Making SEO better for blog posts with Structured Data

Search engines like Google use structured data to understand the contents of our page better. JSON-LD is a format that most use to describe the data.

Structured Data

Below is an example of a piece of structured data.

{
  "@context": "https://json-ld.org/contexts/person.jsonld",
  "@id": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Lennon",
  "name": "John Lennon",
  "born": "1940-10-09",
  "spouse": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cynthia_Lennon"
}

Source: JSON-LD

Adding Structured Data in Next.js

Create the following component StructuredData.jsx. Here we use the built-in component from next/head to append elements to the head of the page.

StructuredData.jsx

import Head from "next/head";
const StructuredData = ({ data }) => {
  return (
    <Head>
      <script type="application/ld+json">{JSON.stringify(data)}</script>
    </Head>
  );
};
export default StructuredData;

Use the StructuredData component in your respective component containing the UI for your post.

BlogPost.jsx

const BlogPost = ({ post }) => {
	const structuredData = {
			"@context": "https://schema.org",
			"@type": "Article",
			headline: post.title,
			description: post.description,
			author: [
				{
					"@type": "Person",
					name: post.author,
				},
			],
			image: post.imageUrl,
			datePublished: post.publishedAt,
		};
};
return (
	<>
		<Structured data={structuredData} />
		{/* ... the rest of your blog post */}
	</>
);

Validate Structured Data

Before deploying the changes to production, we can inspect the HTML elements on a browser to see if the changes are reflected in the <head> section of the page.

Upon successful deployment, we can use the Schema Markup Validator to validate.