Many large enterprises leverage AEM to create rich online experiences due to its high level of customization. AEM’s component-based architecture offers a flexible and modular approach to building and customizing websites, which, while powerful, can also create a complex environment.

Organizations can customize their AEM setup extensively, whether running on-premise or in the cloud, and can use AEM headless to deliver experiences across platforms and channels at scale.

Why Implement Schema Markup on an AEM Site?

Implementing Schema Markup on an AEM site is crucial for enhancing a website’s performance.

Schema Markup helps search engines understand and contextualize your website’s content more effectively, leading to better-aligned search queries, improved search performance, and higher conversion rates. Implementing specific types of Schema Markup can also make your web page eligible for rich results, allowing your brand to further enhance its visibility on the search engine results page (SERP).

Additionally, Schema Markup supports AI initiatives by building your organization’s content knowledge graph, facilitating deep machine understanding of your content and brand.

How to Implement Schema Markup on Your AEM Site

While the benefits of implementing Schema Markup are evident, AEM’s complexities can make it difficult for SEO teams to implement robust Schema Markup at scale. In this section, we will dive into the various methods of implementing Schema Markup on AEM to help you determine the option that best suits your team’s abilities and goals.

1. Manually Implementing Schema Markup on AEM

There are two primary approaches to manually implementing Schema Markup on AEM, both with their own unique challenges:

• creating static markup and pasting it into the post HTML, or
• creating a dynamic but complex solution.

Let’s dive in.

Write the Markup Manually and Paste it Within the Post HTML

You can manually write the Schema Markup and insert it into the HTML of each post. This method involves authoring the Schema Markup in JSON-LD and adding the markup directly to the page’s source code, which is not dynamic or scalable.

With this method, every time the content on a page is updated, the Schema Markup must also be manually updated to reflect the updated content. This approach results in static Schema Markup that requires constant maintenance and is not ideal for large-scale implementations.

Create a Dynamic Schema Markup Solution in AEM Manually

Since AEM is highly customizable, there are currently no standard plugins that can automatically inject default Schema Markup across pages.

If you want to dynamically generate Schema Markup based on the latest content on your page, you must manually develop a solution that maps AEM components to Schema.org properties. This involves identifying the components on each page and defining how their properties correspond to Schema.org properties.

Due to AEM’s lack of standardized components (i.e., title, featured image, author, etc.), this method will require you to manually structure the data and map each property to the appropriate Schema Markup, which can be tedious. Each page may have different components and subcomponents, making it challenging to create a one-size-fits-all solution.

Challenges and Considerations for this Approach

Implementing a dynamic Schema Markup solution in AEM is labor-intensive and typically not feasible for marketing teams to manage independently. It requires a dedicated IT team to build and maintain the system, and depending on the organization’s resources, it may not be a practical trade-off.

While manual implementation of Schema Markup on AEM is possible, it demands skilled execution and significant development time and resources to ensure the solution is effective and sustainable.

2. Leverage a Schema Markup Solution for AEM

If you want to implement Schema Markup on AEM at scale without dealing with the complexity, the best alternative would be to partner with a full-service Schema Markup solution like Schema App.

Schema App offers an end-to-end Schema Markup solution specifically designed for enterprise teams, covering everything from strategy and authoring to achieving measurable results.

When you work with Schema App, you will get an assigned Customer Success Manager who will create your Schema Markup strategy and author your Schema Markup using our authoring tools. This includes our Schema App Highlighter, which generates dynamic Schema Markup for your page categories and deploys the markup to your AEM site (headless or not) at scale without requiring manual coding.

Our solution offers flexibility to ensure your site benefits from improved search engine understanding and visibility, regardless of its architecture.

How does Schema App deploy Schema Markup to AEM?

Deploying Schema Markup to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) can be complex due to its high customizability. At Schema App, we offer two methods to simplify this process:

1. Using the Schema App Connector for AEM (Server-Side Deployment)

The Schema App Connector for AEM is a plugin that integrates the Schema App platform with your AEM system.

The Connector receives your Schema Markup from Schema App and stores it server-side, ensuring that the markup is readily available for deployment. Through a cloud services configuration, the Connector inserts the markup into the page in real-time during page load, making it easily accessible to search engines.

This method increases the reliability of Schema Markup delivery and reduces page rendering time.

Your development team will only be required to set up the integration. Once the Schema App Connector is installed as a dependency in your AEM setup, any Schema Markup you create with Schema App will be automatically deployed.

2. Using a Tag Manager (Most Popular for its Dynamic Capabilities and Ease of Use)

Schema App can also deploy Schema Markup to AEM using a Tag Manager like Adobe Launch, Google Tag Manager, or similar tools.

