At Schema App, the ambiguity around the use of the Physician type has long been an area of contention for many of our healthcare customers. Therefore, this article will hone in on the issues around Physician Schema Markup and how the new clarifying subtypes will resolve them.

The Issue With Physician Schema Markup

Prior to Schema.org’s version 24 release, the Physician type was intended to represent a doctor’s office. It was a subtype of MedicalBusiness via both Organization and Place, and MedicalOrganization via Organization, as shown in the hierarchy below.

• Thing > Organization > LocalBusiness > MedicalBusiness > Physician
• Thing > Place > LocalBusiness > MedicalBusiness > Physician
• Thing > Organization > MedicalOrganization > Physician

This hierarchy emphasized the categorization of Physician markup as a business with a physical location.

However, naming the type “Physician” caused confusion regarding how to use it properly. As a result, the Physician type was usually applied to describe an individual physician rather than a physician’s office with a physical location.

You can read more about the issue in this GitHub ticket.

Changes to Physician Type in Schema.org v24

Therefore, Schema.org made a few changes to the Physician type in v24 to provide users with greater clarity in their categorization.

1. Redefined the Physician type

The Physician type is now defined as ‘an individual physician or a physician’s office considered as a MedicalOrganization’.

2. Removed Physician as a subtype of LocalBusiness

The Physician type is now exclusively a subtype of MedicalOrganization.

3. Added usNPI property to the Physician type

The Physician type now also includes the usNPI (National Provider Identifier) property, a unique 10-digit identification number issued to healthcare providers in the United States by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

4. Introduced two new Physician subtypes: IndividualPhysician and PhysiciansOffice

Schema.org added IndividualPhysician and PhysiciansOffice as subtypes of Physician to disambiguate between these two interpretations of the Physician type.

Note: Schema.org version 26.0 later went on to restore PhysiciansOffice as a subtype of MedicalBusiness, after accidentally omitting it from the v24 update.

You can read more about it in this GitHub ticket.

5. Added occupationalCategory property to the Physician type

The occupationalCategory property is used to describe a job, preferably using a term from a taxonomy such as BLS O*NET-SOC, ISCO-08 or similar. This means you can specify whether a Physician (or its subtypes) has a specific occupational category like obstetrics or pediatrics.

6. Added new practicesAt property to the IndividualPhysician subtype

We will expand on this more in the section below.

But before that, let’s learn more about the two new Physician subtypes and how to use them.

Using the IndividualPhysician Subtype

The IndividualPhysician subtype should be used to describe an entity that is an individual medical practitioner.

The IndividualPhysician subtype still has properties available for things like:

• address
• hospitalAffiliation
• availableService

However, it also has the new ‘practicesAt’ property, which is unavailable to either Physician or PhysiciansOffice.

The practicesAt property should be used to indicate the MedicalOrganization (i.e. hospital, clinic, pharmacies, etc.) where this individual physician practices. If you have the MedicalOrganization entity defined on a different page of your site, you can connect both entities using this property.

Using the PhysiciansOffice Subtype

The PhysiciansOffice subtype should be used to describe an entity that is a doctor’s office or clinic.

It has the exact same properties as the Physician type, so you can still associate the PhysiciansOffice with a location using the address and hospitalAffiliation properties.

Should you Update Your Physician Markup?

In summary, the changes made to the Physician type in v24 will allow users to describe their content with greater specificity and help search engines better understand and contextualize the content on a page.

If you would like to continue using the Physician type to describe the entity on your page, you can do so since the new subtypes have almost the exact same properties. However, being specific with your Schema Markup is essential for search engines to disambiguate the entities on your site, thus allowing them to provide users with more accurate and relevant search results.

Therefore, we recommend updating your markup if you want to:

• Clearly distinguish between an individual physician vs a physician’s office,
• Leverage the practicesAt property, which is only available under the IndividualPhysician type.

The Schema App platform already supports Schema.org V24 if you want to try out the new Physician subtypes and properties. If you are a Schema App Enterprise customer, chat with your Customer Success Manager if you have questions about using these new types and properties.

If your healthcare organization is in need of healthcare schema expertise, we can help!

At Schema App, we provide an end-to-end Schema Markup solution for healthcare organizations and other enterprise SEO teams. Contact us to learn more about our solution.

The post Schema.org V24.0 Release: Changes to Physician Schema Markup appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

On November 29, 2023, Google announced they expanded their markup support for organization details. This means they’re using more properties from Schema.org’s Organization type to showcase the relevant information on Google’s knowledge panels and other visual elements such as Attribution.

This announcement comes two days after they introduced Profile Page and Discussion Forum rich results. Let’s dive in.

What You Need To Know About Organization Structured Data

Organization Structured Data is used to describe an organization (like a corporation, NGO, or school). It is often added to a website’s home page or about page since these pages tend to contain important information about an organization.

Previously, Google only supported Logo rich results for the Organization type. This required web publishers to use the logo and url properties to feature an organization’s logo in search results.

However, this update expands the number of properties that Google will support for the Organization type. In addition to logo and url, Google recommends web publishers use properties such as:

• name
• description
• legalName
• sameAs
• address
• duns
• taxID
• And more.

As part of this update, Google has also merged the documentation for Logo structured data with the Organization structured data feature guide. You can test your Organization structured data using Google’s Rich Results Test to determine if your markup is valid for the associated rich result.

