Mastering Schema Markup takes time and requires technical knowledge that most SEO teams lack the capacity to acquire and implement. As a result, they are unable to see results from this technical SEO strategy.

At Schema App, we don’t just provide the platform for you to generate and deploy your Schema Markup. We also provide high-touch support services to support you from strategy to results.

What does our high-touch support service entail? 

Our high-touch support services are offered through our end-to-end Schema Markup solution for enterprise SEO teams.

In the beginning stages of our partnership, you will be assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to your account during the onboarding session. This person is the point of contact throughout the engagement for all things related to authoring markup, deployment and troubleshooting, measuring results, and continued strategy on how to develop the semantic value that structured data provides to your website.

Your CSM will guide you through the Schema App process outlined below and you should know that this is a cyclical and ongoing process.

As things change with Google or your website’s content, this process is repeated throughout your engagement to ensure you continue to see value in your Schema Markup strategy and stay prepared for the future of search.

Every enterprise customer is allotted a minimum of one hour of high-touch support per month. After your initial strategy and scope implementation, your CSM will utilize your high-touch support hours to provide ongoing Schema Markup-related support.

Initial strategy and scope implementation

1. Creating your Schema Markup Strategy

One of the first things your Customer Success Manager will do is create your Schema Markup strategy.

Identifying desired outcomes

During the discovery process, we work to identify each individual enterprise customer’s desired outcomes in working with Schema App. This might include:

• Increased traffic to specific lines of businesses,
• increased organic click-through rate (CTR) year over year,
• rich result targeting,
• reduced dependency on IT teams to deploy structured data or
• the development of a knowledge graph through semantic schema markup.

By clearly stating these desired outcomes, your Customer Success Manager can align the strategy with your goals.

Scoping website for appropriate Schema.org types and properties

Additionally, your Customer Success Manager will assess your domain to identify common pages and the most applicable schema Type to apply to each page. By starting with this scoping process, we create an overview of how we’re establishing your Marketing Knowledge Graph by connecting your Organization to your various locations, products, and services.

From there, we dig into your various page sets to identify how your content aligns with the many schema properties applicable to the targeted schema Type. Our guiding star is establishing thorough, healthy markup that is dynamic with your content and scales across the pageset.

2. Authoring your markup using our tools

Once your CSM identifies how to target customer pages with the most appropriate schema Type in the ‘Strategy’ stage of the Schema App process, it is time to move onto the ‘Authoring’ stage.

As part of your initial implementation scope, your CSM will also help you author your markup using our Schema App Editor and Schema App Highlighter.

At Schema App, we provide all our CSMs intensive training to ensure they become experts in the Schema.org vocabulary and our tools. Equipped with the expertise, your CSM can help you quickly author thorough semantic markup, and find applicable external entities to include. Your team will not have to worry about having to master the Schema.org vocabulary or learn how to use the Schema App Editor and Highlighter in detail. Your CSM will take care of that.

Given the capabilities of our team and our tools, we can typically create accurate JSON-LD to deploy to your page within minutes.

3. Deployment

Once authored, Schema App deploys markup to your website through a variety of integrations – with the most common deployment method being through a simple JavaScript tag. Generally, once markup is authored, you’ll see your Schema Markup live on the page within approximately 15 minutes.

If any challenges arise during the deployment process, your CSM will troubleshoot with our internal team and perform corrections where needed. If necessary, your CSM will also provide actionable advice on any setting changes required from your team to resolve these challenges as soon as possible.

Shortly after deploying the agreed-upon scope, we provide initial reporting with a ‘First Wins’ presentation, to reflect on our early successes.

Ongoing Maintenance

Schema Markup is not a one-and-done strategy. It takes effort to maintain your markup through the evolving search landscape. SEO teams often lack the capacity to stay on top of Google’s changes and keep their markup up to date. Therefore with Schema App’s High Touch Support services, your CSM becomes an extension of your SEO team.

As mentioned earlier, your CSM will utilize your high-touch support hours for ongoing Schema Markup-related support after the initial strategy and scope implementation, and there are many ways you can utilize this time.

1. Regular sync ups

You can utilize your high-touch support hours for regular sync-up calls with your CSM to maintain constant communication.

