Within its Audiological Care business, Sonova wanted to solidify its digital search presence and drive sales through its online retail sites.

In 2019, their SEO team noticed that the Search Engine Results Page was evolving. Google was adding more search features and enhancements. They saw this as an opportunity to increase their visibility on search and provide more appealing results for strategic queries and product pages to their potential customers.

However, Sonova’s Audiological Care business did not have a centralized Schema Markup solution. With 19 retail sites and domains, some country teams had implemented their own local Schema Markup and weren’t seeing significant results. They were also about to launch blogs on their sites and wanted to get rich results for the articles that were meant to attract organic traffic.

Sonova’s Audiological Care business wanted a company that was able to support them in adding structured data on their websites to increase organic traffic and awareness. They needed a scalable solution and found that Schema App’s tools and expertise support were what they needed.

They decided to start with two countries as part of their pilot project with Schema App. When Laura Losito stepped into her now-current role as SEO & Content Manager for Sonova’s Audiological Care business, she was tasked to manage the pilot project with Schema App.

During the pilot project, Sonova focused on achieving FAQ rich results for their newly launched blogs, and the results were impressive. “We saw that we were getting much better results than the markets that added the markup locally. That’s why we decided to extend our contract with Schema App to all our domains last year,” said Ms. Losito.

This was when the real challenge started.

Managing Schema Markup across multiple sites and subdomains

Implementing a global structured data strategy across 19 retail sites was no small feat. Ms. Losito had to get buy-in from different country teams, work with content in various languages and keep track of various issues across all the sites. 

Even though Sonova’s Audiological Care business only had a handful of templates created using the Schema App Highlighter, many of these templates were deployed across all their domains. They had to ensure that any structured data changes they made to their Schema App Highlighter template were standardized for all the sites and subdomains.

Dependencies on different country teams

The content on a page can make or break a Schema Markup strategy. However, each country team had the final say on the content on their site. As a result, Ms. Losito often had to wait for each country team to update their content to be eligible for specific rich results.

Deploying Schema Markup to all 19 microsites

KEEN Footwear wanted to add Schema Markup to all 19 microsites for their global business. Adding Schema Markup to each site manually would have been difficult, tedious, and time-consuming. They needed a scalable Schema Markup solution that allowed them to easily deploy and manage Schema Markup for all 19 microsites with their small SEO team.

Pages with inconsistent templates and layouts

KEEN Footwear’s migration to SalesForce Commerce Cloud also presented a significant hurdle. SalesForce Commerce Cloud wasn’t built to be a content manager, which made it challenging to add Schema Markup to the pages with different layouts. For example, there wasn’t a consistent template for their Blogs, so pages had an assortment of image sizes, text placements and page elements. This lack of consistency made it difficult for them to deploy Schema Markup using Schema App’s Highlighter tool through Google Tag Manager.

Linking Entities

As a Schema Markup expert, Havalah understands that every page on the internet can be seen by search engines as its own individual entity (or thing). She wanted to determine which entities on a page could relate to other entities elsewhere on her site but recognized that this could be challenging.

Deploying Schema Markup at Scale

KEEN Footwear decided to partner with Schema App to enable their Schema Markup strategy. The Schema App team used the Highlighter tool to create and deploy Schema Markup templates for the different types of pages on KEEN Footwear’s 19 microsites.

With Schema App, Keen could be certain their markup would accommodate variations in their content architecture, automatically update when changes were made, and be maintained and monitored from a central source. As a result, KEEN Footwear was also able to execute its Schema Markup strategy with little to no dependency on its IT team.

Using XPaths to Apply Schema Markup Templates

Due to the inconsistency in page layout, KEEN Footwear couldn’t simply use URL or Regex patterns to deploy the Schema Markup template to the Blog pages. The Schema App Customer Success Team stepped in and identified XPaths that were unique to the Blog pages, allowing KEEN Footwear to deploy their Schema Markup template without any obstructions.

Semantic Expertise

Linking entities on the site was a priority for KEEN Footwear. With the support from the Schema App Customer Success Team and the flexibility of Schema App’s Editor and Highlighter tools, Schema App was able to link entities across the KEEN website using the Linked Entity Recognition feature.

Havalah and her Customer Success Manager worked together to link entities from authoritative knowledge bases (like Wikipedia and Google’s Knowledge Graph) to describe what blog posts were about. This enabled Havalah’s request to create semantic connections and provide clarity to Google on the topics of the blogs.

Standing out in a highly competitive market

The home improvement market is highly competitive with retail big box stores. As part of its vision to be Canada’s most trusted and preferred home improvement retail brand, Home Hardware chose to partner with Schema App, a leader in search engine optimization, to complement its growing digital team. The goal was to maximize visibility and real estate in search to stand out in a highly competitive market.

Shifting consumer shopping habits

In addition, the global pandemic has shifted consumer shopping habits and increased the importance of online visibility for retailers. It also created a need for Home Hardware to communicate rapidly changing protocols, including safety measures, store hours and available shopping methods.

Scalable Schema Markup

Schema App provided expertly managed Schema Markup services and strategy for Home Hardware’s product pages, which was deployed to thousands of pages on their custom web platform using the Schema App Highlighter.

Standing Ahead of the Competition

Schema App’s Customer Success Team keeps Home Hardware’s Schema Markup up to date and provides insights on how they can maximize their search opportunities to be more visible than their competitors. Home Hardware’s product pages stood out as Product rich results, showing additional information such as pricing and review snippets, unlike other competitors.

Agility

In response to Covid-19, Schema App was able to help Home Hardware stay agile by quickly adding Special Announcement Schema Markup to key pages and ensuring their pages were eligible for Google’s ever-evolving search features.