Do you need to add all the recommended properties for Organization structured data? Probably not.

Most of the recommended properties are pretty straightforward. However, certain recommended properties, in particular, the identifier properties – iso6523Code, duns, leiCode, naics, globalLocationNumber, vatID, and taxID – may not be present on your website since they aren’t usually relevant to website visitors.

It is a general structured data best practice to only add Schema Markup for content that exists on the page itself. However, identifiers, like the ones listed above aren’t typically something that users visiting your site would be looking for.

Conversely, Google can use this information to consolidate the various identifiers as a single Organization entity in their Knowledge Graph. In cases like this, the content of these properties does not have to be visible to users on your website for you to add them in your markup.

Google is more strict about the visibility of content for rich results like Products and Review Snippets, which are more prone to fraudulent representation that can undermine consumer trust. However, metadata like identifiers is more critical for Google’s semantic understanding of entities than for the visual representation in the SERPs.

What you get from implementing Organization structured data

Adding Organization markup to your site will make it eligible to be shown on knowledge panels like the new merchant knowledge panel or other visual elements like Attribution. That way, users can easily find accurate information about your organization on Google.

Historically, the knowledge panels that appear on the right side of the SERP feed off data from Google’s knowledge graph and other sources like Wikipedia and authoritative websites. But with this update, Google can now tap into your structured data to provide users with even more accurate information about your organization.

The information in your Organization markup is arguably more accurate than an external source like Wikipedia because your organization owns the website and controls the information that appears there. Your structured data should be a trustworthy source, provided it is descriptive and up-to-date.

Structured Data to Reflect More E-E-A-T

These recent rich result updates underline Google’s ongoing prioritization of high-quality content from authoritative and trustworthy sources. Particularly at a time when AI-generated content is becoming more widespread, evidence of trustworthiness and reputation for the Organizations and People authoring and publishing content is paramount.

The Discussion Forum documentation states that markup for this type is used in features like Discussions and Forums and Perspectives, the latter of which surfaces “hidden gems” of unique expertise on a topic from those hard-to-find places.

Both the Profile Page and Discussion Forum structured data documentation include recommended properties for InteractionCounter to indicate things like the number of other accounts being followed, the number of likes of other entities’ posts, and the number of posts for a Person or Organization. These are properties that humans often reference when gauging the authority or trustworthiness of a source, so it would make sense that Google would want simplified access to this information in the form of structured data as well.

Google’s documentation for Article structured data now also recommends marking up author pages with profile page structured data.

This indicates two things:

1. Google wants more information about authors connected to the articles they write
2. Google is consuming structured data from multiple URLs about those authors

In essence, high-quality content from trusted sources is much more effective for keeping users happy with the search results they receive, but it’s also effective for training AI. Whether Google is focusing on advancing in the AI field, or trying to get a handle on the wild west of AI content proliferating on the web, it’s logical for them to encourage the application of structured data for types and properties that contribute to this effort.

Conclusion

In the October Google Search News Update, John Mueller recommended that SEOs “use a CMS hosting platform or plugin that makes it easy for you to add and remove structured data” to save time and make quick changes.

All these updates further demonstrate how important it is to have an agile structured data solution to stay ahead of your competitors. Furthermore, it is equally crucial to implement your structured data correctly and keep it up-to-date with Google’s changing requirements. This significantly impacts how Google understands your organization as an entity and how the information about your organization shows up in the SERP.

With the right expertise and agility to implement structured data on your site, you can leverage these new structured data opportunities to control how your brand is represented on the SERP and improve the search engine’s understanding of your content for more relevant search results.

Need help implementing an agile and scalable structured data solution across your site? Contact us today to learn more about our end-to-end Schema Markup solution.

The post Google Expands Markup Support for Organization Information appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

On November 27, 2023, Google released the new Profile Page structured data and Discussion Forum structured data. This comes after they announced the new Course Info structured data on November 15 and Vehicle Listing structured data on October 16. This holds to what John Mueller mentioned in the October 2023 Google Search News Update that some rich results would go away, and new ones would be introduced. Never before have four new rich results been announced in such a short time period.

Despite deprecating How-To structured data and reducing the frequency of FAQ rich results being shown, these 4 new rich results reflect a new investment in structured data from Google. And the reason for their investment in structured data is simple.

Structured data, also known as Schema Markup, helps search engines and machines (AI) understand and contextualize the content on your site to provide users with more relevant search results. As Google and Bing invest in generative AI search experiences driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), the Schema Markup on your site helps them reduce errors and delight their customers. Read more about the evolving role of Schema Markup and Knowledge Graphs.

Let’s dive deeper into these two new rich results to see how you can maximize them to stand out in search.

Profile page (ProfilePage) structured data

ProfilePage structured data is great for websites that have creators (person or organization) who share first-hand perspectives. It can be used to describe author profile pages on a news site, employee pages on a company website, and user profile pages on a forum or social media site. Google can use this information in features such as Perspectives and Discussions and Forums.

It can also be nested in other structured data features that have authors such as Article, Recipe, Discussion Forum and Q&A page.

By adding ProfilePage markup and the required/recommended properties to your page, Google can highlight the creator’s information, such as their name, follower count, content popularity, social media handles, and more, on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

But more importantly, Google can leverage this markup to disambiguate the creator. Even though search engines like Google use natural language processing models like BERT to gain a better understanding of your content, these models are still prone to errors.

