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

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

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

Does Schema Markup help SEO?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Schema Markup a search ranking factor?

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

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

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

Can bad Schema Markup cause ranking loss?

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

What constitutes “bad” Schema Markup?

It could be markup that…

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

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

Some ways incorrect Schema Markup can impact your rankings include:

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

Can duplicate Schema Markup affect rankings?

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

What is duplicate markup?

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

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

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

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

Can there be two Schema Markup blocks on one page?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Search Console

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

Search Results Performance Report by Search Appearance

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

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

Schema Performance Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are, however, some strategies to consider:

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

Supporting you on your Schema Markup journey

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

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

The post Common Questions About Schema Markup for SEO appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Beyond this, implementing Schema Markup can also result in a reusable content knowledge graph for organizations looking to train their internal LLMs, gain a semantic advantage in AI search, and manage their internal data more efficiently.

Let’s take a look at what Schema Markup is and the value it adds to healthcare organizations like yours.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema Markup, also known as structured data, is metadata based on the Schema.org vocabulary that you can add to your website to help search engines better understand and contextualize your web content.

When you implement Schema Markup on your site, you use the Schema.org vocabulary to describe the entities on your web page and how they relate to other entities on your site and across the internet. This helps search engines clearly understand what your web page is about and enables them to provide users with more accurate and relevant search results.

For example, your healthcare organization might have a physician page with content about the physician’s medical specialties, practice location, ratings and reviews, and contact information. When you apply Schema Markup to that page, you express this information in machine-readable format using the Schema.org types and properties. This helps to disambiguate your content topics and support search engine comprehension.

Common Schema Types for Healthcare Providers

In the Schema.org vocabulary, types are how you categorize the various entities on your page, and properties are attributes or characteristics that provide additional details and contextual information about a given entity.

Healthcare organizations can use more general types such as Organization, Physician, MedicalClinic, and more. However, the Schema.org vocabulary contains a Health and Life Sciences extension of over 200 Types and 160 properties specific to the medical space.

These include everything from terms for describing diseases and injuries, such as AnatomicalStructure and MedicalSignOrSymptom, to systems of medicine, such as TraditionalChinese and WesternConventional.

In addition to those listed above, here are some other examples of types of content that you can use to explain information about your healthcare organization:

• MedicalOrganization – Home page
• Hospital – Hospital pages
• IndividualPhysician – Physician pages
• MedicalCondition or MedicalProcedure or MedicalTest– Medical Services pages

The main purpose of implementing Schema Markup is to help search engines understand and contextualize the content on your site. Therefore, it is best practice to choose the most appropriate type and properties that best describe the content on your page.

In some cases, adding Schema Markup can also enhance the appearance of a search result on Google’s search engine results page (SERP). This is known as a rich result.

Common Types of Rich Results for Healthcare Providers

A rich result is a visually enhanced and information-rich search result displayed in the SERP, achieved through structured data. Rich results can include star ratings, reviews, and other details, making your healthcare organization’s search appearance more attractive and informative.

Pages with rich results tend to see an increase in click-through rates, higher-quality traffic, and appointments booked, offering measurable results.

Google has specific eligibility and structured data guidelines for each rich result. Aligning your markup with these criteria enhances your chances of achieving various rich results. Here are some common types of rich results that healthcare websites can achieve through structured data.

Review Snippet

Patient engagement is important for any health organization. 94% of healthcare patients leave online reviews about their experiences. Many physician or location pages tend to include reviews and ratings. By nesting the appropriate Schema Markup on your physician or location pages, these pages can achieve a review snippet.

Review Snippets can help organizations display their credibility and build trust during the search journey. When our customer, Sharp Healthcare, achieved Review Snippets for their Physician pages, the CTR for those pages increased by 119%.

Job Posting Rich Results

Hiring talent is top of mind across most healthcare organizations, and Schema Markup provides innovative opportunities around healthcare recruitment.

Healthcare organizations can use Job Posting Rich Results to showcase their job openings directly on Google’s search results, providing key details like job title and location. This boosts visibility, attracts qualified candidates, and streamlines the hiring process.

Our customer, Baptist Health, saw an 1194% increase in CTR when the job posting rich result was awarded.

Product Rich Results

If your healthcare organization sells products such as CPAP machines or flu shots, you can leverage Product Rich Results to display key product information such as price, reviews, and availability directly on the search result.

This provides users with clear and immediate details, which can help them make quick decisions and increase your web conversions.

Recipe Rich Results

If your organization publishes healthy recipes on your site, you can make that content eligible for a Recipe rich result by marking them up with Recipe structured data.

These are just some of the rich result opportunities that healthcare organizations can leverage to stand out in search. However, the value of Schema Markup far exceeds rich results.

Why is Schema Markup Important for Healthcare Providers?

Search engine advancements have transformed the conventional approach to healthcare, with a growing number of patients seeking relevant health-related information directly on the SERP.

Schema Markup is a powerful yet underutilized SEO strategy that can help healthcare organizations stand out in this competitive search landscape and provide answers directly in the search results when prospective patients need it most. Beyond achieving rich results and bringing pertinent information about your organization to the SERP, Schema Markup supports several other healthcare organizations’ SEO initiatives.

Enhanced Search Visibility

Schema Markup helps search engines better understand the content on a healthcare provider’s website. This improved comprehension can lead to higher accuracy in search results. This can improve the provider’s visibility to individuals searching for relevant healthcare information.

