About Kevin Veilleux https://www.schemaapp.com/author/kevin/ End-to-End Schema Markup and Knowledge Graph Solution for Enterprise SEO Teams. Wed, 15 Nov 2023 22:52:57 +0000 en-CA hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://ezk8caoodod.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/SA_Icon_Main_Orange.png?strip=all&lossy=1&resize=32%2C32&ssl=1 About Kevin Veilleux https://www.schemaapp.com/author/kevin/ 32 32 6 Common Product Rich Result Mistakes You Might Be Making https://www.schemaapp.com/schema-markup/6-common-product-rich-result-mistakes-you-might-be-making/ Wed, 04 Oct 2023 17:14:45 +0000 https://www.schemaapp.com/?p=14415 2023 has been quite the year with all the changes happening at Google. Between core algorithm updates, changes to Video rich results, and FAQ & How-to rich results being deprecated, there is a lot to process. That said, there has still been a lot of positive movement around one of the ‘evergreen’ rich results –...

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2023 has been quite the year with all the changes happening at Google. Between core algorithm updates, changes to Video rich results, and FAQ & How-to rich results being deprecated, there is a lot to process. That said, there has still been a lot of positive movement around one of the ‘evergreen’ rich results – Product rich results.

Google has continued to expand the properties around Product structured data, enabled Merchant Listing experiences through structured data, and provided more opportunities for web publishers to enhance their Product rich results with more information like return and shipping details.

Additionally, Google can now award Product rich results even without structured data. This, in theory, might sound great. But the problem is that even Google can get it wrong sometimes.

So what do we do when our Product rich results aren’t showing up as expected? Let’s jump in.

Different Types of Product Rich Results You Can Achieve

Firstly, it is important to distinguish the types of Product rich results available as this might modify how you tackle correcting the enhanced search result.

When reviewing website performance on Google Search Console, you’ll see three different types of Product search appearances in your performance report:

  • Product results
  • Product snippets
  • Merchant listings

search appearance report on google search console

Product Results = Product Snippets + Merchant listings

Product results are an all-encompassing view of performance around your Product rich results. This can include Product rich results awarded directly by Google, Product rich results awarded through the use of structured data, and Merchant listings results.

Product Snippets

Product snippets are a type of Product rich result that are awarded through structured data. They typically include information such as ratings, reviews, prices and stock availability.

example of a product rich result
Example of a Product Snippet

Merchant Listings

Merchant listings, also known as merchant listing experiences, are another type of Product rich result that you can achieve through structured data or through Google Merchant Center. They tend to have more detailed information than product snippets and can show up in the Popular Products, Shopping Knowledge Panel and Google images section of the SERP.

Example of merchant listing experience popular products
Example of a Merchant Listing Experience

How To Determine If Your Product Rich Result Isn’t Showing Up Correctly

The answer is simple, but often overlooked industry-wide.

The easiest way to determine if your Product results are not showing up as expected is to simply find them on the search engine results page (SERP). This should provide you with all the details you may need to determine if the rich result achieved is aligned with your product details.

So, is that it? Assuming you’ve reviewed your Product rich results on the SERP, everything looks good and your traffic is increasing, then yes, it’s as simple as that!

But, let’s say your Product rich result is not showing up the way you want and you want to correct those issues. In that case, here are some of the common Product rich result pitfalls and what you can do to fix them.

Common Product Rich Results Mistakes

1. Not utilizing structured data

Google has the ability to grant Product rich results on your behalf. However, giving away control of your search appearance means you might not always get your desired display.

In our experience, we’ve seen Google award Product results to blog pages based on a price stated in a headline, or target an incorrect price on a Product page with different prices that varied depending on membership standing.

Adding Product markup to your pages is the first step to regaining control over the information you want presented on your Product rich result in the SERP. This means that you’ll need to add Product structured data to all your product detail pages and manage the markup on an ongoing basis, which can be tedious if done manually. At Schema App, our Highlighter tool allows SEO teams to automatically create and deploy Schema Markup dynamically to thousands of pages at once. If you struggle to implement and manage your Product markup at scale, we can help.

As previously mentioned, Google can award your pages the merchant listing experience based on the data in your Google Merchant Center feed. If you are not relying on structured data for your Product rich results, you should ensure that the product information on your Google Merchant Center feed is accurate and up-to-date.

