Why Schema & Accessibility Are the Easiest SEO Wins Everyone Ignores
There are two kinds of SEO work.
There’s the work that feels impressive in a meeting. Competitive gap analyses, content roadmaps, link acquisition plans, “we’re going after the head terms” strategy. That stuff has its place, and it’s often necessary once you’ve earned the right to care about nuance.
Then there’s the work that quietly turns a site from “pretty good” into “hard to beat” without asking for a headcount increase or a six-month timeline.
Schema and accessibility live in that second category.
They’re not exciting because they don’t look like “marketing.” They look like implementation details. They live near code and templates and pattern libraries, and that means they get deprioritized by default. What’s frustrating, after years of watching this play out, is how often these two “boring” items are the difference between a site that could be performing and a site that is performing.
Schema is ignored because people misunderstand what it does
Schema markup doesn’t magically boost rankings. If someone sells it as a ranking button, they’re overselling it.
What schema does, when it’s implemented correctly, is remove ambiguity. It tells search engines what a page is, what the key entities are, and how to interpret details that would otherwise be inferred. That matters more now than it did years ago, because modern SERPs are crowded with enhanced features. If you’re not eligible for rich results where they apply, you’re choosing to compete with less screen real estate.
The frustrating part is that we’re past the point where this is an “advanced” tactic.
Backlinko’s large-scale SERP analysis found that 72.6% of pages on Google’s first page use schema. In other words, schema is not something only nerds do. It’s a baseline behavior among top-ranking pages.
And yet a meaningful chunk of the web still isn’t using structured data at all. W3Techs reports that 21.7% of websites use none of the structured data formats they track. That’s not a small niche. That’s a lot of organizations voluntarily opting out of eligibility for enhancements that their competitors are taking for granted.
If you’ve ever sat in a meeting where a team argued over whether the site should “invest in SEO,” that stat is the answer. A lot of sites aren’t losing because they lack content ideas. They’re losing because they’re not doing the fundamentals that make content interpretable and eligible.
What schema looks like when it actually moves the needle
The simplest real-world schema win is not “we added markup and rankings jumped.” It’s closer to “we made the listing more compelling and the page got clicked more often.”
That’s not a small thing. Click behavior influences whether a listing keeps earning its position over time, and at minimum it changes your efficiency. If two pages rank similarly but one earns rich results, the click share is not going to be evenly distributed.
A clean way to talk about this without hand-waving is controlled testing. SearchPilot has a case study on testing schema markup where the mechanism is exactly what you’d expect: schema increases eligibility for richer presentations, which can improve engagement, which can support traffic growth. The important part, for your purposes as a strategist, is not treating schema like a magic lever. It’s treating it like making your product easier to understand in a system that rewards clarity.
In practical work, schema tends to help most when one of these is true:
You publish content that maps cleanly to known rich result types (products, recipes, FAQs, reviews, events, organizations, articles).
Your site has lots of similar pages and you need Google to interpret them consistently.
Your SERP is already feature-heavy and basic blue links are being visually outcompeted.
That’s when you see the payoff. Not always as a rankings spike, but as stronger presentation, better click share, and less misunderstanding.
There’s also a darker version of this that teams rarely consider: schema can hurt you when it’s sloppy.
Google’s own structured data policies are explicit that structured data issues can result in a manual action that removes a page’s eligibility for rich results. That doesn’t mean your page disappears from search, but it does mean you can lose the enhanced treatment you were counting on, and if you’ve built a big footprint around rich results, that’s a painful regression.
So yes, schema is an “easy win.” It’s also a “quiet risk” if it’s implemented lazily, copied from plugins without review, or applied inconsistently across templates.
Why accessibility belongs in an SEO conversation
Accessibility gets framed as legal compliance or moral obligation. Both of those are real. But even if you set those aside, accessibility is still a search problem because it is a usability problem, and usability problems show up as engagement problems, conversion problems, and crawl interpretation problems.
Search engines don’t have feelings, but they do have models for quality. A site that is hard to use is less likely to satisfy users. A site that’s difficult to parse structurally is also harder for machines to understand, especially when basic semantics (headings, labels, link text) are a mess.
The easiest way to make this feel concrete is to look at what happens when accessibility is bad enough that it blocks customers.
Domino’s is the recognizable brand example most people have heard of, and it’s not just about lawsuits as an abstract threat. The case involved a blind customer alleging he couldn’t order through Domino’s website and app using a screen reader. Whatever you think about litigation culture, the business problem is plain: customers were being prevented from completing a transaction.
If you translate that into SEO language, it’s not complicated. If your forms can’t be used, your leads don’t convert. If your navigation can’t be interpreted, your content doesn’t get reached. If your UX relies on patterns that break for assistive tech, you’re losing customers you never see in the data because they churn before “conversion” becomes an event.
That is why accessibility is one of the easiest “wins.” Not because it’s easy work in the sense of “no effort,” but because the fixes are often straightforward and have broad impact.
The part everyone ignores: these wins are template-level
Most SEO teams work at the page level because that’s where content lives. Schema and accessibility are different. They pay off when you implement them at the template and component level, which is also why they get ignored. It requires cross-functional collaboration, and it’s not always owned by “marketing.”
But when you do it right, you stop fixing the same issue 400 times.
A product template gets clean Product schema and consistent availability and pricing fields. A blog template gets proper Article markup and meaningful author/date information. A location template gets LocalBusiness schema and consistent NAP. A form component gets proper labels, focus states, and error messaging.
Now every future page inherits the improvement.
That’s the compounding effect most teams miss, and it’s why these are two of the few SEO tasks that can feel like you’re buying permanent leverage instead of renting short-term gains.
If you want the blunt diagnosis for why companies underutilize both
They don’t underutilize schema and accessibility because they’re hard to understand.
They underutilize them because the work looks like maintenance. Maintenance doesn’t photograph well.
Meanwhile, the competitive landscape has moved. When roughly three-quarters of first-page results are using schema and a meaningful portion of the web still isn’t using any structured data , you don’t need to invent a complicated strategy to win. You need to stop leaving obvious advantages on the table.
What to fix first if you want quick wins without a giant project
If you want this to stay practical, don’t start by trying to “make the site accessible” or “implement schema everywhere.” That’s how these initiatives die.
Start by choosing one high-impact page type and one high-impact user action.
For schema, pick the template that drives revenue or leads (products, services, locations, listings) and implement the appropriate markup cleanly and consistently, then validate it and monitor Search Console enhancements.
For accessibility, pick the conversion path that matters most (contact form, checkout, quote request) and make sure it’s usable with a keyboard, labeled correctly, and understandable when errors occur. If you fix those issues, you’re not doing “accessibility work” in the abstract. You’re removing friction that real users are hitting.
And if someone on the team insists this doesn’t matter, point them to Google’s warning that bad structured data can remove eligibility for rich results and to the very real public record showing what happens when accessibility blocks customers from completing basic tasks . That usually resets the conversation quickly.