Improved Customer Journey

Users can obtain critical details directly from the SERP, including facility location, hours, specialties, and reviews. This fosters transparency, credibility, and trust (contributing to your organization’s E-E-A-T) from the start of their customer journey. The streamlined journey leads to easy navigation to booking pages, reducing steps for user-friendly appointment scheduling.

Develop a Reusable Content Knowledge Graph

By implementing Schema Markup on your site, you can create a reusable content knowledge graph that helps generative AI search engines understand and infer knowledge from your content. This content knowledge graph can also be reused to power internal AI initiatives and ground LLMs with accurate information about your organization.

By developing your content knowledge graph, you can control how your brand is understood and presented in search.

The Challenges of Implementing Schema Markup at Scale

Despite all the benefits of implementing Schema Markup for your healthcare organization, creating and implementing a Schema Markup strategy at scale can be costly, complex, and time-consuming.

SEO teams often lack the expertise and the IT resources to deploy and update Schema Markup at scale across their websites. That’s where Schema App comes in. At Schema App, we provide an end-to-end, HIPAA-compliant, Schema Markup solution for leading healthcare organizations.

Benefits of Schema App for Healthcare Organizations

1. Measurable Results

One of the best things about Schema Markup is that it is measurable. This makes showing the return on investment from your work with Schema App easy. When you optimize your web pages with Schema Markup and start achieving rich results, Google Search Console reports on the impressions and clicks you achieve specifically from the URLs that are getting these decorated results.

When you start working with Schema App, we ask about your organizational goals and what success looks like from your work with us. We ensure that you have tangible results to show how Schema Markup is contributing to your organization’s goals.

The most common measures are impressions, clicks and click-through rates from rich results achieved on your site. Upon achieving those results, we’ll continue to optimize your Schema Markup strategy and ensure your content evolves with the changing SEO world.

How do you convert clicks to dollars?

If you don’t have a way to correlate clicks or sessions on your website to appointments booked, you can do a simpler calculation by taking your cost-per-click and multiplying it by the number of clicks you get from rich results. The result is the number of dollars you saved from paid advertising through increased organic traffic. Our customers often see an ROI greater than 10X.

# of Clicks from Rich Results X Avg CPC = Value of work done with Schema Markup & Schema App

This allows marketing teams to easily prove the return on investment in their SEO efforts.

2. Retaining Talent through Agility and Scale

In addition to the measurable ROI from clicks, Schema App offers healthcare organizations a return on investment by adding agility to their teams.
Agility is critical to any business’s success. With Schema App, SEO teams no longer need to learn Schema Markup or wait for internal IT teams to update their markup.

Our Schema App Highlighter tool allows SEO teams to generate and deploy dynamic Schema Markup to thousands of similarly templated pages within minutes. Combined with our team of expert Customer Success Managers, SEO teams can access a Schema Markup expert and make updates to their Schema Markup quickly to see results. We aim to ensure we deliver our client’s quarter-over-quarter results with speed and agility.

On top of delivering greater results, staying agile can also help with employee retention. Operational inefficiencies can hold teams back and be demotivating, resulting in lower employee retention. When your team sees their Schema Markup strategies come to life in little to no time, they are empowered by the results, which motivates them to keep performing.

3. Show Value Cross Functionally and to your Physicians

Many of our clients have already tried to do Schema Markup on their own.

SEO specialists spend countless hours trying to learn how to write Schema Markup (JSON-LD) page by page before submitting it to IT to be implemented on the page. With our Schema App Highlighter tool, SEO teams can generate Schema Markup (JSON-LD) dynamically at scale and deploy it across pages in just a few clicks. They can also reduce their dependency on their development team and get the job done quickly.

Schema Markup not only benefits SEO efforts but also supports physicians within healthcare networks by:

• showcasing reviews and ratings,
• enhancing visibility and appearance on the SERP, and
• building trust with current and prospective patients.

This, in turn, can drive more appointments for these physicians and improve reputability. This can make your physicians more inclined to stay with your healthcare organization, thus aiding physician retention.

Our partnership with Schema App reassures us that this important component of our SEO strategy is being managed. The data we have been able to get out of this is great. Providers love to see how good their marked-up listings look in search results. It’s great evidence of the work we do behind the scenes to increase visibility in our market.”

– Julie Goldstein-Dunn, Director, Experience Insights & Analytics, Henry Ford Health System

Working with Schema App

In the healthcare industry’s competitive landscape, it’s essential to stand out in search results to maintain relevance and visibility among competitors. Integrating innovative strategies like Schema Markup is key to distinguishing your brand. If you haven’t already integrated Schema Markup into your strategy, now is the ideal time to do so, especially as search algorithms increasingly prioritize semantic understanding.

At Schema App, we provide an end-to-end Schema Markup solution. We partner with healthcare networks and other organizations to help their content be better understood by search engines so they can stand out in search. Our aim is to empower organizations like yours to deliver a seamless healthcare experience to their customers with ease and scale.

The post The Value of Schema Markup for Healthcare Organizations 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.

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.

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.

The post How to Manage Your Schema Markup 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.

Fast forward to today, search engines now prioritize positive user experience and ‘people-first’ content. Search engines consider content depth, meaning (aka semantics), and how it answers user questions by providing the desired information.