2. Not utilizing the recommended Schema.org Product properties

Do you have an aggregate rating for your Product that is not showing up alongside your pricing information? Are you hoping to show off some of your shipping or return details?

All this comes down to ensuring you’re incorporating the recommended properties from Google’s Product feature guide. In the guide, Google lists all the result enhancements that you can achieve for your Product rich results by adding the relevant content and recommended properties in your markup.

For example: If you want to highlight your offer of free shipping with your product, you can include the shippingDetails property in your product markup. Your Product rich result will then showcase the free shipping offer.

Merchant listing experience with shipping details

It is important to follow each of the examples to determine which result enhancement is best suited for your pages and how you want to stand out in search.

3. Highlighting incorrect information

As a user who makes informed decisions based on details provided on the SERP, it can be disheartening to see the information presented on the rich result differ from the information displayed on the product detail page.

Examples of this could include indicating an incorrect price, incorrect aggregate review values or counts, and stating a product is in stock when it actually isn’t. This can easily happen when you implement structured data manually on your site and make updates to your content without updating the structured data accordingly. More commonly known as Schema Drift, this mistake can impact the accuracy of the information shown in your Product rich results and reduce your rich result eligibility.

These are challenges that need to be addressed within the structured data. If you notice your Product rich result displaying incorrect information for any of the required and recommended properties, it is important to revisit your Schema Markup to avoid any possible manual action levied against your site for presenting incorrect information.

The Schema App Highlighter can help you overcome the issue of schema drift by creating Schema Markup templates for similar page sets. Your Schema Markup will update dynamically based on the content on the page. Contact us to learn more.

4. Not correcting errors in GSC

If there is an error with your structured data, you’ll likely see it in the enhancement report on Google Search Console.

The product snippet and merchant listing enhancement reports in Google Search Console will show you:

  1. Valid items that are eligible for product rich results
  2. Valid items that could be improved in appearance
  3. Invalid items that are not eligible for rich results and the reason for invalidity

Improve item appearances
Items that show up in this category are valid items that could be presented with more features if more recommended properties and content were included.

Image of 'Improve item appearance' section in product snippet enhancement report on Google search console

This can be viewed as an opportunity to ensure you’re calling out those properties where content permits. It is quite common, however, for Products to have a list of “issues” in this section because most product pages will rarely include all the recommended properties and content for those properties.

Invalid items
Items that show up in this category are invalid items that have issues preventing Google from using your structured data. This will render your page ineligible for the rich result until the issue is rectified.

image of valid and invalid items in the product snippet enhancement report on google search console

If you see any invalid items on your enhancement report, you need to revisit the product markup on those pages and ensure your markup, at the very least, includes the product’s name, and either a review of the product, an aggregate rating, or a price.

5. Not being more semantic with your product markup

Search engines are shifting to semantic search and it is important for your organization to include as many details in your Product markup as possible and be more semantic with your Schema Markup.

You can be more semantic with your Product markup by linking the entities on your page to other entities on your site. For example, you can link your Brand to your Product markup under the brand property. This tells search engines that the product on this page is maintained or associated with your brand.

You can also be more semantic by linking entities on your page to external authoritative knowledge bases like Wikipedia or Wikidata. For example, if you offer free shipping within the US, you can link the USA wikidata page (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30) using the sameAs property to the DefinedRegion of the shippingDestination.

example of shipping destination JSON-LD code with sameAs property

That way, search engines have a clear understanding of which destination you offer free shipping to.

Linking the entities on your site and beyond can help you develop a knowledge graph and provide search engines with more contextual information about your organization. It can also future-proof your organization for a more conversational style of search through AI chatbots like Google’s Search Generative Experience, ChatGPT or even your own chatbot.

Consider how users might engage with a chatbot where they request a product that has a certain pattern, free shipping in the United States, and is a suitable gift for a female – these can all be informed through Schema Markup!

6. Not monitoring performance

You might’ve reviewed the mistakes we covered above and not made any of them. But that does not guarantee improved performance with your Product rich result.

E-commerce is a competitive space and your customers’ purchasing decisions could easily be swayed – both positively and negatively – based on the enhanced results provided in the SERP.

If you find your click-through rate declining when a Product rich result is awarded, you need to analyze the factors that might be influencing performance and run experiments to determine whether it needs to be corrected.

