Structured data for broadcast events - An microdata markup example

By Adrián Coutin

Web broadcasting  events has become a more frequent fact in the Internet world. These services are  being highly demanded by the user community.

The actual situation indicate that this trend will consolidate and new events will be broadcast directly through various web platforms. Example: congress, seminars, conferences. On the other hand the highlighted rich snippets in search results are the summary of a response that can satisfy the user's concern on its own, without the need to click on the search results.

Structured data, also called schema markup, is the source of answers to questions from these users, many of them using mobile devices, and looking for a quick answer to their questions.

 How are events optimized via structured data?

Any type of events  are widely searched on Google and, due to the events characteristics, serve as a source of responses to users.

It is common today to see, for example, in Google search results, the day and time of the start of certain events.

An example of sporting events available in response to search results:

The structured data used by Google follows the schema markup developed by Schema.org, a community whose mission is to create, maintain and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.

Google SERP that including data event rich snippets

Television programming is another kind of event markup hat are including in Google SERP as you can see in the following image.

Google.es search results for "television today"

In this search example we find the fragments highlighted, television programs, ordered by their corresponding hours and the TV channels according to the time in which search are made.

Structured Data for Broadcast Events - BroadcastEvent

Schema.org bring also an event markup specific for those events whose transmission is boradcasting online, BroadcastEvent. It, as the rest of schema markup, makes easier to search engines identifying and processing the event content.

However is important mention  that, at the moment, Google does not show this type of event in its search results but it is a considerable possibility, that it can be included in the near future.

The classic example of this marking is available on Schema.org in its three variants: microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD

The following example of event broadcasting markup is based in a television  serial using microdata markup.

TV Series "Ministerio del Tiempo" Season 1 "Time is what it is" RTVE.es

In this example we have a set of data that will be the central core of the marking:

Title
Description
How is this event broadcast live?
Video format
Language
Start date
End date

It is important to note that these data to markup must be published on the page visually. Sometimes due to design problems, textual content is only wanted to be passed at the level of structured data, hidden it on the page, and thus Google does not recognize this marking.

<div itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BroadcastEvent">                    <h3 itemprop="name"><a href="#" title="Haga click para ir al detalle de El Ministerio del tiempo">El Ministerio del tiempo</a></h3>                    <figure><img src="assets/img/icons/ico-program.png" alt="La 1"></figure><strong>La 1</strong><span>Jueves 22.00 / 50m.</span>                    <p itemprop="description">El Ministerio del Tiempo es una serie de televisión española de género fantástico y ficción histórica creada por los hermanos Pablo y Javier Olivares y producida por Onza Partners y Cliffhanger para La 1 de TVE</p>    <meta itemprop="isLiveBroadcast" content="http://schema.org/False" />    <span itemprop="videoFormat">HD</span>    <span itemprop="inLanguage">es</span>    <span itemprop="startDate" content="2017-10-12T21:00"></span>    <span itemprop="endDate" content="2017-10-12T21:50"></span>    <div itemprop="publishedOn" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BroadcastService">   <span itemprop="name">La 1</span></div>

As you can see it is a very simple way to add this schema markup that would have an strong impact to increase traffic or visualization to broadcast events.