When you use structured data to identify the creator as an entity and connect them to the articles or posts they’ve written, you are building your knowledge graph. Your knowledge graph showcases the relationships between the things on your site and helps search engines understand and contextualize who wrote your content with greater accuracy.

When search engines have an in-depth understanding of the person or organization that wrote the content on your site, it can also boost your E-E-A-T. Information such as follower count and the number of posts written are signals of experience, expertise, authority and trust.

On top of yielding rich results for your organization, adding ProfilePage markup to your site can also help improve the semantic understanding of your site.

The enhancement report and performance report for ProfilePage structured data is now available in Google Search Console.

Discussion forum (DiscussionForumPosting) structured data

Discussion forum structured data can be used to describe user-generated content on forum-style websites such as gaming forums. However, it shouldn’t be used for content primarily authored by the website publisher or their agents (i.e. article or blog posts with comments, product reviews provided by the users).

Forum sites that add this Schema Markup can help Google better identify the online discussions happening across the web and highlight them on features such as Perspectives and Discussions and Forums.

Discussion Forum Schema Markup is very similar to the existing Q&A Schema Markup. However, Discussion Forum markup should be used on pages where the responses to the thread are comments. For example, the threads on the subreddit ‘r/mildlyinteresting’ would be appropriate for Discussion Forum markup because the user is making a statement and expecting other users to comment on the thread.

Conversely, you should only use Q&A markup when the page has questions and answers. For example, the threads on Quora would be appropriate for QAPage markup because the user is posing a question on the page and expecting answers to be provided in the comments.

Unlike other structured data features, Google recommends web publishers provide the DiscussionForumPosting markup in Microdata or RDFa, instead of JSON-LD. This prevents publishers from having to duplicate large blocks of text within the markup. However, using JSON-LD will not impact your eligibility for this rich result.

The enhancement report and performance report for Discussion forum markup is also available on Google Search Console.

Read Google’s document for more information on how to use DiscussionForumPosting markup.

Conclusion

Based on the rich result changes we’ve seen this year, one thing’s for sure. Google can add new rich results as fast as they can take them away from us.

To thrive in this ever-changing environment, organizations need to be agile and ready to implement new or update their existing semantic Schema Markup markup to stay relevant and leading in search.

If you want to increase your visibility and relevance on search, we can help! Contact us to learn more about our scalable semantic Schema Markup solution.

The post Profile Page & Discussion Forum Rich Results Now Available on Google Search appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Available only to verified car dealerships in the US or US territories, the new Vehicle Listing rich result allows car dealerships to display the vehicle inventory they have for sale on various Google surfaces such as Google Search and the dealership’s Google Business Profiles. People can also search, filter and easily access information about the vehicle’s availability, pricing, mileage and other key information.

The Vehicle Listing rich result is a great way for car dealerships to stand out in search and shorten the buyer journey. Pages with rich results typically see a higher click-through rate on the site.

In this article, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of implementing the new Vehicle Listing rich result through structured data compared to using a file feed and share how this announcement is an exciting followup to the overall Search update on structured data earlier this month.

How to achieve the Vehicle Listing rich result

Unlike most rich results that solely rely on structured data, the Vehicle Listing rich result can be achieved through two methods.

1. Adding Car structured data to your Vehicle Listing page.

As with any rich result on Google, you must markup your vehicle listing page with the required structured data properties and are encouraged to also markup the recommended structured data properties listed on the structured data feature guide.

It is, however, important to note that you can only markup content that is visible on your vehicle listing page.

For example, if you do not have any pricing information on your vehicle listing page, you cannot add the offers.price property to your markup. Doing so will make your listing page ineligible for the rich result.

2. Uploading a vehicle listings file feed to Google’s vehicle listings partner portal. 

You can upload your vehicle listing feed file to Google’s vehicle listings partner portal in CSV format to achieve a rich result.

Your feed file should contain the list of vehicles you want to show on Google as well as the required attributes about each vehicle listed in the Feed specification.

Some of the attributes in the Feed specification are optional. However, providing Google with more information will help improve their understanding of your listings to better match the searcher’s query.

Pros and Cons of Both Methods

If implemented properly, both methods should make your vehicle listing pages eligible for the Vehicle Listing rich result. However, there are pros and cons to each method.

Pros and Cons of adding Car structured data to the vehicle listing page

Pro: Easy to implement and maintain structured data markup on your website. 

Similar to the file feed, structured data is a data feed about the content on your website.

If you use a tool like the Schema App Highlighter, you can implement structured data to your vehicle listings page at scale. Your structured data will also automatically update whenever the content on your page changes. This is important because you’ll want to avoid schema drift and make sure the rich result is always showing the latest information like availability and pricing.

Con: It could take longer for Google to detect changes on your website. 

Unlike the uploaded feed file method, you’ll have to wait for Google to re-index your page before it can register any updates to your structured data. At Schema App, we advise our customers to re-index their pages right after making any structured data updates to their pages so that Google can detect the changes quickly.

Con: No 1:1 support from Google. 

Similar to other rich results, Google will have an enhancement report on Search Console for the Vehicle Listing rich result. The enhancement report will show any errors or invalid items for your vehicle listing rich results. But you’ll need to figure out what is causing these errors and rectify them yourself.

If you are using Schema App’s end-to-end Schema Markup solution, you’ll receive support from our customer success team whenever any structured data errors appear. Even if you don’t get the 1:1 support from Google, you can still get support from our team.