Example 1: If your product listing page contains poor reviews and you’ve included aggregate rating markup on that page, your Product rich result is very likely to showcase these poor ratings and reviews. Buyers could see the rating on the SERP and choose not to explore your product further, thus reducing clicks and click-through rate to your page. In this situation, you can consider removing the aggregate rating markup to see if your click-through rates improve after.

Example 2: If your product is expensive and you have a high price tag on your Product rich result, at first glance you might see your traffic decline. But you should also consider whether the decline is impacting your website conversion rate. Having users qualify themselves might not be a bad thing as long as it doesn’t affect sales. In fact, it might better align with user intent and lead to higher-quality traffic for your site.

At the end of the day, your rich result performance should align with your desired outcomes. If it isn’t aligning with your organization’s goals, you should consider enhancing it with different information or maybe even targeting a completely different rich result as a whole.

Scalability of Product Rich Results

Despite all of Google’s recent rich result changes, Product continues to be an exciting rich result to pursue. However, you should consistently monitor how your products are showing up in search to fully maximize your performance through this rich result.

Many of the recommendations we’ve provided can be easily tackled on a page-by-page basis. But if you’re having difficulty finding a scalable solution to help you drive performance through your Product rich results, Schema App can help.

Get in touch with us today to learn more!

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The Value of Schema App’s High-Touch Support https://www.schemaapp.com/schema-app-tools/value-of-schema-app-high-touch-support/ Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:23:36 +0000 https://www.schemaapp.com/?p=14386 We often see SEO teams struggle to manage their Schema Markup strategy due to the lack of expertise, resources, or the tools needed for scale. 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...

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We often see SEO teams struggle to manage their Schema Markup strategy due to the lack of expertise, resources, or the tools needed for scale.

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.

Schema App Process – strategy, authoring, deployment, ongoing maintenance, and reporting

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.

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How to Manage Your Schema Markup https://www.schemaapp.com/schema-markup/how-to-manage-your-schema-markup/ Fri, 25 Aug 2023 21:37:53 +0000 https://www.schemaapp.com/?p=14341 So you’ve authored and added Schema Markup to your webpage. Congratulations! If you thought that’s all there is to it, though, you thought wrong. Schema Markup, also known as structured data, is a code you can add to your site to help search engines better understand the content and entities on your website. However, Schema...

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So you’ve authored and added Schema Markup to your webpage. Congratulations! If you thought that’s all there is to it, though, you thought wrong.

Schema Markup, also known as structured data, is a code you can add to your site to help search engines better understand the content and entities on your website.

However, Schema Markup is not a one-and-done strategy. As with any SEO initiative, the circumstances around what makes good Schema Markup are constantly changing. Therefore, it is necessary to manage the markup on your site on an ongoing basis to ensure it remains accurate and healthy.

Whether it’s content changes on your page, Google modifying properties for rich result eligibility, or even the evolution of the Schema.org vocabulary, it is critical that your Schema Markup best supports your search objectives, which often requires revisiting the markup across your site.

Let’s dig into some of the strategies our Schema App team uses to manage our customers’ Schema Markup for long-term success.

Verify That Your Markup is Deploying Properly 

Authoring your markup is just the beginning. You need to add it properly to your page and make sure search engines can crawl it for it to take effect.

The good news is that Google provides feedback through triggered emails from Search Console. These emails identify errors or warnings with your structured data that impact rich result eligibility. But why wait for Google to notify you?

If you want to be eligible for a rich result as soon as possible, the best approach would be to test your Schema Markup during the implementation stage – before Google picks up on your new enhancements.

Test your markup using the Rich Results Testing tool and Schema.org Validator

After authoring your markup and gaining access to the JSON-LD, you can paste that code into Google’s Rich Result Test and the Schema.org Validator to ensure your markup is accurate when you deploy it. This proactive approach ensures you don’t miss any opportunities to stand out in search.

Once you’ve added the markup to your page, run your page through those same resources again to identify any initial speed issues or crawlability issues that might impact the benefits offered by Schema Markup.

Request indexing on your priority pages

Assuming everything looks good with deployment and you want to get the benefit as quickly as possible, request indexing on your priority pages so that Google can pick up on any new enhancements.

Ensure Your Schema Markup Aligns With Your Content

Your Schema Markup must be reflective of the content on your page to be effective.

To ensure that it provides the appropriate semantic value, you should author your Schema Markup to support the intent of the page. This will require choosing the most appropriate schema Type and utilizing the associated properties within that schema Type.

