Practical: How to use the Schema Entity Audit Template

Before you improve a site’s structured data, you need an honest picture of what is already there. This practical lesson walks through the Schema Entity Audit Template, a simple tool for assessing the quality of existing schema markup across a website. Unlike the planning workbooks, it focuses on what already exists. You can use it for client audits, competitor reviews and before-and-after comparisons of your own work.

What this lesson covers

• The structure of the template and the entity categories it checks
• A scoring framework from zero to five with clear definitions
• How to find and validate the schema on a page
• Writing notes that are specific and actionable
• What to look for beyond validity, such as relationships and description quality
• When to use the audit, from client work to periodic quality checks

The template is deliberately simple. For each entity category, including organisation, leadership, products or services, content, locations, events and concepts, you record whether it is present, give it a quality score and add notes. The scoring framework is the heart of the tool. A five is a best-in-class implementation with required and recommended properties, ID references, connected entities, no validation errors and rich, specific values. Lower scores describe progressively thinner or more broken markup, down to a one for broken markup and zero where nothing exists. Knowing what a five looks like makes it easier to explain why a three is not enough.

The audit method uses the page source or a validator such as the Schema Markup Validator or Google’s Rich Results Test to identify each schema block and record errors and warnings. You then compare each block against the framework and score it honestly. The lesson insists on notes that state exactly what is present and missing, so they are useful when planning fixes. It also recommends auditing more than the home page, checking that relationships are reciprocal and IDs consistent, assessing how detailed descriptions are and flagging markup that is valid but strategically incomplete. Averaging the scores gives an overall picture, with organisation and key person entities treated as the priority.

This lesson is the hands-on companion to Entity Blueprint Analysis in Module 2, Brand Entity Development and Recognition. It suits SEOs, agencies and in-house teams who need a consistent, teachable way to evaluate structured data quality and show progress over time.