Businesses must adapt to this evolution of search. As search engines become more sophisticated, incorporating semantic understanding into your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is crucial to keep up with the changing landscape. This will help ensure your content remains relevant and visible to your target audience.

Understanding Semantic SEO

The word ‘semantic’ is all about understanding the meaning of language.

When people use the term ‘arguing about semantics’, they’re usually debating the interpretation (or misunderstanding) of words or phrases. Semantics is a field that examines how language conveys meaning and follows certain rules for effective communication.

Semantic SEO is the process of giving more meaning and context to your web content to help search engines gain a better understanding of your content.

Why is Semantic SEO important?

The way that search engines understand your content has changed

Historically, Google solely used keywords to evaluate a web page’s topic and relevance to a search query. As of Google’s algorithm changes made in 2013, however, instead of only looking at keywords to understand what the page is about, search engines now read and understand a page’s overall topic.

This change allowed search engines to provide users with a better search experience and ensure that the results presented are providing users with the answers they are looking for.

To improve your ranking and web traffic

By utilizing semantic SEO, search engines can better understand your content and more accurately relate it to search queries. In return, your pages can rank higher on relevant searches, leading to more impressions and, ideally, more clicks. 

Because it presents users with the most relevant information based on their queries, those who do visit your pages are more easily converted into customers. This is because it’s more likely to be exactly the information/product/service they were seeking. 

To keep up with generative AI search

Semantic SEO is the future of search, and that future has already begun. The emergence of powerful generative AI search engines like Google’s Search Generative Experience, has propelled semantic technology to unprecedented heights.

In this transformative era with the AI revolution and search generative experience, search engines are gaining an unprecedented ability to interpret the nuances and meaning of human language. As a result, search queries are now returning dynamic and tailored results with the potential for conversational follow-up answers.

While traditional SEO practices, including keyword research, remain valuable in digital marketing, integrating semantic technologies like Schema Markup into your strategy can provide a competitive advantage.

By doing so, your pages become more visible and comprehensible to the intelligent systems that bridge the gap between your content and human users.

How is Semantic SEO Different From Traditional SEO?

Where traditional SEO prioritizes content that is keyword-based, semantic SEO is a topic-based approach that increases the likelihood of connecting users to information that is most relevant to their search query. 

It accomplishes this by focusing on both the meaning behind queries and the contextual information and relationships in the content being retrieved. This results in a better user experience which can lead to a lower bounce rate, as those who end up on your page from search have a higher intent to consume the information presented.

Semantic SEO is the bridge between your content and users’ intent. This is the biggest difference between Traditional SEO and Semantic SEO. – WeDevs

Moving from a keyword-based to a topic-based approach with your content can seem a bit abstract at first. After all, it’s simple enough to do some keyword research, find a list of terms, and then write content to string the terms together.

These same skills are still essential when it comes to semantic SEO, with one key difference: entities.

What are Entities?

To put it plainly: entities are things, and things have dimensions! 

They take up space (be it physical, digital, or conceptual). They also have attributes (like colour, size, duration) and, most importantly, they are understood in relation to other things.

Take, for example, “bestgihrtie”. This is a string of characters and it means nothing to a human brain, so it won’t mean anything to a search engine either. But if I decide it’s the name of my new album, snackfood, or generative AI tool, this jumble of letters now becomes an identifiable entity. In other words, the string becomes a thing.

However, that entity needs to be described for it to have any meaning. “ChatGPT” didn’t mean anything until we started hearing about it in relation to generative AI, chatbots, and productivity. 

This same entity took on a different meaning when we heard about it in relation to hallucinations, misinformation, algorithmic bias, and plagiarism. The word “relation” is doing the heavy lifting in this example since what it’s providing is context. 

We as humans use context clues to make sense of new things and search engines are doing the same thing.

That being said, machines, including search engines, aren’t good at understanding in the same way that human brains can. Search engines use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the proximity and frequency of certain terms, phrases and entities.

There are ways, however, to make statements about entities more explicit for search engines.

Elevating Search with Entities

As previously stated, semantic search goes beyond traditional keyword matches and focuses on delivering topically relevant search results.

Instead of simply providing “plain blue links” to web pages, it can present information in various formats, such as Knowledge Panels, Featured Snippets, and Rich Results, all centered around the primary entity being searched.

This approach aims to provide users with more comprehensive and contextually relevant information related to their search query. Let’s look at an example of how a search for “Gibson Les Paul” yields results about this particular entity.

Under the “People also ask” section, we can see queries that don’t blatantly name the type of guitar, like: “How much did Kirk Hammet pay for Greeny?”. 

Greeny is a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, named after its original owner, Peter Green. It happened to be purchased by Kirk Hammet, the guitarist of Metallica, which also explains the inclusion of the question “Who is the richest member of Metallica?”, which has nothing to do with guitars at all.

But if we think about this information as being derived from entities that are related to one another, the inclusion of these “People also ask” queries make sense.

And if we search for “Greeny guitar”, we’ll get a Knowledge Panel conveying some of the attributes of this particular guitar, including the fact that its manufacturer is “Gibson”.

Leverage Schema Markup to Improve Your Semantic SEO

There are many things you can do to implement semantic SEO. A lot of it involves creating clusters of content surrounding the topic that you want to be known for.

However, in addition to this, you need to ensure search engines understand what your content is about and how the entities in your content are connected. Implementing Schema Markup allows you to categorize entities and explicitly relate them to each other, providing search engines with helpful contextual information about your content.