In addition to Google making constant changes to its algorithms and overall search experience, it’s also common for your website content to change after the initial implementation. During these sync-up calls, you can:

• Discuss changes made to your Schema Markup,
• Share upcoming plans for your website content,
• Receive coaching on ways to improve your content to meet your rich result requirements,
• Troubleshoot any errors you’ve identified,
• And request other Schema Markup-related support.

Your CSM will also share content recommendations, propose changes to your strategy and update you and your team on any latest documentation changes from Google during the call.

2. Optimize your Schema Markup

As part of your high-touch support hours, your CSM will also perform the work required to manage your Schema Markup. Depending on your organization’s needs, your CSM will:

• Proactively monitor how your markup is deploying and performing,
• Identify any challenges with rich result targeting,
• Provide content recommendations to your SEO and content team,
• Manage your knowledge graph,
• Add additional Schema properties or linked entities to your new or updated content, and
• Set up experiments and A/B tests to help you maximize your rich result performance.

Additionally, you can also use your high-touch support hours to get your CSM to perform a competitive analysis. Your CSM will dive into your competitors’ sites and provide you with a detailed report on the state of your competitor’s Schema Markup and suggestions on how you can stay ahead.

By performing these tasks, your CSM can ensure your markup continues to be accurate, error-free and contributing to your desired outcomes. Read our How to Manage Your Schema Markup article for more details on how our CSMs manage your Schema Markup.

3. Perform Quarterly Business Reporting

Every quarter, we also provide a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) presentation to identify trends we’re seeing through the previous quarter, how our customers are standing out in search, and what we believe to be action items for the upcoming quarter. These QBRs are an amazing opportunity to include additional stakeholders to see the value we’re delivering to our customers.

With access to industry data, we can offer insight as to where you stand in comparison to the competition and help you anticipate the effects of Google changes.

Stay Agile with Schema App’s High Touch Support Service

Our high-touch support provides invaluable benefits to SEO teams aiming to maintain agility amidst ongoing changes in the search landscape. Given this volatility, it’s crucial for your organization to proactively manage your Schema Markup to stay ahead.

We offer reporting alongside industry trends to ensure you’re prepared for the future of search, all while establishing your Marketing Knowledge Graph.

With our high-touch support service, you get:

• Access to a structured data expert who will supplement your existing SEO team and reduce your dependency on internal IT teams,
• Timely insight into industry trends to prepare your team for the future of search,
• Access to Schema App tools with demonstrated agility and scalability,
• Timely monitoring and reporting, with actionable recommendations,
• Cost savings to alleviate internal tasks like authoring, deploying, and maintaining markup, in addition to staying current on Google documentation updates.

If you are interested in learning more about our high-touch support services or our end-to-end Schema App solution, we’d love to hear from you.

Curious to discover how the Customer Success team demonstrates value to our customers? Check out our Customer Stories.

The post The Value of Schema App’s High-Touch Support appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Since our inception, we’ve been helping organizations across the globe implement connected Schema Markup on their websites to strengthen their SEO strategy.

By implementing Schema Markup, our customers can achieve rich results on search engine results pages (SERPs) and increase traffic to their sites. However, the advantages of Schema Markup extend beyond just obtaining rich results. Schema Markup is a semantic technology with numerous benefits.

In this article, we will explore what semantic technology is and how Schema App leverages it to provide meaningful context and understanding of data.

Understanding Semantic Technology

Semantic technology is a set of technologies, methodologies and standards that provide meaning (semantics) to data. It achieves this by representing relationships between different categories of entities, transforming raw data into knowledge.

By providing context, semantic technology enables machines to better comprehend and interpret data, leading to more intelligent decision-making processes.

Background and Terminology

Before jumping into how Schema App is semantic, it is essential to familiarize ourselves with key terms in the field of semantic technology.

Here is a glossary of terms that will be referenced throughout this article.

RDF (Resource Description Framework)

A framework used to express data as a directed graph using subject-predicate-object statements known as triples.

By combining these triples, vast interconnected graphs of resources can be created. This is done using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

A URI is a string of characters that identifies a resource. It provides a consistent way to identify resources across different systems and protocols.

A URL is a string of characters that both identifies a resource and where it’s located on the web. Therefore, a URL is a type of URI.

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD)

JSON-LD is a serialization format for expressing RDF data. In simple terms, it’s one way to describe the subject-predicate-object statements. It also happens to be Google’s preferred format for consuming Schema Markup/structured data.