Pros and Cons of Uploading a vehicle listings file feed to Google’s vehicle listings partner portal

Pro: All inventory data in feed files is recognized by Google. 

However, you need to ensure your vehicle data conforms to the feed specification and Google’s policies and restrictions.

Pro: 1:1 support is available to address any issues with feed uploads at the vehicle listings partner portal.

This means that Google will provide your team with support through the vehicle listings partner portal. After you’ve submitted your vehicle listing file feed, you can also look at the Diagnostics page to see the full list of issues.

Pro: Feeds support more detailed properties for vehicle inventory. 

The file feed method will allow dealerships to include more information than the structured data method and some of the additional information can also be shown in the rich results on Google.

For example, information about the vehicle’s installed options and packages, fuel efficiency, legal disclaimer and vehicle history report link are additional information you can add through your file feed to further enhance your Vehicle Listing rich result.

Information about the vehicle’s EV range, CO2 emissions, fulfillment options, and link to the Monroney sticker are additional information you can add through your file feed to provide more context to Google about your product. This information will not be shown on Google.

Con: Maintaining the feed files can be challenging and time-consuming.

Google recommends dealerships upload the latest versions of their feed files every four hours to preserve the data freshness and to detect outages faster. If done manually, this process can be incredibly tedious and time-consuming. It is also yet another data platform that you’ll need to maintain, on top of having to maintain the information on your website.

That said, you can use both methods at the same time to provide Google with as much information about your vehicle listing pages. However, you’ll need to ensure the data is consistent across both the structured data on your site and the vehicle listings file feed. Otherwise, the information on the file feed would override the information on the structured data, even if the information on your structured data is accurate.

Adding structured data to your vehicle listing page is probably the easiest way for your car dealership to be eligible for these rich results, especially if you’re already adding structured data to your pages.

Structured data is not obsolete

Earlier this month, John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, mentioned in a Google Search News update that they will continue to introduce new Types and some Types may go away over time.

This year, Google stopped using structured data for How-To rich results and changed the eligibility for the FAQ rich results to only be shown for well-known authoritative government and health sites. Many SEOs started to ask if there was value beyond rich results.

The answer is YES! Structured data provides you with the ability to help generative AI search engines understand and contextualize the content on your page and develop your knowledge graph.

The Vehicle Listing rich result is the first new rich result they’ve introduced awhile, albeit it is restricted only to US dealerships for now. This tells us that structured data isn’t obsolete and Google is still giving content publishers control over the information provided to their search engines.

As Mueller reiterated in his update, structured data (also known as Schema Markup) is a machine-readable code that you can add to your web pages which search engines can use to better understand the content.

Therefore, you should implement structured data primarily to help search engines clearly understand the content on your site and consider rich results an added value. That way, search engines can provide users accurate answers to queries like ‘How much does an Audi A6 cost’ and ‘white Toyota Camry for sale’ to drive more qualified traffic to your site.

Finally, Mueller concluded the section on structured data by recommending SEOs to use a solution that allows you to easily implement and manage the structured data on your site to save you time. This is exceptionally important for dealerships who want to maintain the accuracy of their structured data at all times. The last thing you’d want is for a potential customer to enquire about their dream car on your vehicle listing only to find out that the car is no longer available.

If you are a US-based car dealership looking to implement structured data on your site, we can help!

At Schema App, we help organizations leverage Schema Markup to inform search engines, achieve rich results and develop a reusable marketing knowledge graph. We implement and manage your Schema Markup programmatically through our semantic technology platform and high-touch support.

Get in touch with us today to learn more!

The post New Vehicle Listing Structured Data on Google appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

This past August, Google first removed How-To rich results on mobile. As a result, we saw a huge decline in clicks and impressions for How-To rich results across our customers. This updated announcement will undoubtedly remove all traffic and impressions from the rich result.

Why is this happening?

Prior to this change, content publishers would add HowTo Schema Markup to pages with instructional content that defined the steps needed to successfully complete a task. If appropriate, Google would then award the page with a How-To rich result that outlined the steps in the SERP.

However, we’ve often found How-To rich results to be somewhat controversial. On one hand, rich results were supposed to increase user engagement and drive click-through rates to a site. On the other hand, How-To rich results usually provided users with the answer directly on the SERP, resulting in a lower click-through rate. As such, How-To rich results were not as widely adopted as other rich results like product, review snippets and FAQ.

That said, How-To rich results still provided users with valuable information on the SERP and could help organizations improve their customer journey. So why is Google removing this rich result from the SERP?

In their announcement, Google mentioned that this was a continued effort on their end to ‘simplify search results’. This year, Google has made some significant changes to the SERP.

• They introduced Search Generative Experience (SGE) – their generative AI-powered search interface.
• They stopped awarding video rich results to pages that did not have a video as their main content.
• They stopped awarding FAQ rich results on both desktop and mobile for most websites and will only be showing FAQ rich results for well-known, authoritative government and health websites.
• They deprecated How-To rich results entirely from the SERP.

However, this begs the question: What does Google mean by simplifying search results?

Are they trying to declutter the search engine results page? They did reduce the visibility of video and FAQ rich results in the past few months, possibly because people were abusing them. However, the SERP is still littered with advertisements, making it tougher for users to identify the most appropriate result for their query.