Schema Markup, also known as structured data, is a standardized vocabulary that search engines analyze to understand the content on your web pages. By implementing Schema Markup through code, such as JSON-LD, search engines can contextualize your content and present it to users searching for relevant and related topics.

While machines don’t interpret information like humans do, Schema Markup helps bridge the gap. It does this by providing explicit details about the content on your pages, ensuring search engines accurately comprehend the topics of information your website offers.

One of the most common uses of structured data is the application of the Schema.org vocabulary expressed in JSON-LD. It’s usually found under the “technical SEO” umbrella, and most would know it as the “Thing” responsible for rich results.

Rich results can drive higher click-through rates with their engaging visuals, but if that’s the extent of your Schema Markup application, your semantic SEO strategy is missing out!

So how can you leverage Schema Markup to improve your semantic SEO?

1. Implement more specific Schema Markup to clearly explain what your page is about

To be semantic, search engines need to clearly understand your content.

Content publishers often use generic Schema Markup plugins to add default Schema Markup on certain pages like blog articles, product pages, home page, etc. However, the downside of doing this is the lack of control over your Schema Markup.

Generic Article markup autogenerated by plugins won’t give your content the richly descriptive Schema Markup that best supports the search engines.

Plugins are usually CMS-specific and tend to map more general properties to available metadata (like author, or datePublished). While these properties are still helpful, they don’t describe the content with as much depth as more specific properties like about or mentions, which can be used to call out topics and entities in an Article.

Your markup will also often be disconnected. Each page may have Schema Markup describing the content, but not necessarily how that content relates to other pages across your website.

2. Add @ids in your Schema Markup

Your Schema Markup can be generated and authored without including identifiers (@id). Search engines like Google will still read it and make it eligible for rich results.

In the JSON-LD syntax, @id is used to provide URIs (uniform resource identifiers) to entities in your Schema Markup. These identifiers allow you to refer back to entities as you build your knowledge graph.

In the example below, the Organization entity created for Schema App’s homepage has the @id “https://www.schemaapp.com/#Organization”. If a blog post on another page wants to say that it was published by the Organization Schema App, the Schema Markup for that page would say the publisher is “https://www.schemaapp.com/#Organization”.

@ids give the entities in your markup unique identifiers.

Think of it like your social insurance number! There may be 10 different people named “Jane Doe” in your organization, but each of them will have a unique ID that differentiates them. Schema App auto-generates @ids for every entity, so you can link the unique entities across your website.

Therefore, if you want to improve your semantic SEO, you should add @ids to your JSON-LD Schema Markup.

3. Connect your Schema Markup to develop your knowledge graph

Establishing a connection between your Schema Markup elements is crucial for developing a comprehensive knowledge graph. Knowledge graphs are necessary for describing how things on your site are related to each other, as well as other things on the internet.

It makes your content more semantic and provides search engines with contextual knowledge about your content.

Connect Your Entities On Your Website

On your website, you can connect different entities to one another. For instance, if you have a law firm with multiple service pages, it’s important to connect those service pages to your organization. This indicates that your organization provides all of those services despite them being on separate pages.

To ensure accurate representation, it’s vital to describe the relationships between marked-up entities in detail. For example, you need to clarify if an article is about a specific topic or if it simply mentions it.

Schema App offers a free Schema Path tool that helps identify available properties to connect your entities effectively.

Connect Entities to External Authoritative Knowledge Bases

You can also connect entities on your site to external authoritative knowledge bases such as Wikidata or Wikipedia. By doing so, you are clearly explaining what your entity is about.

For example, let’s say your page talks about football. Football can mean two different sports to different readers. In America, football is American football while in Europe, football is soccer.

So if your page is about American football, you can link it to the Wikidata entity (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q41323) for American football in your Schema Markup using the sameAs property. This will help search engines understand that your page is referring to American football and reduces the risk of misinterpretation.

By connecting entities on your site to other entities and external knowledge bases, you are forming your own knowledge graph. The @ids that we mentioned earlier clearly identify the entities in your content, allowing you to connect them and build context.

With Schema App, you have the flexibility to add these entities either manually through our Editor or automatically through the Highlighter, utilizing the Linked Entity Recognition feature. For WordPress users, our WordPress plugin can automatically identify and link entities that you have included in your tags and categories.

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

The Future is Semantic

When creating website content for SEO, it’s important to prioritize semantic SEO that focuses on topics rather than just keywords. Search engines now understand context, relationships, and user intent better than ever before.

To stay competitive on SERPs, you need to create relevant, high-quality content that targets specific topics and use connected Schema Markup to help search engines understand how your content relates to user intent, search queries, and other information on the internet.

By embracing semantic SEO, you align your strategy with search engines’ evolving understanding. This leads to better visibility on the SERP and the delivery of highly-tailored content to your target audience.

If you’re looking to implement connected Schema Markup at scale for your site, get in touch with our team to learn about our solution.

The post Semantic SEO: What You Need to Know appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

By adding Schema Markup (also known as Structured Data) to your page, your page can show up as a rich result on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some rich results claim a prime location at the top of SERPs, while others include additional information about your page, such as images, pricing, reviews, and snippets of content.

Even though Google says Schema Markup does not have a direct impact on your rankings, investing in it can definitely help your pages stand out in the SERP and drive an increase in Click-Through Rates. 