Ontology

An ontology defines the types of entities that can exist within a dataset, and the properties that describe and connect these entities. Schema.org is an example of a loose ontology, serving as a vocabulary rather than imposing strict logic constraints like other formal ontologies.

Knowledge Graph

A knowledge graph is a structured representation of information that captures the context and connections between entities, their attributes, and the relationships between them.

Schema App uses JSON-LD to express how the Schema.org “ontology” defines the connections in your data (in our case, your content).

As a result, content on your page that states things like “this DeWalt Handsaw is from the brand DeWalt” and you can express that in JSON-LD to help search engines understand that statement.

When you connect multiple entities using these technologies, you are constructing a knowledge graph.

Search engines can then interpret the relationships between entities through these knowledge graph connections, enhancing their understanding of the content on your site. More recently, knowledge graphs are also being explored as a means of grounding LLMs to prevent hallucinations in Generative AI.

So as you can see, these technologies are powerful sources of meaning (semantics) for machines like search engines.

The most foundational resource that both uses and is, in itself, a semantic technology, is Schema.org. Schema App utilizes the Schema.org vocabulary to help our customers translate their content to a language understood by search engines.

What Makes Schema.org a Semantic Technology?

Schema.org was founded in 2011 by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex as a way to translate messy human language into structured, machine-readable language. This language is now supported by all major search engines, improving their ability to match search queries with relevant results.

Search engines have shifted to using semantic SEO to provide more accurate and relevant results to users. Instead of matching keywords in an article to search queries, search engines now understand the meaning (semantics) of the content on a page and identify if the content matches the searcher’s intent and query.

In light of this, Schema.org was developed as a vocabulary of types and properties to clearly describe things on a site and provide context on how these things are connected to each other.

Types

The Schema.org types are organized into a hierarchy, starting with Thing and then providing more specific subtypes from there. Example: Thing, which has the subtype Person, which has the subtype Patient.

Properties

Each type has a list of available properties to further describe it. In the image below, we can see that the Person type can be further described with properties like address, alumniOf, and birthDate.

Expected Types for Properties

Most properties also have specific types they can connect to. For example, a Person can have an address property which states the physical address of where the person is located. This information can either be added as plain text, or it can be used to link to the PostalAddress type which has its own page in Schema.org.

By connecting different Schema.org types on your site through the properties, you are defining the relationships between entities described in the content on your site and helping machines understand it.

At Schema App, we apply the Schema.org vocabulary (a loose ontology) to customer content, expressed in JSON-LD (a semantic technology) so that search engines can explicitly understand connections between things (semantics!).

Machine-Readable Representations of Schema.org 

Under the hood, the individual terms on the Schema.org website also have ”machine-readable definitions…available as JSON-LD, embedded into the term page[‘s] HTML”.

If developers are interested in implementing the vocabulary for their own purposes, Schema.org provides downloadable “Vocabulary Definition Files” available in “common RDF formats” like JSON-LD, Turtle, Triple, or RDF/XML. Here’s a link to what the Schema.org vocabulary looks like as a JSON-LD file.

Schema.org has two interfaces – one for humans to navigate and understand, and another for machines to understand the content within their database. This is a great illustration of how semantic technology works to bridge the gap between human language and machine learning.

By understanding semantic technologies, companies like Schema App are better able to create applications and systems that leverage the best aspects of these technologies. At Schema App, we use these files in the construction of our authoring tools and implementation of Schema Markup. This allows us to organize customer information in a meaningful way to machines.

Schema App’s expertise in semantic technologies is evident in our numerous tools and features.

Schema App Tools and Features That Make Us Semantic

Here are some of our tools and features that make us semantic.

Schema App Editor & Highlighter

The Schema App Editor and Highlighter are two Schema Markup authoring tools created by our team. The Schema App Editor allows SEO teams to generate Schema Markup in JSON-LD and automatically deploy it to an individual web page without writing a single line of code.

All the pages optimized with Schema Markup can be updated and live on the site in minutes with this tool, making it easy to manage. The Editor contains the entire Schema.org vocabulary and creates connected Schema Markup via embedded data items to allow our customers to build out their knowledge graphs.