For example, are you detailing a service your organization offers? If so, you can utilize Service markup to identify where and when this service is available through the areaServed and hoursAvailable properties.

It’s likely that you will eventually edit or modify the content on these pages in some way. This introduces the risk of Schema Drift, where the content on a page may become misaligned with the values stated in your schema properties.

With the Service markup in the example above, if you change the areaServed or hoursAvailable properties, you will need to revisit the markup to ensure it aligns with the actual content on your page.

By neglecting your markup and not aligning it with your content, you’re likely to miss opportunities to provide more context to Google to better align with user intent. What’s worse, is that you could also be sending mixed signals to Google which may impact performance.

At Schema App, we overcome the issue of content not aligning with markup through our Schema App Highlighter tool. With our Highlighter, users can create a Schema Markup template for similar pages. The markup will then map dynamically to certain elements on the page. Therefore, any changes you make to your content will automatically be reflected in the markup.

Learn how the Schema App Highlighter has made it easy for the CAPREIT team to maintain their markup while dealing with fluctuating prices on their listings.

Optimize Content to Improve Rich Result Eligibility 

The semantic value of Schema Markup cannot be overstated, but it is undeniable that rich results provide a visual element in the SERP that draws user attention and potentially improves CTR.

As defined in our What is a Rich Result article, “a rich result (formerly known as a rich snippet) is an enhanced search result displayed on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) that can be achieved by implementing the appropriate structured data (aka Schema Markup) on your site.”

The key element in that definition above is to implement the appropriate structured data, as each rich result has different requirements. Google’s documentation on Recipe rich results, for example, is essentially a cheat sheet for content ideas and it is worthwhile to review these types of resources to identify missed content opportunities.

Though Google has also changed where and when FAQ rich results will be awarded, FAQ demonstrated another common opportunity where including a single question and answer would show as a valid enhancement. However, Google would only award this rich result to pages where a minimum of two questions and answers were included.

Particularly in blog posts or articles, we would commonly see only a single question and answer included in the content. This presents an opportunity for content teams to optimize the content by introducing an additional question and answer to pursue rich result eligibility. Read Baptist Health’s case study to find out how they were able to improve their rich results eligibility by optimizing their physician page content.

Even though you might have started off your Schema Markup journey authoring markup based on the content on your page, you can also use it as a content opportunity to identify missing content on your page that would make you eligible for a rich result.

Keep Up With Google and Schema.org Documentation Changes

Both Google and Schema.org are constantly changing. An ever-evolving landscape is familiar territory for most SEOs, but making changes to existing Schema Markup can be a challenging task requiring the efforts of additional resources like Development or IT teams.

Nonetheless, when Google makes changes to rich results, it provides an opportunity for you to improve your content for a more enhanced experience in search.

For example, when the Pros and Cons feature was introduced, it was a change that enabled highlighting specific pros and cons of a product directly in the SERP. This provided the opportunity to revisit editorial Product reviews and related markup to ensure there aren’t any missed opportunities for a more enhanced product rich result.

Similar to Google’s constant updates, the Schema.org vocabulary is frequently changing. These changes might impact the various recommended properties for Google’s rich result eligibility.

For example, the version 13.0 Schema.org release introduced additions to e-commerce return policy markup, which was later reflected in Google’s Product markup rich result recommended properties.

Maintaining an awareness of these changes and utilizing the most current Schema.org properties helps organizations win in search by having a more enhanced appearance and richer markup compared to competitors.

Look for Opportunities to be More Semantic

When you implement Schema Markup, you are effectively informing search engines about the entities on your site and improving your semantic SEO. However, you can be even more semantic by linking the entities on your site to other entities on your site and other external authoritative knowledge bases. Doing so will help you develop your very own marketing knowledge graph that you can then reuse for any AI initiatives you have.

By linking entities on your page to other entities on your site

You can link entities on your page to other entities on your site to explain the relationship between both entities.

For example, if you have a blog post on your site, you might want to tell search engines that this blog post is published by your organization. You can explain that relationship by nesting your Organization markup under the publisher property of the BlogPost markup.

Example of nesting Organization entity under publisher property on BlogPosting markup

This is one of the many ways you can link entities on a page to other entities on your site.

By linking entities on your page to other external authoritative knowledge bases

As you build expertise working with Schema Markup, you can provide further context to your entities by linking to resources like Wikipedia, Wikidata or Google’s own Knowledge Graph. We often use properties such as areaServed, sameAs and knowsAbout to help increase the search engine’s understanding of all the entities mentioned on our customers’ sites – including external entities like cities or other well-known brand names.

