Before diving into implementation, ask yourself: what am I aiming to achieve through Schema Markup? Which key content or business entities do I want to highlight in search results? How can Schema Markup support our overall SEO and content strategy?

A thoughtful Schema Markup strategy can help you:

• Target the right rich results
• Develop your content knowledge graph
• Increase organic traffic and CTR in search
• Identify gaps in your content and inform your content strategy

In this article, we outline the steps you can take to create a Schema Markup strategy for your website.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Identify Key Entities in Your Content for Structured Data Opportunities

The first step to implementing Schema Markup is identifying the key entities that represent your business and where they are located on your site. This process will help you recognize the structured data opportunities across your website.

1.1 List the Key Entities That are Relevant to Your Business

You can start by creating a list of key entities that make up your business, such as:

• Business name and contact information
• Products or services
• Key personnel (e.g., owner, management team)
• Locations (for businesses with multiple branches)
• Authoritative content about your industry or expertise

For example, Pizza Palace is a local pizza restaurant owned by Enrico Picolli with over 20 locations across Ontario, Canada. Pizza Palace sells different types of pizzas (i.e. pepperoni, Hawaiian, etc.) and appetizers through their online site. Pizza Palace, along with its products, locations, and owner are key entities related to the business. These entities are also described across their website content.

1.2 Locate Relevant Web Pages

Once you’ve identified your key entities, you can identify which page on your website best describes each entity. This will help you determine which top-level Schema.org type you should use to mark up each page.

As per our previous example, the Pizza Palace home page has detailed information (i.e. address, logo, telephone number, etc.) about the organization. Therefore, it should be the entity home for the organization Pizza Palace.

Similarly, Pizza Palace has product detail pages for each of its pizzas. Therefore, these product detail pages should be the entity home for each product.

Pro Tip: If you don’t have a page about any of your key entities, this is an opportunity for you to create new content to describe the entity.

1.3 Map Content to Schema.org Types

Once you have your list of entities and where they live on your site, you can identify the corresponding Schema.org type for each entity.

Back to our example— “Pizza Palace,” being the organization’s name, would best correspond with the Organization type. Therefore, you would mark up the homepage with Organization markup to help search engines clearly understand the key information about the Organization.

Pro Tip: If you’re new to the Schema.org vocabulary and need more clarity on identifying types and properties within your content, we recommend reading our guide to the Schema.org vocabulary.

1.4 Create an Entity Mapping Table

Next up, it’s time to organize your findings in a table format for clarity. Here’s an example continuing with our hypothetical local pizza business:

Step 2: Review Eligible Rich Results for Your Pages

Once you’ve identified your key entities, the next step is determining which rich results are available and relevant to your content. This will help you prioritize your Schema Markup efforts for maximum visibility in the search results.

2.1 Understand Available Rich Results

Before you dive into rich results, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the types of rich results offered by Google. Google has over 30 rich results, some more applicable than others. The most common types of rich results include:

• Review Snippet
• Local Business
• Product
• Job Posting

Within Google’s structured data guidelines, you can see which Schema.org properties are required and recommended to achieve your target rich results. If your page does not have the content for the required properties, you must add the content to your site before you markup the required property.

2.2 Match Your Content to Eligible Rich Results

You can review your key content identified in Step 1 and determine which rich results each page might be eligible for.

For example, Pizza Palace has 25 product detail pages (PDPs), each with reviews and ratings related to the relevant product. Since the PDPs have the right content, they should be eligible for a review snippet-rich result when we add AggregateRating and Review markup.

When you’ve identified the rich results each page could be eligible for, you can add it to the previous table you’ve created. Here’s an example continuing with the table we created for the pizza business in Step 1:

2.3 Ensure Your Content Aligns With the Structured Data Requirements for Each Rich Result

Before implementing Schema Markup, it’s crucial to verify that your content meets the requirements for each desired rich result if that is your goal. This step helps ensure your markup efforts are effective and compliant with search engine guidelines.