The Schema App Highlighter is also a no-code Schema Markup authoring tool, but it is for templated pages and dynamic content rather than individual URLs. With this tool, you can automatically apply descriptive Schema Markup at scale to thousands of pages and dynamically update your Schema Markup based on the content on your page.

What makes our authoring tools semantic?

Both the Editor and the Highlighter have the same semantic features, just applied in a slightly different way.

Using the Schema.org vocabulary

The primary feature that makes our authoring tools semantic is how they author markup using the Schema.org vocabulary to express RDF triples (subject-predicate-object statements) in JSON-LD.

These statements (aka semantic triples) can be combined to create huge graphs of interconnected resources using URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Earlier in the article, we saw a simplified version of the triples. The image below is a more accurate representation of the triples, where the URIs are the entities being described in the graph.

By doing so, they leverage Schema.orgs’ means of translating human-readable content to machine-readable content, supporting the extraction of meaning (semantics) from web content.

All of Schema App’s authoring tools are Ontology-driven applications. Therefore, any updates or modifications to the Schema.org vocabularies will be reflected in the tools. For example, if Schema.org introduces a new property for a specific Type, the new property will be available in Schema App’s authoring tools.

Entity Linking Features

The Highlighter utilizes an automated Linked Entity Recognition feature to identify entities on the page and link them to Google’s knowledge graph and Wikidata definitions, while the Editor employs a manually applied Entity Linking Method. Both tools then nest the entities within the Schema Markup.

By using Entity Linking Methods like Linked Entity Recognition, our authoring tools can help search engines better contextualize the topics on your site and align them with the searcher’s query.

Linked Entity Recognition

As previously stated, Linked Entity Recognition (LER) is a powerful feature that can be applied to a Highlighter template to enhance content analysis.

Once applied, this automated process identifies named entities (such as people, places, things, and concepts) in content. It then links them to external identifiers from authoritative knowledge bases (like Wikipedia and the Google Knowledge Graph). These identifiers are automatically embedded within your Schema Markup.

Through the automatic embedding of these identifiers into the Schema Markup, the entities contribute valuable semantic information to the metadata. Consequently, Google and other web crawlers gain a deeper understanding of the content, thanks to the inclusion of well-defined, linked entities. This reduces ambiguity in the interpretation of content and supports more accurate matching to user queries.

For instance, we can say the DeWalt Handsaw is from the brand DeWalt, which is the same as the DeWalt described in this Wikipedia entity.

By linking the DeWalt Handsaw to the corresponding DeWalt entity on Wikipedia, search engines can clearly understand which DeWalt you are referring to.

Advanced WordPress Plugin

Like our other authoring tools, our Advanced WordPress plugin provides markup using the Schema.org vocabulary. The plugin can automatically generate Schema Markup for pages and posts. It also provides users access to our Schema App Editor for further Schema Markup customizations.

The Advanced WordPress plugin also has the ability to map WordPress tags and categories to Wikipedia and Wikidata entities to help search engines better match content with relevant search queries on those topics.

Schema Paths Tool

The Schema Paths Tool is a free tool created by the Schema App team to help users identify the best way to connect and organize different Schema types together within their Schema Markup. This is especially useful when you’re unsure which properties are available to connect two different Schema.org Types.

The Schema App team identified a need for this within their suite of tools because Schema Markup is most beneficial when it’s highly descriptive. One of the best ways to do this is by connecting your Types with the most descriptive property. The Schema Paths Tool helps you narrow down what properties each Type has that allow them to connect to one another (as an “Expected Type”).

For example, the Schema.org Organization type has more than 50 unique properties. If you want to connect an Organization to a Service it provides, you can enter both Types into the Schema Paths tool, and then receive a list of properties that can be used to connect these Types.

The Semantic Nature of Schema App

By embracing semantic technologies, Schema App helps you develop a reusable knowledge graph which also enables machines to better comprehend and interpret website content. When search engines have a clear understanding of what your page is about, it can provide searchers with more accurate and relevant results.

Our passion for semantic technologies doesn’t end with the tools and features currently available to our users. We pride ourselves on working towards a data-centric architecture for our internal data as well (see Semantic Arts Data-centric architecture manifesto) and invest time considering the possibilities of semantic technology and how we can support them.

Interested in learning more about how our tools can support your semantic SEO initiatives? Get started here.

The post What Makes Schema App Semantic? appeared first on Schema App Solutions.