However, before you start implementing Schema Markup on your page, there are a few basic technical SEO factors that can have an impact on your search visibility. Here are the 4 SEO factors you should consider before doing Schema Markup: 

1. Ensure Your Pages Are Indexable

Indexing is the process that search engines use to understand what your page is about. For example, Google’s algorithm achieves this by analyzing textual content, key content tags, alt attributes, and other elements of your page. 

However, some sites mistakenly embed a no-index rule in their site’s code, which will prevent certain content from showing up on SERPs. If your page is not indexed, search engines cannot read your Schema Markup or your content, which defeats the purpose of implementing Schema Markup.

To find out whether your site is indexed, launch Google’s URL inspection tool, paste in a URL, and initiate your query. Within seconds, Google will reveal if your URL is indexed. If it isn’t, you need to adjust your robots.txt file or meta tags to fix the issue.

2. Have a Fast Page Load Speed

You can implement Schema Markup regardless of page load speed. However, page load speed impacts your ranking on search engines like Google, which is why you should strive to optimize it before investing in more extensive technical SEO like Structured Data. 

Google considers page load speed so important that it’s one of Google’s Core Web Vitals – a metric that also considers your page’s visual stability and interactivity. If your page speed is slow, it will negatively impact the user experience and your “crawl budget,” which refers to the resources Google allocates to crawl your page.

Additionally, if rendering your page and loading its JavaScript takes too long, Google might index the site before the JavaScript is finished executing and not even see some of your content or Schema Markup. As a result, you might miss your chance to be featured as a rich result on the SERP. Therefore, it is vital for you to address your page load speed before implementing Schema Markup. 

To assess and optimize load speed, we suggest following Google’s recommendations. 

3. Have a Mobile-Friendly Site

As of Q4 of 2022, mobile devices accounted for over 59% of global web traffic. With these numbers climbing daily, it’s no surprise that Google has adopted a mobile-first indexing philosophy. 

This means that the search engine giant will index websites based on their mobile versions rather than the desktop alternatives. Therefore, the mobile version of your site must be indexable and optimized for speed if you want to achieve a strong ranking.

Your website should be responsive, which means its format seamlessly adapts to the screen size and resolution of the user’s mobile device. This is so important to the user experience that Google incorporated this concept into one of its most significant algorithm updates in 2020. 

The bottom line is this: If your page does not rank well in mobile searches, Schema Markup will do little to improve your visibility. Before you start doing any Schema Markup, test your site’s mobile-friendliness with Google’s free tool to ensure your site functions well on any device.

4. Have More Helpful Content

Google recently launched its Helpful Content Update, a system designed to reward sites with people-first content that provide visitors with a satisfying, valuable experience. Conversely, content that falls short of visitor expectations will perform poorly in rankings.

This update is another in a long string of algorithm adjustments to discourage sites from keyword-stuffing their content and producing content that lacks any real substance for readers. Instead, it gives more weight to sites that produce quality content written for people, not algorithms.

As you start investing in Schema Markup, evaluate the quality of your site’s content and ensure it answers the user’s queries and meets their needs. On top of that, you should make sure that your page has the content needed to meet the required properties to be eligible for the relevant rich results. 

Google has also provided some great tips for generating helpful content, so be sure to put these tips to use.

Learn how to optimize your content to achieve Google’s rich results.  

Run an Effective Schema Markup Strategy by Mastering the Basics

Rich results can help differentiate your website from the competition. But if your website doesn’t load quickly, lacks quality on-page content, and isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it will not rank well even if you invest heavily into Structured Data.

With that in mind, we recommend mastering these basic tenets of SEO, so you have a solid groundwork upon which to build. To be clear, while your site does not have to run at lightning-fast speeds and host content written by world-class copywriters, it should function reliably on desktop and mobile alike and feature a good mix of content that provides value to readers. 

If you’re ready to start investing in a sophisticated Schema Markup strategy that will drive more organic traffic to your website, get in touch with our team to learn more about our end-to-end Schema Markup Solution.

The post 4 Basic SEO Factors to Consider Before Doing Schema Markup appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Regardless of whether you believe that a prolonged recession is just over the horizon or are more optimistic, the market is echoing the effects of this economic uncertainty. As such, many companies are cutting back on certain expenses and delaying certain investments while contending with declining sales.

The marketing budget is often one of the first investments that businesses cut back on. However, it is a short-sighted move especially if they want to weather the potential recession without exacerbating their economic challenges.

During a recession, you should prioritize the following:

• Retaining loyal customers
• Making sure new customers can still find your brand
• Maintaining a strong digital presence.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the marketing strategies that can help you maintain brand awareness and nurture potential customers at a lower cost. As you prepare for an economic downturn, consider these strategies to make your SEO budget dollars work for you.

3 Tips to Manage SEO in a Recession

1. Continue to Invest in SEO

In a recession, you will need to up your digital marketing efforts and start acquiring new customers. Make sure you build relationships and trust with that new customer base, as doing so will increase their average lifetime value.

As you navigate the newly condensed marketplace, you might be tempted to devote all of your marketing resources to short-term tactics like pay-per-click advertising or social media marketing campaigns.

These efforts will help you connect with potential customers, but they’re not sustainable marketing strategies. PPC and social media advertising tends to be more costly and the clicks might not always lead to sales. In the long term, SEO is far more economically viable, even during a recession.