This approach is popular among Schema App customers because it is:

• easy to use,
• quick to install and
• doesn’t require input or resources from your development team.

How does it work?

The Tag Manager method adds a JavaScript element to your AEM installation. This script dynamically generates Schema Markup by interacting with the final rendered page, regardless of where the content originates.

When a user visits your page, the script is loaded from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and generates the markup on the fly. Even if components load outside of AEM, the script can still capture and mark up this information.

This approach reflects changes instantly without caching, making it a highly dynamic solution.

Choosing the Best Method

You can choose the method that best suits your web environment and preferences. During the sales process, our team will assist you in determining the most suitable integration method for your AEM system.

Beyond the dynamic deployment capabilities, partnering with Schema App also offers additional benefits:

• Schema Markup Strategy Guidance: You’ll be assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to help you identify the properties to target for achieving rich results or enhancing your knowledge graph.
• Ongoing Support and Content Recommendations: After the initial implementation, you’ll receive ongoing content recommendations to optimize your website for Schema Markup, and measurable insights through Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) and timely business reviews.

Read this article to learn how our Customer Success Team will manage your Schema Markup for long-term success.

Implement Schema Markup on Your AEM Website With Schema App

Implementing Schema Markup on your AEM site can enhance your website’s search visibility and user engagement. By offering search engines clear and structured information about your content, you can achieve rich results, increase click-through rates, and drive more conversions to your website.

Whether you choose the Schema App Connector for AEM or the dynamic and easy-to-use Tag Manager method, Schema App’s end-to-end Schema Markup solution will empower your organization to generate robust Schema Markup at scale with speed, agility, and accuracy.

Contact us today to see how we can help you implement Schema Markup on AEM and drive better results.

The post How to Implement Schema Markup on Your AEM Site appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

By leveraging Sitecore’s capabilities, businesses can create, manage, and optimize customer experiences effectively.

Importance of Implementing Schema Markup on Sitecore

Implementing Schema Markup when using a Content Management System (CMS) like Sitecore is critical to your website’s success.

When you implement Schema Markup on your website, you translate your content into a machine-readable format. This can help search engines understand and contextualize the content on your website, leading to improved search performance, increased click-through rates (CTR), and higher conversions from search.

Apart from supporting your SEO efforts, implementing Schema Markup can also:

• Enhance your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through rich results and other enhanced search features
• Result in higher click-through rates and increases in non-branded queries, which showcase measurable results and ROI
• Build your organization’s content knowledge graph, supporting AI initiatives and deep machine understanding of your content and brand.

Within Sitecore’s Content Hub, users have access to a configurable data model, which is a structured representation of the underlying Content Hub database. This includes definitions of entities like assets, products, or projects. However, this can still be ambiguous to search engines and machines.

Therefore, by implementing Schema Markup to describe these entities in your data model, you can ensure that search engines and machines can understand the data in detail and with proper context.

How to Implement Schema Markup on Sitecore

Although the benefits of Schema Markup for your website are clear, challenges can arise when implementing it within a complex CMS like Sitecore. Before jumping into implementation, it’s important to first know your options and what best suits your team’s capabilities and business goals.

1. Implementing Schema Markup Manually

One of the ways you can implement Schema Markup within Sitecore is to manually author your markup in JSON-LD and manually add it to the HTML of the page. You can review Perficient’s “How to Implement Schema.org in Sitecore” article on the exact steps.

While it is possible to implement Schema Markup manually within Sitecore, the process is technical and labor-intensive. If you choose to go this route, potential challenges include:

• Lack of Scalability: Manually implementing Schema Markup becomes impractical when dealing with thousands of pages or multiple domains. The process is not only time-consuming but also costly.
• Maintenance Difficulties: If your organization frequently updates your site’s content, you’ll need to maintain your Schema Markup constantly to ensure it aligns with the content on your page.

IT teams and digital marketers often struggle to find the time to update structured data across large, complex websites. With enterprises that have extensive content spread across multiple domains, manual upkeep can become increasingly difficult and inefficient in time.

An alternative would be to use a plugin to implement your Schema Markup. Most organizations seek a solution that is easy to maintain and can scale dynamically with their content, something that an internal manual approach often cannot provide. However, there are currently no Schema Markup plugins that can automate Schema Markup deployment in Sitecore.

2. Leverage a Schema Markup Solution

The most optimal way to implement Schema Markup on Sitecore would be to utilize an end-to-end Schema Markup Solution like Schema App.

