To carry out a structured data audit you first need to setup Sitebulb to collect structured data when it crawls your website.
For the purpose of this guide we’re going to assume that you want to create a new project, but the same process can be followed if you’re setting up a new audit within an existing project, or setting up a previous audit to re-run including structured data.
Once you click the ‘Start a new Project’ button, you’ll be presented with the form below:
Name your project and add the URL of your website. Once you click 'Save and Continue', you'll be taken to the 'Audit Setup' page.
Note: you can perform structured data validation with the HTML Crawler or the Chrome Crawler. However, if the website uses JavaScript to load in structured data markup, you will need to select the Chrome Crawler.
On the audit setup page, scroll down the the 'Extraction' section and tick the 'Structured Data' checkbox as shown below:
That's it - you're good to go! If you click 'Start Now' the audit will run with the Sitebulb crawler collecting structured data from your website.
The structured data extraction can be enabled alongside any other data collection options. But consideration should be given to resource requirements as some websites can contain extensive structured data and result in resource intensive audits.
Once your audit has finished running, you'll find the structured data section in the main, left hand navigation menu:
If you navigate to the structured data section of the tool you'll first be presented with the structured data overview as shown in the screenshot below:
From here, you can explore your structured data further using the tabs across the top.
Some websites use JavaScript to generate their structured data. Using the HTML crawler with these websites may not render the structured data, therefore the JavaScript crawler should be used.
A simple way to tell if structured data is being generated with JavaScript is to view the source code (CTRL + U shortcut in most browsers) of a page which you know contains structured data, then search the page for 'schema.org'. If the search does not find any matches (unlike the example below), it is likely that the structured data is being generated with JavaScript.
If you do need to use a JavaScript crawler, select 'Chrome Crawler' from the 'Crawler Type' dropdown in the 'Crawler Settings' of your audit.