Other actions to consider in this step include:

Review Google’s guidelines: Check the requirements for each rich result type you’re targeting. These requirements may be content-related (e.g. Aggregate Ratings require the reviewCount), but they also may be more general guidelines (e.g. There should only be one Product or ProductGroup per page). Google provides detailed documentation for each rich result in their structured data documentation.

Audit your content: Compare your existing content against the requirements. Look for any gaps or missing elements.

Update content if necessary: If your content doesn’t fully meet the requirements, now is the time to update it. This might involve adding more detailed information, reorganizing content, or creating new page sections.

Step 3: Assess Implementation Methods for Ease and Coverage

After identifying your key entities and desired rich results, it’s time to consider how to implement your Schema Markup strategy effectively. This step focuses on balancing high-value opportunities with practical and manageable implementation methods.

3.1 Analyze Pages for Individual or Repeating Content

The implementation strategy for one-off or individual pages will likely be different than highly templated or repeating page types. For this reason, we recommend determining whether your content follows single or recurring patterns:

• Individual Page: Unique content, generally dissimilar to other pages on the website (e.g. About Us or Contact Information pages)
• Recurring Pages: Pages with a similar content structure repeated across multiple URLs (e.g. product detail or location pages)

3.2 Assess Existing Capabilities

From here, evaluate your current technical setup:

• Check if your Content Management System (CMS) has built-in Schema Markup functionality
• If it does, determine whether it meets your requirements or needs enhancement from other methods or sources

3.3 Consider Implementation Methods

There are many ways to implement Schema Markup. We recommend exploring the different available approaches to implementing Schema Markup to decide what best suits your organization’s needs and capabilities:

• Manual Implementation: You can author your markup for each page manually and add it directly into the HTML of the page
• Plugin or SEO Tool Implementation: You can use Schema Markup plugins designed to generate Schema Markup (these can be limited in their capabilities)
• Full-Service Schema Markup Solution Providers: You can also hire an end-to-end Schema Markup solution Schema App to help you author, implement and manage your Schema Markup on an ongoing basis

3.4 Assess Automation Possibilities

Implementing Schema Markup manually can be tedious, complex, and time-consuming. This is especially true for large organizations managing thousands of content pages or even multiple domains.

This is when it becomes crucial to identify and leverage opportunities to automate your Schema Markup implementation:

• For recurring content patterns, consider templated solutions like the Schema App Highlighter
• Explore API integrations for dynamic content
• Investigate tools and plugins that can generate and update markup automatically and dynamically

Schema App automatically deploys Schema Markup to your website at scale, so you can save time, make updates faster, and reduce delays caused by waiting for IT/developers. It works with all website platforms because of our integrations with Tag Manager, JavaScript, or our custom add-ons for WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, Drupal, etc. Explore our integration options.

3.5 Plan for Scalability

A common goal for most organizations is to grow. Therefore, planning for scalability is a must!

Ensure your implementation strategy can grow with your business:

• Choose methods that can easily accommodate new content or site sections
• Consider future rich result types you may wish to target

By completing this step, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to implement your Schema Markup strategy efficiently and at scale, taking into account your current capabilities and future business needs.

Best Practices for Schema Markup

Here are some things to keep in mind as you develop your Schema Markup strategy and evaluate your site content.

1. Use JSON-LD (rather than microdata or RDFa), as recommended by Google
2. Use the most specific Type possible
3. Only markup content that is visible on the page
4. Identify one key page for each business concept
5. Include an @id attribute to the entities in your Schema Markup
6. Nest the entities in your Schema Markup to accurately showcase their relationships on a page

So now you know how to identify which pages you should optimize and how to determine the best approach depending on the page type.

At Schema App, we help you go beyond the fundamentals of SEO, leveraging structured data to showcase your unique value in search. In a rapidly changing SEO landscape, we introduce agility to your digital team, saving you time and resources for managing other aspects of your business portfolio.