Or could they be simplifying search results that SGE can also provide? As seen in SEO expert, Glenn Gabe’s tweet, the content from the same How-To was shown in SGE and in the first position in the SERP as a How-To rich result.

Ah, yes. But this is about the desktop version being removed. This is how it looked. See my listing below SGE (when HowTo was still there on desktop). pic.twitter.com/S1nqtYukNa

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 14, 2023

One of the glowing features of SGE is its ability to provide users with answers and additional relevant information that they might need. If you search up how to perform a task, SGE can provide you the steps to perform the task successfully and links to a few pages that also capture those steps.

If you search for the top Italian restaurants, SGE can provide you with a list of restaurants together with a map showing where they’re located in proximity to you, and links to aggregator sites that also have a list of top Italian restaurants in your city. These are just two of the many examples of how SGE creates helpful experiences based on the wealth of information on the web.

At its core, Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Rich results were first introduced to provide users with more useful information in search, help them make better decisions and find answers. It was also a way for Google to incentivize website owners to add structured data to their sites to help search engines understand the content on a page.

But with SGE providing the information in a simplified way, more rich results could be rendered obsolete in the coming years. That said, this does not mean that you should abandon adding Schema Markup to your site.

What should you do next?

Schema Markup helps machines understand and contextualize the content and information on your website.

Even though you will no longer achieve a How-To rich result on your page, you should still add Schema Markup to your pages to futureproof your organization for search.

This is a paradigm shift that requires SEOs to think about the value of Schema Markup beyond rich results. 

Over the past few years, search algorithms have shifted from lexical to semantic search. Instead of ranking pages based on keyword matching, search engines are ranking pages based on the relevance of the concepts and entities in the page’s content to the searcher’s query.

And how do you identify and define the entities on your website for search engines? You can define the entities on your website using Schema Markup.

By marking up the content on your site, you are helping search engines understand the concepts and entities on your website and providing them with contextual information about these entities. In return, they can better match your page to a query and ideally improve your ranking on search in the long run.

If you are interested in learning more about entities and semantic search, you can tune in to our recent webinar with Mike King or Schema Markup expert, Dave Ojeda’s latest interview on iPullRank’s Rankable podcast.

Generative AI search engines like SGE and the new Bing still face hallucination challenges resulting in inaccurate results. At Schema App, we’ve been advising our customers to think about the semantic value of Schema Markup.

Instead of implementing Schema Markup on a handful of pages for the sole purpose of achieving a rich result, you should implement Schema Markup across your site to define the entities and concepts on your site and link them to develop your very own marketing knowledge graph.

Knowledge graphs are a structured and organized information data layer that can help search engines to improve the accuracy of their answers and provide your organization with a control point to inform generative AI on your web content. Your marketing knowledge graph can also be reused for other AI initiatives.

As the SEO industry continues to see changes from Google and on search, organizations need to prepare to stay ahead of the competition. If you are looking to learn more about semantic Schema Markup, we can help.

Contact us to see how we can help your organization build a marketing knowledge graph and future proof your organization for AI search.

If you are a Schema App customer with concerns regarding the changes in rich results, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to see how we can support your organization through these changes.

The post Say Goodbye to How-To Rich Results on Google appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

FAQ rich results will only be available for “well-known, authoritative government and health websites”. Other sites won’t receive FAQ rich results “regularly” (which is not the same as saying “ever”). We have yet to see what Google considers an authoritative site or health site, but this is one of the many questions we endeavour to answer in the coming weeks.

How-to rich results, on the other hand, will exclusively appear on desktop and no longer be visible to mobile users. That said, with Google’s mobile-first indexing, websites should still include HowTo markup on both their mobile and desktop site to achieve the How-to rich result on desktop.

Even though this change will not have an impact on search rankings, websites that leverage FAQ and How-to rich results will likely see a decline in traffic and impressions from these rich results on the Google Search Console performance report.

This announcement garnered strong reactions from the SEO community, as many mourned the loss of some of their best-performing (and content-heavy) rich results. In response to some of the tweets, John Mueller referenced “the tragedy of the commons”, and other SEOs remarked on the overuse of FAQs, in particular, as “spammy”.

Independent of abuse / over-use, things can change on the web / with users / with focus shifts, and it’s important to clean up from time to time. (And it’s a good reminder to read up about the tragedy of the commons :-)).

— John Mueller (official) · #MaybeABot (@JohnMu) August 8, 2023

But Mueller also recommended SEOs “really focus on structured data to make your pages eligible for a specific treatment in search. Additional structured data can be useful to understand the content better, but [he] wouldn’t assume there’s a visible effect / ranking change.”

What Schema Performance Analytics is Showing

We are monitoring the industry data from Schema Performance Analytics on a daily basis to see when the changes announced take place.

We have seen varied results after August 8th. We have seen drops in FAQ performance in some of our clients.

As of August 14, we’ve seen a decline in FAQ performance on mobile for customers in the Healthcare Industry, while FAQ performance on desktop remains stable. Stay tuned for more updates on FAQ performance.

Schema App Perspective on this Change

Here are our key takeaways from this change:

1. Focus on targeting a diverse range of rich results.
2. Continue adding connected schema markup to support machine understanding.
3. Create quality content that prioritizes a human audience.

These three recommendations are already considered best practices here at Schema App and what we already work on with our customers.

Focus on targeting a diverse range of rich results

At Schema App, we’ve seen lots of fluctuations from various rich results over time. As such, we always recommend diversifying the rich results in your portfolio.

