Describing Package Tours With Schema.org: Too Much Pain, Too Little Gain... If Any

Since I published some of my (mostly positive at that point) thoughts about structured data embedded in web pages in general and schema.org in particular (see Tour Shopping on the Web: the... Bad and the Ugly and Chicken Thighs, SEO, Structured Data... and More), I have been asked many times by quite a few tour industry professionals whether implementing schema.org mark-up on their sites is something they should consider.

If you want a short answer, it's in the title.

Below is a longer, minimally technical, answer. I may focus on the more technical aspects in another post when and if I have the time.

First, let me explain the following:

In order to test the benefits of schema.org markup for a web site of a small independent tour operator, a real web site was created. Real tours with very detailed itineraries and programs were developed.

The site was run without schema.org markup for about two months, i.e. long enough for it to be fully indexed and start showing consistently in search results.

After that, it was marked up with microdata using schema.org vocabulary and run that way for over five months (it takes a long time for Google to discover and "digest" embedded structured data).

Below are some of the results of the test described as "non-technically" as possible.

Tour Shopping on the Web: the... Bad and the Ugly

Back in 1994, when I started hand-coding my first big web site about the tourist resources of a certain European country, we browsed the Web, literally. Web masters created web sites "by hand" (using a plain-text editor). They manually added hyperlinks between pages and to other sites (creating the "web effect"). They submitted their sites to a handful of web resource directories/catalogs, which were also compiled and maintained "manually". The number of web sites was, by today's standards, microscopically small, but even back then many realized that maintaining catalogs of web resources manually, as well as finding information on the Web by actually browsing the Web, would soon become impossible. A few short years later, there was a whole bunch of search engines available. We stopped browsing the Web and started browsing search results.

Chicken Thighs, SEO, Structured Data... and More

Let's run a simple experiment. Imagine that you have some chicken thighs in your refrigerator. You are not much of a cook, but you are willing to try. So, you do what most of us do looking for answers to all kinds of questions - search the Web. Don't worry - the experiment doesn't involve actual cooking :-)