See how our end-to-end Schema Markup and knowledge graph solution can help your website stand out in search.

The post How to Develop a Schema Markup Strategy for a Website appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

With user behaviors and search engine algorithms constantly changing, it is crucial to ensure that your new and old content remains comprehensive, relevant, and helpful to humans and machines.

Enter Schema.org, a collaborative, community-driven initiative launched in 2011 by tech giants Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. The Schema.org vocabulary provides a standardized framework for structuring and organizing data on the web. It offers a comprehensive set of Types and properties that website owners can use to describe the entities and content on their site.

While Schema.org is widely known for helping search engines and machines understand the content on your site, its potential extends far beyond that. This vocabulary can be a game-changing checklist for improving your website’s content and formatting and identifying information gaps on your pages. By aligning your content with relevant Schema.org Types and properties, you can identify opportunities you may have overlooked, enhancing your overall content strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore how you can leverage the Schema.org vocabulary to develop a thorough and robust content strategy for your website.

Identifying Content Gaps on Your Website

Your primary focus should always be creating high-value content that serves your users’ needs. That said, the Schema.org vocabulary can serve as a roadmap during the content creation process, outlining information commonly found on certain types of web pages.

The Schema.org vocabulary provides a detailed framework for describing the entities on your website and their relationships. By examining the properties associated with relevant Schema Types, you can:

• Identify potential gaps in your existing content
• Fill those information gaps for your audience
• Add depth to existing page content
• Create new, supplementary content

Whether you’re creating new content or revamping existing pages, Schema.org can provide valuable guidance. Let’s explore a few examples.

For a healthcare organization creating a new page about a medical condition, you’ll need to decide what information you should include. The MedicalCondition Type in Schema.org has a list of properties such as signOrSymptom, possibleTreatment, and more that capture information that is commonly found on these types of pages. Reviewing the full list of properties associated with a Type can spark ideas about what entities are well-suited for supplementing your content.

Recall that you can only mark up content that exists on your page. Therefore, if you want to incorporate content for these properties to give readers more comprehensive information about the subject, you’ll want to identify those opportunities early in the content creation process.

Our customer, Sharp Healthcare, successfully applied the Schema.org vocabulary to form a long-term content strategy. During their website migration process, the Sharp team ensured that each page focused clearly on a specific Schema.org Type when establishing their content structure. They also incorporated content for the properties suggested by Schema.org for each chosen Type.

Enhancing Rich Results Potential

Aligning your content with Schema.org properties not only helps fill content gaps but also improves your rich result eligibility on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Rich results can lead to enhanced visibility on the SERP and increased click-through rates for your website.

To be eligible for rich results, specific content elements must often be present on your pages. Each rich result type typically has both required and recommended properties:

1. Required properties: These are essential for eligibility and must be on your page.
2. Recommended properties: While not mandatory, Google has stated that including more recommended properties can improve the quality of rich results for users and that rich result ranking takes extra information into consideration.

By incorporating both required and recommended properties into your content strategy, you can simultaneously improve your content quality and rich result eligibility.

Let’s look at product snippet requirements and recommendations as an example:

Product Snippet
To be eligible for product snippets on the SERP, it is required that you include the following:

• name (of the product)
• At least one of the following is required, but all are recommended:
  • review
  • aggregateRating
  • offers

You can further enrich your product rich result by adding content around the pros and cons of your product. That way, you can markup the content using the positiveNotes and/or negativeNotes properties and potentially have these pros and cons show up on your product rich results.

CAPREIT successfully leveraged Schema.org to enhance their rich result potential. By structuring their content according to Schema.org guidelines, they were able to improve their visibility in search results for their property listings and job postings.

Continuous Content Optimization

While Schema.org is an excellent tool for identifying content gaps and structuring information, it’s crucial to remember that creating helpful, high-quality content should always be your primary goal.