Google’s goal is to provide searchers with the best quality results, and we’ve seen them make countless changes to the algorithm or the SERP to inch closer to that goal.

Whenever Google makes a change like this, we’ve been able to detect the drop in performance and test solutions to help our customers overcome them. For example, FAQs not being granted unless questions matched keywords exactly or videos needing to be the main content of the page to achieve a Video rich result. Our approach to this announcement is no different.

FAQ rich results have historically performed well for many of our customers. It brought more website content to the SERP and allowed the inclusion of HTML to improve the readability of the answers and embed hyperlinks. We will continue to monitor FAQ rich results to see who Google awards this rich result to and look for opportunities for our customers to qualify for it.

In the meantime, our customer success managers will work closely with our customers to identify other rich result opportunities and ways to improve their content to achieve a wider range of rich results.

Continue adding connected Schema Markup to support machine understanding

At its core, Schema Markup is a code that helps machines better understand the content on your page.

As Google and Bing accelerate their AI search capabilities, they will need to overcome the challenge of AI hallucinations to achieve a reasonable level of efficacy. By adding Schema Markup to your site, you can provide search engines with reliable, structured content that they can use to train and hone the accuracy of their Large Language Models.

Google might have eliminated the FAQ rich result but there is still an opportunity for your organization to appear in their Search Generative Experience (SGE).

If you want Google to provide an accurate answer regarding your organization in their new AI search experience, adding robust, semantic Schema Markup on your site is necessary. Doing so will allow your organization to generate a marketing knowledge graph from the content on your site. AI search engines can then use this knowledge graph to provide users with more accurate information about your organization.

Conclusion

We will be sharing more insights on the situation as Google rolls out the changes to FAQ and How-To rich results in the next week. Our team is also actively testing various alternative solutions to ensure our customers continue to see great results from implementing Schema Markup.

If you have more questions, please reach out to your assigned customer success manager or support@schemaapp.com.

The post Changes to FAQ and How-to rich results on Google appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

The decline was first noticed on April 5 for FAQ rich results on mobile and subsequently affected results on desktop starting May 4. As a result, the clicks, impressions and CTR for many FAQ rich results dropped.

After monitoring the situation for a few weeks, pages with FAQ rich results have shown little signs of recovery without changes to the content.

What we do know:

• Nothing has changed in terms of Google’s Structured Data requirements and documentation. The FAQ instances remain valid for Google’s rich results on Google Search Console. 
• Google is reducing the number of FAQ rich results it is showing. Various SEOs have also noticed this decline, but there hasn’t been any official comment from Google. 
• Despite the decline, most of our customers are still achieving FAQ rich results for a number of queries. This is where it gets interesting and where we see an opportunity for optimization.

Opportunity for FAQ optimization 

Upon observing this decline, our Customer Success team dug deeper into the FAQ rich results to find potential solutions and recommendations for our customers. We observed that the issue was country and device-agnostic, so we honed in on the queries in Google Search Console to see what might be affecting the performance of the FAQ rich results.

To start, we identified individual pages that saw a decline in FAQ performance but were still awarded the FAQ rich result. For each of these pages, we looked at the top queries that previously achieved an FAQ rich result and compared it to the existing queries that were still achieving an FAQ rich result, and we noticed a trend.

The Schema App Customer Success team discovered that if the frequently asked question on a page did not align with the query, the page would no longer be awarded an FAQ rich result. 

For example: Our blog article ‘What is Schema Markup?’ used to get awarded the FAQ rich result for queries such as:

• What is Schema org
• Schema Markup Seo
• Types of Schema Markup
• What is Schema Markup

The questions with the FAQ markup on the article were:

• What is Schema Markup?
• Why is it important to add Schema Markup to your pages?
• What types of Schema Markup are there?
• How can Schema Markup be implemented?

The first two queries – What is Schema org and Schema Markup SEO – that were previously awarded the FAQ rich result did not align with the questions on the blog post.

These two queries saw the largest decline in impressions on Google Search Console after May 4. Even though the page itself is still ranking for that keyword, Google is no longer awarding an FAQ rich result for pages with questions that broadly match or are related to the query.

On the flip side, the last two queries – Types of Schema Markup & What is Schema Markup – aligned with the questions in the article and continued to be awarded the FAQ rich results even after May 4.

Logically, this makes sense. If Google’s main objective is to provide users with the highest quality and relevant search results, showing users FAQs with irrelevant content doesn’t really align with that objective. What this means is that you want to target queries that have a high search volume and relevancy to your audience.

Our Customer Success team is currently working with Schema App customers to update their FAQ content with what the data is showing as targeted queries and measure the impact on their FAQ rich result performance.

If you are looking for ways to optimize the performance FAQ rich results after the April and May decline, you can follow these steps.

1. Login to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Search Results’ tab on the left menu bar.
2. Review key URLs that have seen a significant decline in FAQ performance but continue to achieve FAQ rich results.
3. Look at the queries that have seen a decline after May 4.
4. Review FAQ content on your page and check if it is aligned with the search queries that you want to target. If they are not aligned, update your FAQ content on page to align them with your targeted search queries.

As seen in our previous rich result weather reports, Google’s rich results are prone to fluctuations and that is why we emphasize heavily on the importance of diversifying your rich results. As the search engine result page changes, you have to proactively manage your Schema Markup and content to maintain your visibility in search.

