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

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

What You Need To Know About Organization Structured Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you get from implementing Organization structured data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This indicates two things:

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Before diving into the rich results that exist and how they can support your business, let’s explore what rich results are exactly.

What is a Rich Result?

A rich result (formerly known as a rich snippet) is an enhanced search result displayed on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) that can be achieved by implementing the appropriate structured data (aka Schema Markup) on your site. Structured data helps search engines better understand the content on your page and display that content with a more detailed appearance on the SERP.

Unlike standard organic search results, rich results offer users additional information beyond the typical page title, URL, and meta description, enhancing their search experience.

Rich results go beyond conventional search results by offering a more informative and decorated appearance, which significantly enhances a page’s visibility in search.

When implemented correctly, rich results provide users with additional information such as ratings, pricing, reviews, job locations, and more, allowing pages to stand out beyond the usual blue links and short previews.

By enriching the user experience, these decorated results not only make the search process more informative but also yield measurable advantages for businesses.

Benefits of Rich Results for Businesses

Stand Out in Search & Gain a Competitive Advantage

For businesses, rich results offer a competitive advantage by presenting content in a more compelling and authoritative manner. Businesses can showcase key information directly in the SERP, informing users that their content is best aligned with their queries, and persuading more qualified traffic to click through for further information.

Reduce Spend on Sponsored Content

With a stronger organic presence through rich results, businesses can save on advertising costs and sponsored content while still effectively reaching their target audience, increasing CTR, and driving valuable traffic to their websites.

Drive Qualified Traffic

A rich result can also drive more qualified traffic to your site. When searchers see elements like pricing on a product they are interested in, or a relevant job description on a job posting, they can self-assess and determine if your content will provide them with an answer to their query.

This self-qualification process can lead to a higher likelihood of getting clicks from users genuinely interested in your listings, leading to a higher chance of converting them to your page.

Delight Your Customers With Answers

Rich results streamline the process of providing customers with relevant information directly on the SERP, ensuring a seamless user experience.

For instance, when users search for specific recipes, rich results promptly showcase essential details like ingredients, cooking duration, and ratings, eliminating the need to visit individual websites for such information.

Similarly, for local businesses, rich results efficiently present vital information such as operating hours, contact details, and customer feedback directly in the search results, facilitating quick access to necessary details.

This approach not only enhances user satisfaction by delivering instant answers but also saves customers time, thereby increasing the likelihood of further engagement with the business.

Build Trust With Your Audience

Some rich results like review snippets can help your brand establish trust, authority, and credibility with new customers at the start of their buyer journey. They enable you to showcase positive reviews and high ratings for your brand, which reflect the trust that other users have placed in your product or service.

By doing so, you can build strong E-E-A-T, which represents the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness of your brand and can have a strong influence on conversions.

Drive Measurable Results for Your Business

At Schema App, we’ve seen the impact a rich result can have on the click-through rate of a web page. Our customer, Baptist Health saw a 491% increase in the CTR when comparing physician pages with a review snippet to those without.

Implementing Schema Markup to achieve rich results is a strategy that can provide your company with measurable ROI.

Develop Your Content Strategy

Just like how you need to have the necessary content on your page to markup with structured data, you can customize your content to meet the required properties for a specific rich result.

Your Schema Markup strategy is unique to the goals of each page, and which rich results would serve your page’s user queries and intent the best. It’s essential to adhere to content guidelines specific to each structured data type to ensure your content contains the relevant Types and properties for your rich result goal.

Are you looking for more product sales? Be sure to include product images, pricing, and ratings to be eligible for Product rich results.

Looking to get more appointments booked? Include reviews and ratings on your physician pages to build trust and establish credibility with potential patients to encourage them to book.

All in all, being aware of the desired outcomes and rich result goals you have for each page can help drive your content strategy in an actionable way.

See how Sharp HealthCare utilized the schema.org vocabulary to architect their content strategy.

By leveraging rich results effectively, businesses can gain a competitive advantage and enhance their online visibility organically, ultimately offering users a more engaging and informative search experience.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the rich results available on Google.

Rich Result Examples & How They Support Business Objectives

Review Snippets

Review snippets appear in the SERP when a user searches for a product, local business, movie, and other content types. It displays a concise summary of review ratings and other information, such as the average rating and the number of reviews, directly on the SERP.

Review snippets help users make informed decisions before clicking through to a specific website. For businesses, review snippets can significantly impact their online reputation and trustworthiness, as positive reviews can instill confidence and entice potential customers, boosting click-through rates to their website.

Product Rich Result

When a user searches for a specific product, the Product rich result provides detailed information about the product, including its name, price, availability and reviews, directly on the SERP.

This rich result offers users a quick glance at essential product details, allowing them to compare options and make purchasing decisions without needing to visit a specific website.