You must have substantive, relevant content in place before implementing Schema Markup. Without this foundation, you won’t be eligible for rich results. Moreover, attempting to markup non-existent or irrelevant content could be seen as spammy, potentially leading to penalties from Google.

Use Schema.org as a starting point to spark ideas and ensure your content is comprehensive, but don’t let it constrain your creativity or limit the value you provide to your audience.

By balancing user-focused content creation with Schema.org’s structured guidance, you can develop a content strategy that provides genuine value to your users and enriches the Schema Markup on your site.

Schema App Provides Content Recommendations Using the Schema.org Vocabulary

The digital landscape is constantly changing, and with it, Google’s structured data documentation and the Schema.org vocabulary continue to evolve. By keeping up with the latest updates, you can continually refine your content strategy and ensure your website content remains aligned with best practices.

At Schema App, we help our customers stay current with the latest changes in Schema.org and Google’s documentation. We also provide content recommendations to help our customers improve their rich result eligibility and enhance the richness of their content.

The post How to Improve Website Content Using the Schema.org Vocabulary appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

However, Schema Markup is a very technical aspect of SEO, and navigating the complexities requires technical expertise, ongoing effort, and costs. As a result, we frequently encounter questions from our customers, digital marketers, and IT teams alike, seeking clarity on Schema Markup.

This article addresses some of these common questions head-on, providing insights to help you understand Schema Markup’s role in your SEO strategy to help you confidently implement it on your pages.

Let’s start with one of the most pressing questions newcomers to Schema Markup often ask…

Does Schema Markup help SEO?

Yes. Schema Markup contributes to SEO by improving click-through rates (CTR), which can indirectly support conversions. It aids SEO efforts in two main ways.

Firstly, it helps search engines comprehend and contextualize page content. Schema Markup enhances search engine understanding by identifying and describing entities on a page, which improves comprehension of the page’s topics and their connections within the site and across the web. This precision leads to more relevant search results, driving qualified traffic to your site.

In the context of AI search, where most search engines are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) prone to errors and hallucinations, this understanding becomes even more critical. Schema Markup can ground and train the Large Language Models (LLMs) with factual information. This, in turn, allows them to provide more accurate search results and helps you control how the AI search engine interprets your brand and content, conveying that information accurately within search results.

Secondly, Schema Markup facilitates the generation of rich results. Rich results enable your content to stand out on the SERP as an enhanced organic search result, making it more attractive and engaging to users. This enhancement often leads to higher user engagement and CTR.

Specific types of rich results, such as Review Snippets, also play a crucial role in bolstering trust and credibility for your brand by fostering trust and positive brand perception through reviews and star ratings. For example, physician pages with Review Snippets tend to have higher CTRs than those without. Similarly, products featuring pricing information in the SERP through Product rich results typically garner more clicks.

Our customer, Baptist Health, saw a 491% increase in CTR for physician pages with review snippets compared to those without. Similarly, our customer Avid Technology experienced a substantial 241% increase in CTR for product pages with rich results compared to those without.

Is Schema Markup a search ranking factor?

No. Implementing Schema Markup does not directly impact your search rankings. However, it can indirectly impact rankings in certain ways.

While Schema Markup is not a direct ranking factor – like quality content, page speed, or backlinks – implementing Schema Markup can enhance your website’s appearance in the SERP by providing search engines with more clarity about your content, your organization and other associated entities.

This structured data enables search engines to better comprehend the content on your web pages. As a result, the search engine can more accurately align your page with the intent and meaning behind users’ relevant search queries, which could potentially improve your page’s ranking.

Can bad Schema Markup cause ranking loss?

Yes, it’s possible. Incorrect or poorly implemented Schema Markup can negatively affect your website’s search rankings.

What constitutes “bad” Schema Markup?

It could be markup that…

• Doesn’t accurately reflect the content on your page, aka schema drift.
• Goes against Google’s Content Guidelines – i.e. marking up invisible, irrelevant, or misleading content or engaging in other manipulative behaviors, which can be considered problematic.

