publisher, browser, and the Search experience context all support it. As a publisher, you will need to publish both the signed exchange version of the content in addition to the non-signed exchange version. Learn more about how Google Search supports signed exchange.

Getting started with signed exchanges

Many publishers have already begun to publish signed exchanges since the developer preview opened up last fall. To implement signed exchanges in your own serving infrastructure, follow the guide “Serve AMP using Signed Exchanges” available at amp.dev.

If you use a CDN provider, ask them if they can provide AMP signed exchanges. Cloudflare has recently announced that it is offering signed exchanges to all of its customers free of charge.

Check out our resources like the webmaster community or get in touch with members of the AMP Project with any questions. You can also provide feedback on the signed exchange specification.

Posted by Devin Mullins and Greg Rogers

Discover is a popular way for users to stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, even when they’re not searching. To provide publishers and sites visibility into their Discover traffic, we're adding a new report in Google Search Console to share relevant statistics and help answer questions such as:

• How often is my site shown in users' Discover? How large is my traffic?
• Which pieces of content perform well in Discover?
• How does my content perform differently in Discover compared to traditional search results?

A quick reminder: What is Discover?

Discover is a feature within Google Search that helps users stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, without needing a query. Users get to their Discover experience in the Google app, on the Google.com mobile homepage, and by swiping right from the homescreen on Pixel phones. It has grown significantly since launching in 2017 and now helps more than 800M monthly active users get inspired and explore new information by surfacing articles, videos, and other content on topics they care most about. Users have the ability to follow topics directly or let Google know if they’d like to see more or less of a specific topic. In addition, Discover isn’t limited to what’s new. It surfaces the best of the web regardless of publication date, from recipes and human interest stories, to fashion videos and more. Here is our guide on how you can optimize your site for Discover.

Discover in Search Console

The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019. We hope this report is helpful in thinking about how you might optimize your content strategy to help users discover engaging information-- both new and evergreen.

For questions or comments on the report, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums, or contact us through our other channels.

Posted by Michael Huzman, Ariel Kroszynski

To help users find the answers to their questions faster, we included page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches in 2018. Since then, we've observed improvements on many pages across the web. We want to recognize the performance improvements webmasters have made over the past year. A few highlights:

• For the slowest one-third of traffic, we saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. As a comparison, no improvement was seen in 2017.
• We observed improvements across the whole web ecosystem. On a per country basis, more than 95% of countries had improved speeds.
• When a page is slow to load, users are more likely to abandon the navigation. Thanks to these speed improvements, we've observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search, a metric that site owners can now also measure via the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.
• In 2018, developers ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits to identify performance optimization opportunities for over 200 million unique urls.

Great work and thank you! We encourage all webmasters to optimize their sites’ user experience. If you're unsure how your pages are performing, the following tools and documents can be useful:

1. PageSpeed Insights provides page analysis and optimization recommendations.
2. Google Chrome User Experience Report provides the user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.
3. Documentation on performance on Web Fundamentals.

For any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums (like the webmaster community) to chat with other experts.

Posted by Genqing Wu and Doantam Phan