Breadcrumb Schema Markup: Boost Your SEO & User Experience the Right Way

Providing the best website navigation for users is essential for a positive user experience. In the vast web landscape, with countless websites striving to achieve higher rankings, search engines must discover your website and understand the hierarchical relationship between its various subpages. Schema markup breadcrumbs simplify the process by establishing a clear understanding for both users and search engines.

Failure to implement this on your site results in missing out on a major opportunity to improve your SEO and user engagement. Let’s learn about SEO breadcrumb schema in this blog, along with its benefits and how to implement breadcrumb schema to maximize SEO performance and user satisfaction.

What is Breadcrumb Schema

Before explaining that, let’s analyse the following image. See the green highlighted part? That is breadcrumb navigation.

In SEO, the term schema refers to a set of microdata that is embedded in a site’s HTML page. When search engine crawlers discover this data, they understand what the web page and its contents are all about. This makes it easier for search engines to present the information accordingly to users.

Therefore, breadcrumb schema markup is a specific type of structured data tailored for breadcrumb navigation on a website. Embedding breadcrumb schema allows easier site navigation for users and search engines get a better understanding of the site contents.

Benefits of breadcrumb schema

Apart from improving search visibility and rankings, breadcrumb structured data offers several other benefits in terms of SEO enhancement and user experience, which are listed below:

• Simplified page navigation: As breadcrumbs indicate the user’s position on a site, it essentially creates a secondary navigation path for users to move on to other pages without difficulties.

• Enhanced Search Result Snippets: The benefits of featured snippets are well-known. With the breadcrumb schema, it is enhanced further. As they appear on search results, they display a clearer context of the specific page content on your website, which helps increase click-through rates.

• Minimal Bounce Rate: The purpose of breadcrumbs is to tell users where they are on a website and make navigation easier. Displaying breadcrumb schema on search results takes users directly to the page they are looking for. This reduces the chances of users leaving, thus making it one of the key benefits of breadcrumb schema.

Exploring the types of breadcrumbs

Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs

This is one of the most widely implemented breadcrumb navigation types. They represent the hierarchical structure of the site by displaying from the homepage to the current page chosen by the user. Since the trail is straightforward, it allows users to trace back to the previous pages with ease. Check out the following image that clearly explains about hierarchy-based breadcrumb.

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Path-based breadcrumbs

Also known as history-based breadcrumbs, these create a path followed by the user that displays all the pages that the user has visited. This is one of the least used breadcrumb types because it essentially duplicates the functionality offered by most browsers’ back button and fails to provide a clear understanding of the website’s structural hierarchy.

Attribute-based breadcrumbs

What makes attribute-based breadcrumbs different from the above two is that it displays the various filters or attributes selected by a user on a previous page. The image below should explain the concept clearly.

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Users can easily narrow search results by either selecting or deselecting attributes. This eliminates the need to return to the previous page or start from scratch, thus improving the user experience.

How to implement breadcrumb schema

Properly implementing breadcrumb schema markup positively impacts your site’s visibility and rankings. To get started, you must learn how to implement it in the first place:

Pick the Right Format

You can implement SEO breadcrumb schema by leveraging any of these methods:

• JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data): The most popular format due to its simplicity and flexibility. It involves embedding a <script> tag with JSON code.
• Microdata: This is an inline markup format that is directly added to the HTML content.
• RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes)

Despite the choices, most search engines recommend JSON-LD, one of the best types of schema markup for generating breadcrumb schema.

Determine the Breadcrumb Type

Identify the right breadcrumb type for each page on your site upon choosing the markup format. For example, if you have a sub-category page under a main category page, the trail should look something like this:

Home > Category > Subcategory >

Generate Your Markup

Now it’s time to generate the actual schema markup code based on your chosen format and the determined breadcrumb trail for the specific page you plan to implement. A JSON-LD breadcrumb example looks something like this:

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Implement on Your Website: 

Once the schema markup is generated, integrate it into the HTML page of every webpage on your site. You can either edit your website’s templates or use renowned content management system (CMS) plugins such as Yoast, WordPress, etc that handles schema markup.

Validate the markup data

Leverage tools such as Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool or Rich Snippet Markup Results Test to ensure your breadcrumb structured data is correctly implemented and is free of errors. This is something that must be done from time to time.

Monitor Website Performance

After validating the breadcrumb structured data and implementing it, you have to monitor whether they are accurately displayed or not. You can do this by using the Google Search Console account. You will be notified if any issues occur.

Keep the schema up to date

If your website’s hierarchy has any changes, they have to be updated accordingly in the breadcrumb schema. This ensures that search engines have the latest data about your site.

Breadcrumb Schema Best Practices

To make your breadcrumb schema implementation easier and error-free, it is essential to consider these breadcrumb schema best practices detailed below:

Ensure Hierarchy Consistency

When creating a breadcrumb trail, make sure it matches your site hierarchy. This allows both search engines and users to clearly understand the content organisation.

Don’t Link The Current Page

Linking a webpage to itself isn’t beneficial for SEO because it has no navigational value. When creating a breadcrumb trail, instead of linking the current page, show it in plain text. This allows users to know which page they are on.

Display the complete navigational path

When showing the breadcrumb trail, keep it shown completely instead of hiding certain pages. This helps users to know which page they are currently on a site and makes the navigation easier. 

Keep up with Schema Guidelines

Search engines update their structured data guidelines and recommendations from time to time. This is why you must adhere to the changes and implement them on your site to stay ahead of the competition.

Winding Up

Schema markup breadcrumbs are indeed one of the most important SEO tools that help improve website navigation and search visibility. Learning what this is and implementing it helps SEO professionals to effectively bridge the gap between users’ expectations and the site’s hierarchy. By now, you should have learned what is breadcrumb schema, the different types and steps to implement it on your site correctly. To learn more about this concept or digital marketing services, connect with GTECH Information Technology to learn more.