At Schema App, our Customer Success team does more than just leverage our tools to author and deploy Schema Markup at scale for our customers. They also utilize Schema Performance Analytics to measure results, observe trends and dive deep into the data to provide recommendations to help our customers grow their organic results.

If you are interested to see how our end-to-end Schema Markup solution can help your organization leverage Schema Markup to drive traffic or gear up for AI search, get in touch with our team today.

The post May 2023 Rich Results Weather Report: FAQ Fluctuations & Optimization Strategy appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

2023 started off on a calm note with very few changes in rich results performance, but since the March Broad Core Update, we’ve seen a few big swings happen on the search engine results page, particularly with Video and FAQ rich results.

Based on our industry data, we’ve seen most of the changes happen after an announcement from Google – whether that be a core update or a documentation update on how they are displaying specific rich results. However, there are also changes on the search engine results page that happen unannounced by Google.

Here’s what our industry data is showing us from the past few months.

Video Rich Result Changes

Effective April 13, 2023, Google has simplified the video presentation on the search engine results page. Prior to this change, video thumbnails were shown in two different ways.

1. Pages that had a video as the main content of the page would show up with this listing format on the SERP.

2. Pages that had a video present on a page but not as the main element of the page would show up with this listing format on the SERP.

Today, Google is no longer awarding a video rich result to pages that do not have the video as the main content. However, if the video is the main content of the page, the video rich results will continue to show.

After April 13, we’ve seen the clicks and impressions for Video Rich Results drop by over 95% for all our clients and the numbers slowly improved after April 21st, as a result of customers making video the main content on a page.

Read Google’s Video SEO best practices guide to learn how you can help Google find your video and optimize it for search. If you are a Schema App enterprise customer, your Customer Success Manager will provide you with content recommendations to optimize your videos.

FAQ Rich Results Fluctuations

Our relationship with FAQ rich results is tumultuous at best.

Around April 5th 2023, we saw the clicks and impressions for FAQ rich results on a downward trend.

This drop was mainly for FAQ rich results on mobile as mentioned by other SEOs.

Quick update on the drop in FAQ snippets on mobile & the drop in video snippets in the SERPs.

FAQ snippets remain down on mobile based on the change on 4/5. And video snippets have plummeted for sites where the videos are not the main content (starting on 4/13). No change there: pic.twitter.com/M0406FPGWG

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 29, 2023

Even though the numbers show signs of slow recovery after April 18, we saw the clicks and impressions for FAQ rich results on desktop and mobile dropped drastically on the weekend of May 7. We’ve yet to see any confirmed algorithm changes or comments from Google regarding this issue.

Despite being one of the top-performing rich results on the search engine results page, FAQ rich results have historically been notorious with their fluctuations. We saw the performance for FAQ rich results fluctuate in May, August, September and October of 2022.

We have yet to isolate the reason for this decline but it looks like Google is reducing how often it is awarding a rich result and the queries that might be achieving them.

Moreover, we aren’t seeing this across all our clients, in fact some clients are seeing gains. This leads us to believe that it could be based on the quality of content.

In an unofficial statement on Mastodon, John Mueller also mentioned that “sites love adding FAQ markup, it gives them more room in search, and at some point, it makes the results less useful. The right balance makes sense to re-evaluate from time to time, like with any other search element.”

As a result, our Customer Success team keeping a close eye on the situation and revisiting the schema markup strategy to make content recommendations to drive results. This is also why we urge our customers to diversify their content and rich results, to reduce dependency on individual rich results to drive traffic.

Google Updates: Generative AI on Search

Google’s I/O developer conference also happened today and recent reports from Wall Street Journal and New York Times have leaked potential changes that Google might be making to the search engine results page prior to the conference.

During the keynote speech at the conference, Google unveiled the addition of generative AI to their search engine results page. Users will still need to type a query, but the generative AI search engine will provide users will answer directly on the SERP with links to websites, snippets of content and ads. Users can also ask follow-up questions to get more specific responses.

Image: Google

This change is a departure from the traditional search results and could explain the recent changes in FAQ and video rich results. But more importantly, Google’s Search Generative Experience will still require a data source to identify information from trusted websites and sources. This is where Schema Markup comes to play.

Watch our ‘How Marketers Can Leverage Schema Markup and Prepare for AI-Search’ webinar recording to learn why Schema Markup and your Knowledge graph are important for AI and machine learning.

The post April 2023 Rich Results Weather Report: Video & FAQ Fluctuations appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Building meaningful connections and a strong company culture can be challenging as a fully remote team working across Canada. We host monthly team-building activities and conduct virtual co-working sessions, but the value of in-person interaction is often unparalleled as we continue to grow our team.

To bridge the distance gap, we hosted our first 2-day in-person team retreat at our new Schema App head office in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. The entire Schema App team gathered for two days of culture-building, strategic planning, training and celebration to mark the end of another quarter.

Here’s what we got up to during Homecoming 2023.

Breaking the ice & building team culture

Part of building meaningful connections is contextualizing places and things, and helping the rest of the team understand how they relate to various team members. With a good 70% of the Schema App team living outside of Guelph, we hosted a scavenger hunt across Guelph.

Building our very own Knowledge Graph

In the spirit of building meaningful connections, we also wanted team members to identify things they had in common. During the game, we learnt that some of us played multiple musical instruments while others found commonality in their love for video games, sports and reading.