If search engines encounter Schema Markup that is inaccurate, unclear, or violates their guidelines, they may ignore it or even penalize your site.

Some ways incorrect Schema Markup can impact your rankings include:

• Penalties: If search engines determine that your Schema Markup is manipulative or deceptive, they may penalize your website, resulting in lower rankings or even removal from search results.
• Misinterpretation: Incorrect Schema Markup can confuse search engines about your web pages’ content and context. This can lead to misinterpretations and may cause search engines to display your site less prominently or inaccurately in search results.
• User Experience: “Bad” Schema Markup can result in inaccurate or irrelevant information displayed on the SERP. This can lead to poor user experience, indirectly impacting your rankings as search engines aim to provide the most relevant and helpful results to users.

Can duplicate Schema Markup affect rankings?

While duplicate Schema Markup may not have a direct impact on rankings, it can diminish the effectiveness and clarity of your Schema Markup.

What is duplicate markup?

Duplicate markup refers to having two separate sets of markup describing the same entity, like a product, on a single page. If both markup sources provide identical content, such as the same product name and price, it’s typically not an issue. However, if the content differs between the two sources, for example, one block of Product markup shows a price of $15 while the other lists it as $15.99, it can confuse search engines like Google.

This confusion may reduce the likelihood of your page being awarded that result, resulting in uncertainty and potentially incorrect information on the SERP.

To conclude, duplicate markup may make your markup less effective if:

• The intent of the page is unclear
• There is conflicting information

Can there be two Schema Markup blocks on one page?

Yes, but let’s clarify. It is acceptable to have two primary entities that are neither identical nor nested and accurately describe the page. Ideally, the markup should be connected and/or nested, but this isn’t always possible given the hierarchy of entities on a page.

For instance, a Product Detail Page may have Product markup alongside BreadCrumb markup as primary entities. Since the breadcrumb isn’t related to the product entity, nesting it under the top-level Product markup doesn’t make sense.

However, if the page contains reviews and ratings related to the product, it’s advisable to nest the Review and AggregatingRating markup under the top-level Product markup. This accurately reflects the relationship between the product and these additional elements.

Ultimately, the goal is to clarify what’s on the page and how these content elements relate to each other. If there’s a connection, nesting is recommended; if not, having separate markup on a page is acceptable.

While Google won’t penalize you for failing to nest your markup, nesting is crucial for accurately representing relationships on your site and building a useful content knowledge graph.

How can I measure the performance of Schema Markup on my website?

How you measure performance may depend on the kinds of markup you’re adding to your page and your desired outcomes. You can assess performance either by individual URLs or by aggregating multiple URLs into groups, such as sitewide results or all pages within a specific subfolder.

There are a variety of tools you can use for this purpose, such as:

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) provides insights into how Google indexes your markup, quality improvements, and offers limited ROI reporting. Let’s dive into the feature within GSC that best helps you monitor and maintain Schema Markup.

Search Results Performance Report by Search Appearance

The Search Appearance dimension report in Google Search Console will show you the clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and ranking by rich result. You can dive deeper into each rich result to see which URLs are achieving it and how the URLs with rich results are performing.

There are some limitations when using GSC. Namely, their 1000-row user interface limitation. This impacts websites with a large number of pages and those that rank for a large volume of queries. Additionally, creating the complex groupings required for strong ROI reporting can be a challenge in the GSC’s UI. It can be hard to isolate URLs without the use of regular expressions and complex queries that look for specific patterns in a text string.

Schema Performance Analytics

The Schema App team created Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) for in-depth markup performance reporting. It combines the markup performance data from Google Search Console and the Schema App Highlighter and Editor, and gives users more filtering options to analyze their markup by page level or line of business.

Additionally, SPA’s Page Level Report is not limited to 1000 rows of data. Our team imports the entire set of metrics using Google Search Console’s API so you can analyze the entirety of your dataset with ease.

