How We Built a Smarter Schema System for Our Website

At We Are Chain, we have always believed that websites should work not just for people, but also for machines. It is not enough for your site to look good, it also needs to communicate clearly with search engines and AI systems.

That is where schema markup comes in. Our website is built using WordPress and as such open to the idea of uploading a bespoke plug in that would work with our content. We also added an EO generator tool which works with hatgpt but not as a plug in, I will follow up with this later.

Recently, we set out to improve our own website’s structured data. What started as a simple question about missing FAQ results developed into a broader approach: creating unique, page-specific schema for each section of our site, layered on top of our existing business markup.

The Problem

Our site already had the basics in place. We had implemented:

• Organisation schema (to tell the world who we are)
• LocalBusiness schema (to give Google context about our Dorset office)

However, when it came to FAQs, nothing was showing. Even though the content existed on the page, search engines were not picking it up.

That raised a bigger question: how can we make sure each part of our site - services, case studies, blog posts, FAQs and reviews - has its own unique schema block, rather than relying solely on the generic business markup?

The First Suggestions

The initial idea was simple: generate clean JSON-LD blocks for each content type.

• A FAQ block for FAQ sections
• A Review block for testimonials
• A Service block for specific offerings
• A CaseStudy block for client projects
• A BlogPosting/WebPage block for posts

All of them would point back to stable anchors such as #org and #webpage, so that we avoided duplicating our organisation data.

Iterating with Feedback

Once the first schema templates were drafted, we tested them on live pages.

Some important lessons quickly became clear:

• Visibility matters: schema should always represent content that is visible on the page.
• Uniqueness counts: generic markup is not enough. FAQs, reviews, services and blogs all need their own schema.
• Keep it lightweight: bulky plugins slow websites down. A lean, custom block approach works better.

We also realised another key point. By going down this route, we were reducing the need for large SEO tools that often come with expensive subscriptions and add unnecessary bloat to WordPress.

Instead, we could cover the essentials ourselves with a custom schema system, and then follow up with carefully written SEO metadata and XML sitemaps to replace any remaining features we might still need. (That part is a story for another day.)

Building the Tool

Eventually, we created a lightweight schema generator for WordPress that allowed us to:

• Add custom JSON-LD per page
• Automatically pull titles and meta when required
• Reuse stable @id anchors across the whole site
• Add new schema types (FAQ, Service, Review, BlogPosting) section by section

This meant that instead of one oversized SEO plugin trying to do everything, we now had a modular system that we could control ourselves.

The Outcome

Today, every key section of our site carries its own schema:

• FAQs are marked up with FAQPage
• Reviews are structured as Review and AggregateRating
• Services are described with Service
• Case studies are tagged as CaseStudy
• Blogs use BlogPosting

All of this sits neatly on top of our existing Organisation and LocalBusiness nodes.

The result is clear:

• Our schema is lighter and more transparent
• Search engines and AI assistants can parse our content more easily
• Each piece of content has a clear identity beyond the generic business details
• We have reduced reliance on heavy SEO tools, saving money and improving performance

What We Learned

This project reinforced several important principles:

1. Do not rely only on generic schema. Every section deserves its own unique markup.
2. Iterate and test. What looks correct in theory does not always show up in search results.
3. Keep it lightweight. A custom approach is better than plugin bloat.
4. Replace rather than duplicate. Schema, metadata and sitemaps can cover most SEO essentials without expensive third-party tools.

By building and refining this schema system on our own website, we have created a framework that we can now roll out for clients. This helps ensure that their content is not only visible to people but also fully understood by search engines and AI assistants. If you are inteested in exploring a tool like this for your own WordPress website, we can design and build one that works for you.