Within 10 minutes, we found commonality between various team members and built our very own live Schema App Knowledge Graph.

Living our Values 

Growth mindset, great people and getting results are the 3 core values we live and breathe at Schema App. It flows through our work, our actions, our culture and even more so at Homecoming 2023.

During Homecoming 2023, the entire Schema App team had the opportunity to exercise their creativity and ideate on what could do to reach 10X growth. With no wrong answers, we heard  team members from different functional groups share their perspectives based on the work they’ve been doing.

Award of Excellence

Every 6 months, we get to nominate and pick an exemplary team member for our Award of Excellence. This team member lives out our core values, has demonstrated outstanding service to the Schema App community and/or has made extraordinary contributions to the company beyond what is normally expected of their job.

The Award of Excellence went to Ana Petkovic, Manager of Customer Success! Ana ensures that our purpose thrives within our Customer Success team and with our customers. She lives our culture day by day, while also delivering awesome results. Congratulations Ana!

Developing our Team

Developing a great team involves more than just alignment on goals and priorities. On the second day of Homecoming, Brady Wilson, cofounder of Juice Inc, and our very own Kate Wilson, conducted an Oxygen Poker training session to help our team members understand their needs and how they can manage their energy to maximize performance.

This exercise was a great framework for the Schema App team to reflect on their needs and understand how they can best support their team members to maximize energy and performance. You can learn more about Oxygen Poker here.

In conclusion, Homecoming 2023 was a huge success. On top of all the workshops and activities, our team members were able to build meaningful connections through shared meals, board games, and conversations throughout the day. We cannot wait for our next reunion!

The post How We Built Meaningful Connections at Homecoming 2023 appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

This January, we’ve seen December’s fluctuations turn into a steady rhythm of growth. There were also discussions about Google’s perspective on connected structured data. Here’s a roundup of what we’ve seen this past January.

Rich Results Performance in January 2023

Steady performance across all rich results

January was a fairly calm month on the search engine results page – a welcomed change from the second half of 2022. 

According to our data from Schema Performance Analytics, most rich results were trending positively in January in comparison to December.

FAQ Recovery from December Update

In December 2022, we saw the performance for FAQ rich results take a slight decline.

This is likely due to the rollout of Google’s December Helpful Content Update and link spam update, which affected rankings and traffic to many websites as observed by other SEOs. 

The Google search ranking algorithm volatility is still pretty hot, right before Christmas https://t.co/plitzoaipq pic.twitter.com/HWgLMFlxhI

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) December 23, 2022

Thankfully, the updates ended officially in January and we’ve seen the numbers recover and stabilize for the rest of the month. 

Connected vs. Unconnected Structured Data

This January, there was a conversation with John Mueller about whether Google had an SEO preference for connected structured data on Mastodon. 

While John said that Google has no preference, Ryan Levering, who primarily works on structured data at Google, agreed to John’s response but with a caveat on Mastodon. 

Here’s our takeaway from this discussion. 

Google cares about Schema Drift.

In Levering’s response, he said,

However, the caveat here is that when you do [structured data] in multiple blocks, there are sometimes conflict/duplication problems… We still see cases, where people throw unrelated markup about things (like related products) at the same top level as the main entity from different blocks on the page and that, makes it mostly noise.”

The duplication issue is also known as Schema Drift and happens when the structured data is out of sync with the content on your website. 

During the “Structured Data: What’s it all about?” episode of Google’s Search off the Record Podcast, Levering mentioned that their primary challenge with structured data is “figur[ing] out a way to verify that the structured data is accurate”. 

The challenge of verifying the accuracy of structured data is costly to Google, “so sometimes centralizing the logic makes it more consistent/correct,” said Levering. Keeping the structured data organized can reduce the risk of Schema Drift and this aligns with how we do structured data at Schema App. 

The Schema App Highlighter dynamically generates structured data from the content on your website. If your team changes the content on the page, your structured data will automatically update to reflect those changes. 

Connected structured data might not matter as much to Google today but it will in the future.

Also, over time richer/correct semantics will favour more connected graphs.” 

During the podcast, Levering also spoke about how machine learning can use structured data as a data source. If machine learning uses structured data to validate or understand the content, connected structured data will teach the machine to infer the meaning and connections between different entities on the site. 

Even though Google doesn’t utilize connected structured data today,  they are likely headed in that direction in the future. However, creating connected structured data can be complicated and hard to manage. 

At Schema App, we do more than just achieve rich results through structured data. We help our customers create their own knowledge graph and connect it with other knowledge graphs available on the web. 

With our background in semantic technology, our goal is to support our users’ SEO goals while also connecting their domains with the people, places, things and concepts that have been described by other authorities like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google’s Knowledge Graph. In engaging with Schema App, you are leveraging a global collective intelligence and transforming your data into knowledge.

Connected Schema Markup is essential to this work. That’s why we developed the Schema Paths Tool, to help users connect different schema types and determine the path that best articulates the relationships in their web content.

Conclusion

Rich results are merely the tip of the structured data iceberg. 

At its most basic level, structured data increases search engines’ understanding of your content, which corresponds to an increase in traffic and engagement to your site. At an advanced level, structured data provides search engines with context to the contents on your page, which transforms data into knowledge for future applications. 

If you are interested in generating connected structured data, we can help. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our solutions.

The post January 2023 Rich Results Weather Report appeared first on Schema App Solutions.