SEO isn’t a one-and-done strategy. It requires ongoing maintenance and improvements if you want to keep your high ranking. If you stop investing in your SEO efforts, you are throwing all your hard work down the drain and giving your competitors a chance to step in and steal all the traffic from your brand.

Conversely, if you stay the course and continue to invest in your SEO campaigns, you are more likely to improve your organic traffic and be well-positioned to compete once the recession ends.

2. Find What Works and Multiply

Managing a business during a recession is undoubtedly challenging. However, you can use the challenges you face to your advantage by doing what your competitors aren’t.

Many businesses in your market may forgo investing in SEO, including exploring new strategies. This leaves an area of opportunity open for you to maximize your website traffic by leveraging emerging marketing tactics like Schema Markup.

Schema Markup, also known as Structured Data, is an advanced SEO strategy that helps search engines understand and contextualize the content on your web pages. Adding Structured Data to your web page will also qualify it for a rich result on the search engine results page, which improves your click-through rate and drives more traffic to your site. It is recommended by Google and is becoming even more relevant with the continued evolution of AI and Search.

Most of the results attributed to SEO are difficult to measure. Conversely, Schema Markup, and the website traffic that it produces, can be tracked accurately. Therefore, you’ll be able to measure the impact it is making on your business.

When implementing this strategy into your marketing mix during a recession, you might want to start small and test its effectiveness before investing more into it. You can start by adding the markup to 1-2 key page sets (for example: blog, products or physician pages) on your website and review the results of it on Google Search Console. If the rich results are driving performance, you can then invest more and create a Schema Markup strategy that covers more pages on your site.

One of our customers, Sonova, conducted pilot Schema Markup projects to test the effectiveness of the strategy before committing to it fully.

Sonova worked with the Schema App team to implement FAQ markup on two country sites and saw that they were getting better results than the countries that were adding markup locally. As a result of this pilot, they were confident in Schema App’s ability to help drive their website’s performance through Schema Markup.

3. Focus on Content that Converts

During a recession, the economy doesn’t come to a full stop. Consumers are still spending money, albeit less of it. You need to give them a good reason to spend it on your products and services instead of those offered by your competitors now more than ever. 

One great way to do that is by investing in high-quality website and content that boosts your visibility, promotes trust, and provides value to your target audience.

To be clear, we aren’t referring to purely advertorial content. According to Entrepreneur, 70% of consumers prefer to learn about brands via content instead of advertising. While ads certainly have their place in your marketing strategy, we suggest focusing on SEO by publishing educational or informative content. 

When you create content, you need to ensure it will reach the right audience, which means optimizing it for specific keywords, but sometimes that isn’t enough. To help your content stand out further, you can add Schema Markup to your content and help it stand out as a rich result on search. 

Example of a Product rich result

If you are still experimenting with Schema Markup and want to start small, you should focus on optimizing content for rich results that provide the best conversion rates. In the past year, we’ve seen FAQ, Product, Review Snippets and How-To rich results perform best for our customers in terms of click-through rates. 

That said, you will also need to ensure that your page has the required content to be eligible for those rich results. By focusing on optimizing content that converts and picking the rich results that can drive meaningful traffic, you will maximize your ROI on Schema Markup.

Revitalize Your SEO Strategy with Schema Markup

Now that you know how to manage SEO during a recession, it is time to take meaningful action and reinvigorate your marketing strategy. 

Keep in mind that marketing is an investment, not an expense. As such, you should continue to invest in SEO, as organic traffic can yield cheaper clicks and provide long-term value.

However, since much of SEO is not measurable, you should expand your strategy by incorporating measurable tactics such as Schema Markup into your SEO game plan. Doing so will allow you to see the return on investment of the tactic, and make more savvy decisions on which tactics you should continue to invest in or cut. 

If you are thinking of investing in Schema Markup during this time of uncertainty, we can help. At Schema App, we work with enterprise SEO teams to deliver an end-to-end Schema Markup solution. When you partner with us, you will be assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager to create your custom strategy, gain access to our scalable Schema Markup tools, and get measured results on your ROI.

If you are considering investing in a Schema Markup solution, let’s talk! See how Schema App can help you gain a competitive advantage on SERP during these budget-conscious times.

The post How to Manage SEO During a Recession appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

If you are about to get started, you may be asking,

Where do I start?”

For Excel Impact’s Lindsay Malzone, she knew structured data was important because Google thinks it’s important:

For Lindsay, the challenge was figuring out how to implement structured data across all web pages of her site while incorporating rich result opportunities into her team’s content strategy. Depending on the type of content, different schemas should be used for different enhanced search features called rich results. Now, you may be asking:

What is a rich result?

This is a rich result. The additional information of pricing and availability comes from the structured data added to your website for this content.

You need relevant content marked up with all required and recommended schema.org properties to qualify for rich result eligibility. Through these enhanced search features, you can show more information about the products or services you offer through frequently asked questions (FAQs), how-tos, pricing, reviews and star ratings, and more.

Taking her Schema Markup to the Next Level

We asked Lindsay what took her to the next level of understanding as she journeyed in schema markup, to go beyond just basic markup:

Following the trends and what’s going on in the SEO space, as well as our own industry space and tracking the competitors — figuring out what they’re doing and seeing if they’re ahead of you, or behind you, or if they’re catching up to you.”