Take, for example, Burger King, a global chain of restaurants where, in Australia, it’s known as Hungry Jack’s. Depending on your audience, identifying this relationship through sameAs properties can help search engines clarify the relationship between Burger King and Hungry Jack’s and support performance for a wider range of user queries.

Identifying opportunities to enhance your markup by linking to external entities leads to a more thorough knowledge graph. This, in turn, provides a variety of opportunities, such as enabling search engines to provide users with more accurate responses to their queries.

Download our Guide to Connected Schema Markup eBook to learn how to connect the entities on your site and develop your knowledge graph. 

See What Your Competitors Are Doing

Schema Markup is publicly available information and while comparison can be the thief of joy, it can also be utilized as an opportunity to improve your own Schema Markup strategy. We often perform competitive analysis for our customers to help them understand what their competitors are doing in terms of content and Schema Markup.

This includes identifying net new properties or links to external entities that were not previously considered. Additionally, it can help you discover new rich result opportunities by comparing content.

Sometimes, the ultimate insight from comparing your Schema Markup to that of your competitors is that you’re on the right track. This then allows space for other SEO initiatives to potentially bridge that performance gap.

Review Performance and Make Data-Driven Decisions

One of the benefits of implementing Schema Markup is its positive impact on your organic traffic performance. You can easily monitor the performance of rich results using tools such as Google Search Console and Schema Performance Analytics.

Analyzing Rich Result Performance

Though correct Schema Markup will only have a positive impact on your organic performance, certain rich results might show improved performance or, at times, reduced performance.

There can be a variety of reasons why you might see an overall decline in CTR with certain rich results. For example, is the price of your product outside of most buyers’ budgets? This will allow a user to self-assess and decide whether to click through to your page or not, suggesting a potentially lower volume of clicks.

Outside of the myriad of reasons a certain rich result might reduce CTR, it’s important to determine if those rich results are properly serving the intent of your page.

For a converting page, generating clicks might be your top priority. This presents the opportunity to pivot your rich result strategy and targeting. If the price of your product is too high, consider focusing solely on product reviews.

Alternatively, you can get creative with How-to rich results to demonstrate how that product can help users accomplish a particular task.

Ultimately, it is important to ensure your Schema Markup supports your business objectives, which might mean that the most obvious rich result isn’t always the ideal solution. Therefore, you should always experiment to see which rich results work best for your content and business objectives.

Experiment to See What Works

Implementing markup at scale is a challenge for most companies. There can be a variety of barriers, including access to internal IT development resources. You may need to make a business case to justify access to those resources for sweeping changes to your markup.

In the example above from data-driven decisions, introducing How-to content and markup on a single page, let alone a large volume of pages, could be a daunting task. Starting with a smaller volume of pages might be the best way forward to limit the resources required from Content or Development teams.

You can also consider A/B testing pages where you’ve implemented some of the above recommendations, such as modifying certain rich result targeting or implementing linked entities.

Sometimes an unwelcome change might be introduced by Google, requiring a pivot to maintain consistent performance across certain pagesets. As discussed in our Changes to FAQ & How-to Rich Results from Google article, the good news is that change can spark innovation.

While FAQ may not be as worthwhile for rich result targeting, consider experimenting with linked entities, different rich results, or even just expanded markup. Find a tactic that provides maintained performance on your priority pages.

Manage Your Schema Markup for Success

There’s a lot to consider with managing your Schema Markup. The above strategies are just some of the ways our Customer Success team supports our enterprise customers to remove the complexity of managing and maintaining their structured data.

By working with Schema App, you have access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager who can provide you with the expertise and help you manage your Schema Markup from strategy to results. That way, you can stay current with all the industry trends and Google changes, and receive timely content recommendations to stand out in search.

Our Schema App solution also includes access to our tools, like the Schema App Highlighter, which ensures your markup scales dynamically even as your content changes. We also have advanced features like Linked Entity Recognition to ensure that identified entities in your content are reflected in your structured data.

On top of achieving rich results, semantic Schema Markup can help you prepare for the advent of Google’s Generative Search Experience, which makes a focus on managing your Schema Markup all the more necessary.

Need support strategizing, deploying and managing your Schema Markup? Get in touch with our team today to learn about our solution.

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