Successfully Utilizing Website Data

Generally, when someone opens a website, they don’t think about the data types that are being used and how they affect that website.

However, companies should understand the importance of the way they present information to consumers.

The distinction between structured and unstructured data affects plenty of website elements. The simplest examples of structured and unstructured data are the list of contacts on a smartphone vs. the photos in the gallery app respectively.

Structured Data

Any data that fits a predefined format or model is considered to be structured data. This type of data makes things easy to search, analyze and report information on.

To generate it, companies have consumers fill out forms with their name, contact information, location, and other details. Google needs certain types of website information to be presented as structured data so that it can understand it and use it on the results pages.

Businesses should be using structured data on their websites to highlight information about themselves, their products, or instructional info. This allows search engines such as Google to use the structured data in the results pages, allowing companies to engage people with data that can answer any questions they might have.

Unstructured Data

Any sort of data that doesn’t have a set format is defined as unstructured data, and this makes up most existing data.

Most companies these days already store a lot of unstructured data, but unstructured data formats make information difficult to analyze.

Not a lot of people realize the benefit of unstructured data, but there are new tools, like machine learning and natural language processing, that are effective at analyzing unstructured data such as images or audio.

Without structured website data, search engines will have a difficult time understanding what a website is about. Nevertheless, unstructured data types, such as paragraphs, also have their use. No one expects companies to mark up every single paragraph on a website and assign it some sort of meaning. Luckily, search engines still have the capabilities to understand what paragraphs are about.

Balance of Data

When deciding whether a company should be using structured or unstructured data, it’s important to balance different interests. Most of the time, companies use more unstructured data on their websites, compared to structured data.

This is simply because everything that’s put on a website doesn’t really need to fit into a designated data type.

Yet structured data can be used to highlight some of the more important elements of a business website. Overall, the way companies structure information on their business websites is important for their SEO efforts. And to make it easy for search engines to interpret data, structured data is the way to go.

Ronn Torossian is the CEO and founder of NY based PR firm 5W Public Relations. Torossian is also the founder of the Ronn Torossian Foundation, and a lifelong New Yorker.