Partnering with Schema App can simplify the process of implementing and managing Structured Data on your Sitecore website. By using Schema App, you can achieve scalability, easy maintenance, comprehensive reporting, and access to strategic content recommendations and ongoing support.

How does Schema App Implement Schema Markup on your Sitecore Website?

1. Create Your Schema Markup Strategy

When you first partner with Schema App, you’ll be assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to oversee your Schema Markup strategy throughout the engagement.

Your Customer Success Manager will work with you to develop a Schema Markup Strategy for your website. This includes aligning your goals for implementing Schema Markup and scoping your website for appropriate Schema.org types and properties

2. Author Your Schema Markup using the Schema App Highlighter

Once your team has defined and approved the strategy, your Customer Success Manager will start authoring your Schema Markup using the Schema App Editor and Highlighter.

One of the key features that sets Schema App apart from other Schema Markup solutions is the Schema App Highlighter. The Highlighter allows users to create Schema Markup templates by highlighting specific elements on a page and mapping them to the relevant Schema.org property. This template can then be applied to other similarly templated pages (i.e. blogs, recipes, location pages, product detail pages, etc.), ensuring the Schema Markup aligns with the content on the page at scale.

Furthermore, the Highlighter will dynamically update your Schema Markup whenever content changes are made. as your content changes. This means that your Schema Markup evolves in real time and always reflects the most current version of your content.

Within the Highlighter, you’ll also find our Omni Linked Entity Recognition (Omni LER) feature. If you want to build a knowledge graph and disambiguate entities on your site, Omni LER will automatically link your entities to external identifiers from authoritative knowledge bases. This adds clarity and context, making your content more precise and authoritative in search.

3. Deploy Your Markup on Sitecore

Once your Schema Markup has been authored using Schema App’s authoring tools, we will work with you to set up the integration between the Schema App platform and Sitecore.

At Schema App, we typically use JavaScript to deploy Schema Markup to Sitecore. This method is both efficient and scalable, requiring the implementation of a JavaScript tag in the HTML head or the setup of a tag manager. You can learn more about our JavaScript implementation here.

Once the initial integration is set up, any Schema Markup authored by your Customer Success Manager for your website will be deployed seamlessly to Sitecore.

4. Perform Ongoing Maintenance and Monitoring of Your Schema Markup

Schema Markup is not a one-and-done process. Similarly to how your content will change and be updated over time, factors outside of your control may also change, demanding shifts in your Schema Markup strategy. These changes could include:

• Changes to Google’s structured data documentation
• Required properties for rich result eligibility may change
• Updates to the Schema.org vocabulary
• Shifts in your organization’s goals

Whatever it may be, staying current with these changes is essential. To ensure the long-term success of your Schema Markup strategy, your Customer Success Manager will work with you to manage and optimize your Schema Markup deployment. You can read this article to learn about the ongoing services offered by our Customer Success team after the initial implementation process.

In addition to implementation and management, your Customer Success Manager will also provide strategic content recommendations that are invaluable for both existing and new pages within your Sitecore CMS. These recommendations will help you:

• Tailor your content to a specific Schema.org Type or topic
• Identify opportunities to enhance your Schema Markup for better search features and rich result eligibility
• Create a more robust content knowledge graph

5. Measure the Performance of your Schema Markup to inform Future Planning

Performance measurement is crucial to the long-term success of your Schema Markup strategy. When you work with Schema App, you’ll get access to our Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) platform where you can track the performance of your Schema Markup.

In addition to having access to SPA, your Customer Success Manager will also perform Business Reviews to help you understand the impact of your Schema Markup strategy and areas for improvement. This ensures ongoing improvement in your Schema Markup processes and outcomes.

As SEO trends and best practices evolve, your schema strategy must adapt to keep pace with these changes.

Implement Schema Markup on Your Sitecore Website With Schema App

Implementing Schema Markup on Sitecore can enhance your website’s search visibility and user engagement. On top of providing search engines with greater clarity about the content on your site, implementing Schema Markup can help you achieve rich results, higher click-through rates, and ultimately, drive more conversions on your site.

While Sitecore’s powerful customization capabilities make it an ideal platform for large enterprises with dynamic content, this complexity can pose challenges when implementing Schema Markup at scale. That’s where partnering with an external solution like Schema App comes in.

Schema App enables you to implement and manage your Schema Markup with agility, ease, and minimal time investment. Our combination of semantic technology and customer success simplifies the Schema Markup process, allowing you to concentrate on creating great content while enjoying the benefits of improved search performance.

Contact us today to see how we can help you implement Schema Markup on Sitecore.

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