A recent addition to Schema Performance Analytics is the “Incremental Clicks from Rich Results” feature.

This feature divides the results for an individual URL into instances where a rich result was attained versus when it appeared solely as a standard blue link. It calculates distinct clicks, impressions, and CTR for each group.

By leveraging this data, we can assess the frequency of achieving a rich result, the percentage change in CTR when a rich result is achieved, and extrapolate insights into the additional clicks achieved due to the enhanced appearance. For further details, refer to this documentation.

You can combine these platforms and methods to get a well-rounded overview of your Schema Markup’s performance. By assessing its impact on your website’s performance, you can make informed decisions to optimize its implementation for better results.

You can learn how to calculate ROI from Schema Markup by reading this article. 

When will I start to see the impact of Structured Data in organic search?

The timeline for observing results from structured data in organic search depends on your markup strategy and the result you want to achieve.

For rich result-eligible markup, the impact can be evident quite quickly as soon as Google indexes your markup. There are a few key steps that must occur in order to see results:

1. Markup deployment: Your team’s changes to your markup are reflected in our system within 5 minutes of making changes in the Schema App Editor or Highlighter. If your website uses caching technology, it could take longer for the JSON-LD to appear in your rendered HTML. For more info, refer to this support document.
2. Markup indexing: After deployment, Google needs to index the Markup, which depends on how frequently Google crawls your site. This point in the process is also when we may discover technical limitations preventing Google from seeing and using your markup. These discoveries could cause further delays.
3. Google may begin awarding Search Features as soon as it indexes your results. The shortest time period for this is 2-3 days, but this process typically takes closer to a week or more.

When evaluating the impact of using structured data for semantic or entity-related objectives, it becomes more challenging to measure the direct impact of implementing Schema Markup. Over time, you may notice your page appearing on the SERP for more relevant keywords and observe an increase in click-through rates.

However, as per information from this Google SEO Starter Guide, these outcomes may take weeks or months to materialize. Unlike Rich Results, semantic efforts do not have a performance report filter in GSC. To report on results, we recommend a combination of approaches, including monitoring the SERP for key queries and in-depth data analysis on performance metrics.

How can we separate the impact of Schema Markup from other SEO initiatives?

Identifying the distinct impact of Schema Markup can be relatively straightforward because implementing Schema Markup is typically the primary method of achieving a rich result. However, there are exceptions, such as Merchant Listing Results, which can originate from markup or a Google Merchant Center account.

To separate the impact effectively, you can utilize Schema Performance Analytics tools like Page Level Analysis and Incremental Rich Result Clicks. However, in cases where other initiatives target the same group of URLs as the markup, isolating the direct impact becomes challenging.

There are, however, some strategies to consider:

1. Clear Team Communication! To isolate the impact of Schema Markup from the work of your content team, it’s important to know what your team is working on that could impact results, including URLs, types of content and site improvements made, etc.
2. Do A/B Testing or use control groups: Try to create equal groups of URLs with similar traffic volumes and formatting. You can use Schema Performance Analytics to compare the results over time between the experimental group (with Schema Markup) and the control group and assess any significant differences.
3. Acknowledge Challenges: Sometimes, it might be challenging to completely isolate Schema Markup’s impact from other initiatives. SEO is a cross-functional industry, and accepting the reality that shared efforts lead to shared results may be necessary.

Supporting you on your Schema Markup journey

Understanding the significance of Schema Markup is crucial for optimizing website content and driving success in SEO, AI, and semantic search initiatives. Digital teams must understand and measure the impact of Schema Markup on their SEO goals to craft and implement an effective strategy tailored to their organization’s goals.

If you’re looking to develop and implement an advanced Schema Markup strategy at scale and build your knowledge graph, Schema App offers an end-to-end solution that combines our semantic Schema Markup platform with High Touch Support services to drive results. Contact our team to get started.

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