I held a Search London event in July about Schema Markup where Lisa Myers spoke about the advantages of using Schema to encourage higher click through rates.

Barrie Smith implemented the plugin straight away and wrote a great review about Search London which you can see in the screenshot below.

As I am using a wordpress  site,  I decided to look for a plugin to clearly show any reviews for events or hotels I have been to. I went to Digital Industry Females and was really impressed with the meetup that I wrote a review about it on this blog. I looked for the plugins that were available through wordpress where I can clearly show the rating and who it was reviewed by as per Barrie’s example.  The following plugins came up:

I installed the third plugin (the one by James Swindle) as I really wanted to display the stars at the bottom of my post and show my rating of the meetup in Google. It was really easy to install. I just clicked install, then went back to my post and it was in the right hand corner under Review info. I then filled in the details with a link to the meetup group and selected my rating.

It took a few days to appear in the SERPs and I took a screenshot of when it did.  I was so pleased the schema worked.  I know everyone says it is really easy to implement, but many of these are people who own their own code and can code quite easily.  I only use wordpress sites as I do not enjoy coding and therefore I have to rely on plugins.

This plugin took just 5 minutes and was the easiest schema markup I have done, it was easier than the Rel=Author as that took about 8 weeks to show my profile pic and name against my blog.