To stay ahead of the competition, you need to keep an eye on what others in the industry are doing to stand out. By going beyond the most commonly used schema to implementing more complex and unique schema markup, you can discover new ways to connect with your customers through engaging content and interactive search features, like this FAQ rich result:

To keep a competitive advantage, Lindsay realized that her team needed to do even more. She wanted to dig into more advanced levels of SEO complexity to beat her competition. After playing with a couple other tools or plug-ins, she found that most weren’t up to speed with everything she needed for a more advanced schema markup strategy.

Figuring out how to organize sets of pages, group them together, and distribute different types of schema manually—Lindsay knew that doing this in-house would be a big ask of her SEO and development teams to create JSON-LD (Google’s preferred structured data format ) by hand:

I realized that it was going to give me carpal tunnel!”

Whether it’s a set of 5 or 500 pages, you need to figure out what types of schema you can implement on them and keep it organized and consistent. That way, you’ll be able to scale your structured data through templated pages and dynamic tools like the Schema App Highlighter.

The key to successful structured data is organization. You want to organize different types of content and keep your schema markup consistent. By doing so, when it’s time to scale your strategy or when Google introduces updates, you’re already prepared to deploy new recommendations to groups of content at scale that are currently on your site.

Schema Markup is a Learning Journey

We like to think of schema markup as a journey—from strategy to results.

Start with strategy—what is the unique value proposition you want to communicate to your customers in search? Use these values as well as rich result opportunities to inform your content strategy. By doing so, you can maximize your results from structured data. Schema markup is an iterative process; you are always learning and growing on your schema markup journey.

For Lindsay, working with other SEO experts is where she learns the most. Working with Schema App, she was able to have a dedicated team focused on this advanced area of SEO for her company. Meetings with her Customer Success Manager were an opportunity to share new ideas, discuss updates from Google, and celebrate wins together.

Being able to have an internal, dedicated team to help stay on top of everything and stay informed on what other experts are saying isn’t always an option. This is especially true for more agile organizations that may not necessarily have an entire team dedicated to SEO.

That’s why Schema App focuses on empowering our customers with scalability and agility through our expert tools and support. We work with you to develop a customized schema markup strategy aligned with your return on investment goals.

Through expert recommendations, we help your SEO team learn how to use structured data opportunities to inform their content strategy in order to maximize results.

In her ten years of doing SEO, significant increases or decreases to website traffic were usually due to algorithm updates. The only other time she’s seen that happen is when she launched schema markup on her site. Beyond metrics, the visual change to your content in SERPs is very impactful in demonstrating the value of structured data.

Not only are you standing out from the competition through rich results you’ve achieved and commanding more virtual real estate on the first page of the SERPs, but you’re also presenting new, engaging opportunities for your customers to connect with your brand right in search. Don’t wait until it’s become the standard for your industry—stand out from the competition by doing it first!

The post How to be an SEO Trailblazer with Structured Data appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Schema App empowers your digital team with the control and agility to drive results in a changing SEO world, by leveraging structured data without having to rely on I.T. resources. Work with and learn from schema markup experts to take your website to a new level with structured data, and showcase the unique value of your organization in search.

Businesses who reach out to us are typically looking to solve the following three problems that hinder their digital performance:

1. Lacking Schema Markup Expertise
2. Inability to Scale Schema Markup
3. Insufficient I.T Resources for Agility

Lacking Schema Markup Expertise

Schema markup is an advanced, technical, and relatively new search engine optimization method.

This structured data vocabulary was released in 2011 through a collaborative effort by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Yandex, and the language is always changing and expanding. Schema.org is the dictionary for schema markup, and with thirteen new versions released over the past two years, it’s clear that search engines continue to invest in this advanced SEO practice.

The benefits of structured data extend beyond improving your SEO performance:

• You’re actually translating your content into a language that search engines understand. 
• You’re connecting your organization and information on your site to a search engine’s knowledge graph by defining objects in your content as distinct entities, which streamlines Google’s ability to match a user’s search intent to information on your website. 
• You’re taking control of how the data on your web pages is defined, rather than just hoping that search engines will figure it out and show the best information in search results.

Learning a new language and how to properly map, connect, and nest data items is hard and  takes a lot of skill and knowledge, for which most SEO teams cannot dedicate a full-time position.

Schema App: Your End to End Solution for Structured Data

Schema App offers a technical solution with high-touch support to enable your team through the whole process. Beyond the initial setup and creation comes the need to edit, maintain, and scale your schema markup. A common misconception is that schema markup is static once it’s created. The truth is your structured data should be evolving and changing over time, just as your website content and online business goals evolve. Let our solution do the heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on other areas of SEO, like strategy.

Inability to Scale Schema Markup

The biggest challenge for businesses who already have a structured data expert on their team is creating and managing schema markup at scale across hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of pages on your website. Hardcoding schema markup into your website page-by-page is not sustainable, and your digital team is going to be spending hundreds of hours doing so. At Schema App, our solutions allow us to easily create, manage, and deploy customized schema markup at scale across thousands of pages to suit our customers’ needs. 

To maximize results from schema markup, your website should have useful, informative content that is comprehensively marked up with structured data. That’s why your Customer Success Manager will provide expert content recommendations to unlock new opportunities for search enhancement features like rich results. The Schema App Highlighter can even update your schema markup dynamically to keep up with content changes across your website, meaning you won’t miss out on any opportunities to connect with your customers as your business grows.

