I’ve been having a lot of conversations with clients in which everyone agreed that “structured content” was critical but everyone was surprised by the DEEPLY divergent views of how the content should be structured. One of the things I’ve been trying to emphasize is that different needs drive different approaches to structure. For example:
- Reusability: “A client testimonial can be written once and used or displayed in many contexts”
- Consistency: “One client testimonial will always look and read like other client testimonials”
- Validity: “All client testimonial have a ‘client’ and a ‘testimonial’”
- Modularity: “A client testimonial can be part of a case study, a product packet, or an event”
- Discoverability: “A search engine can tell that this markup on the page represents a client testimonial”
They’re not incompatible with each other, but if your primary concerns are consistency and validity, your ideal structure is going to be very different than if your core coals are reusability and modularity.