Insufficient IT Resources for Agility

Even if your schema markup expert has found a way to create structured data internally at scale, our bet is that implementing this is going to require some assistance from your development team. If your dev team is anything like ours, they’re usually running at max capacity. Customers come to us to remove the dependency of deploying or editing their schema markup from their development team, enabling their SEO team to just get the job done! 

Schema App is a SaaS solution, so the setup, and updates are made in our application, which empowers your SEO team to make updates as the content evolves, vs being dependent on your dev team.  Also, once templates or sets of pages are set up, anytime you add to that page set, BAM! It’s optimized. 

Our solution, paired with our expert Customer Success teams, means that updates can be made quickly. We’re quick to execute based on customer needs and feedback—no need to jump in line for your next dev team sprint cycle. Simply reach out to your customer success manager and create a plan together for when changes are going to happen so that we can be ready to update your configuration in Schema App’s solution; your schema markup will evolve with your website. Or maybe your company is considering a website migration or redesign; we can pivot your schema markup strategy to help mitigate traffic lost through your transition. 

When AdventHealth was planning a massive rebrand that would consolidate over 800 websites using approximately 35 different content management systems, we helped them mitigate the risk of a drop in organic traffic during the rebranding and ended up driving the following results:

• 90% increase in clicks 
• 40% increase in impressions
• 38% increase in CTR
• Top position in the rankings

We have seen significant increases in how our physicians are being found. Physician bio clips increased 90% from 150,000 clicks to about 285,000 clicks and we saw a 38% increase in the click-through rate of the search results as well”

—Brandi West, Executive Director, Digital Brand & Content Strategy I Digital Marketing, AdventHealth

We’re here to work with our customers as they change and grow, and our integrations mean your team can do it without IT!

Return on Investment of working with Schema App

Schema markup is an SEO strategy that has just started to gain appreciation from digital marketers in the last few years. The level of complexity associated with creating schema markup has likely kept some brands at bay. Early adopters are reaping the benefit of future-proofing their brand in search, especially as it becomes apparent that Google is investing more in structured data and increasing the reach of what applications it may have in the future.

Schema App has been at the forefront of automated schema markup technology since schema.org’s unveiling back in 2011. Our founders launched Schema App’s powerful suite of tools to create and maintain structured data at scale without having to write a line of code. You not only save budget on software maintenance, but also on hiring a new team member to manage your schema markup internally. With structured data, you’re able to measure the impact of your SEO efforts without increasing the cost of paid. With Schema App, we ensure that your return on investment goals are being met with a customized schema strategy and high-touch support from our team of experts.

Advanced SEO technology at a fraction of the cost

We aim to be 30% of the cost of doing schema markup internally. Your digital team will be empowered with advanced search engine optimization techniques without having to rely on I.T resources. How long does it take for your development team to take a concept through delivery? We take 2-3 weeks to get things live, on average. 

The savings from dedicating development resources are already worth the investment, but what about software maintenance? Research shows that maintenance of software typically contributes to 75% of cost of ownership. Let us handle the technology, giving back more budget, time, and resources for you to invest in other areas of your business.

Effectively measure the value of your search engine optimization

How do you currently measure the value of your investment in search engine optimization? Schema markup is like striking SEO gold for your website. Your SEO team will have the opportunity to work with structured data experts who do this day in and day out. Through innovative content recommendations, enhanced analytics to inform decisions through powerful data, and scalable technology, we establish a true business partnership between our team and yours. 

Save time learning complexity by partnering with world-class experts. On average, our customer success team spends 640 hours learning structured data before they can set up and do strategy. That’s an estimated 640 hours of dedicated, focused learning!

With Schema App, you’ll be adding robust, specific markup without needing to invest hundreds of hours from your internal team in learning. Our customer success managers will help you lead the industry by  leveraging our up-to-date knowledge on the most recent schema.org enhancements and rich result opportunities. We work cross-functionally with different areas of your organization to help you maximize your results from structured data.

Compliment paid traffic acquisition with a boost from organic clicks and impressions.

You’re enabling your team to measure the value of their search engine optimization without increasing the cost of paid. Our goal is to help you move your existing business metrics, not create new ones.

Our customers typically achieve more than 10% more clicks and impressions from schema markup. If your website on average receives around 150k clicks from Google search Console on a monthly basis and your average cost per click from paid Google Ads traffic is $1.34, your average monthly value from schema markup is over $20k. 

If you’re curious about calculating the value of implementing schema markup using your own benchmarks, reach out to our sales team to explore the ROI opportunities for your website.

Let us know if you’re interested and we can get on the phone this week.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should someone choose to work with Schema App as opposed to implementing schema markup themselves?

Expertise, scale, agility. Removing the dependency from your team to learn, maintain, and stay updated with structured data trends will allow them to shine and contribute back more to the company in the areas they’re truly specialized in.

Why aren’t all brands already using schema markup?

Schema markup is an SEO strategy that has really just started to shine and gain appreciation from digital marketers in the last two years. The level of complexity associated with creating schema markup has likely kept some brands at bay, but early adopters are going to reap the benefit of future proofing their brand in search especially as it becomes apparent that Google is investing more in structured data, and increasing the reach of what applications it may have in the future (hint: visual and predictive search).

We help you go beyond the fundamentals of search engine optimization, leveraging structured data to showcase your unique value in search. In a rapidly changing SEO environment, we introduce agility to your digital team, saving you time and resources for managing other aspects of your business portfolio. We deliver to your online business goals using our structured data expertise and advanced technology.

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