For instance, if you have a product page, achieving a Product rich result will provide you with an enhanced result that can display product images, pricing, ratings, availability, and even shipping and return details directly on the SERP.

These details allow potential customers to make quicker purchasing decisions before even visiting your website. This immediate access to essential product information can have a significant influence on buying decisions.

Google recently started awarding rich results even without structured data. Our experience, however, is that they don’t always get it quite right. We’ve seen Google providing Product rich results on non-product pages or even highlighting incorrect prices.

By implementing structured data, you can build trust with your users by taking control of what should be highlighted on your product pages and be reassured the correct details are shared with your users.

Job Posting Rich Result

JobPosting rich results appear when a user searches for job opportunities. It displays relevant job listings directly on the SERP, providing essential details such as job titles, locations, and company names.

This rich result allows job seekers to view and compare job openings without needing to visit individual job boards or company websites. For employers, job-posting rich results can significantly improve their recruitment efforts by increasing the visibility of their job listings and attracting potential candidates.

We have seen our client Baptist Health increase their CTR by 1194% when JobPosting rich results were achieved. You can read the case study here.

These are just a few of the many rich results available on Google. There are, however, other search features on Google that are not considered a rich result. Let’s dig in.

What is NOT a Rich Result?

On top of rich results, there are other visually appealing Google SERP features you can optimize for without using structured data.  While rich results are powered by structured data, there are other formats that can achieve a similar outcome, and it’s important to know the difference.

Knowledge Panel

For instance, a knowledge panel is an information box that appears on the right side of the search engine results page, offering concise details about a specific entity or topic. Though not technically a rich result, it displays relevant data, including images, links, and key facts, making it highly useful to users.

Featured Snippet

Similarly, a featured snippet showcases a summarized answer to a user’s query at the top of the search results, often extracted from a webpage. These features enhance the user experience by providing quick, relevant information in an easily accessible manner, even without structured data markup.

Other Google search results that resemble rich results, but are in fact not rich results, include:

People Also Ask

The “People Also Ask” feature presents a list of related questions that users frequently ask based on their original query. When users click on these questions, additional drop-down answers appear, offering more detailed information.

Though not directly utilizing structured data, this dynamic presentation of information can resemble rich results due to its interactive nature and visually appealing design.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content, which includes paid advertisements and promoted links, can also resemble rich results in appearance. These sponsored listings are often displayed with attractive images, catchy titles, and additional metadata to capture users’ attention.

Even though they are not organically generated through structured data, sponsored content can have a visually rich and distinct format, leading to potential confusion with true rich results by users.

HTML Tables

In the SERP, an HTML table is a structured layout used by search engines to display certain types of information from web pages. It organizes data in rows and columns, making it easier for users to interpret and compare different data points

If a webpage contains a table with data that is relevant to a specific query, search engines may choose to display that table in the search results to provide users with a quick overview of the information they are looking for.

Though the HTML table itself is not a rich result from structured data, it can be utilized in conjunction with rich results like Product to further enhance the user experience.

Rich Results Vs. Other Enhanced Results

While alternative results in the SERP can still be visually engaging and informative, structured data remains the preferred way to achieve enhanced results by achieving a more query-focused presentation of data in the form of rich results.

By leveraging structured data, you ensure that the information displayed aligns precisely with user search intent. Interactive elements present in many rich results further engage users.

The Schema Markup used to generate these results enables better comprehension for search engines, leading to improved rankings, better search performance, enhanced user experience, and even greater preparedness for the future of AI-Generative Search.

Overall, rich results powered by structured data provide a competitive advantage, offering a context-rich experience and greater authority in SERPs, making them a preferred choice for businesses and SEOs aiming to optimize their online presence.

How to Achieve a Rich Result on Google

As mentioned earlier, you can achieve a rich result by implementing the required structured data on your web page. However, there are a few other factors that can affect your eligibility for a rich result. Here are the steps you can take to be eligible for a rich result.

Step 1. Identify which rich result your page could be eligible for

Google currently boasts over 32 different types of rich results, each catering to distinct content intents and page structures. Deciding which rich result is most beneficial for your page hinges on understanding the intent behind your content and optimizing its structure accordingly.

Before deciding what rich result to target, you need to understand:

• Who the target audience is for your page
• What query would best match your content
• What your intent is with your page
• What rich result would convey the information on your web page most effectively

Rich results offer distinct benefits based on the type of content you have on your website, which means that your rich result goals should be page specific.

For example, if you have a product listing page, a product rich result would be most appropriate because it already has information about pricing, shipping, ratings etc.

On the other hand, if you offer a service that receives reviews and ratings, you might consider targeting a review snippet for your page because it promotes credibility and trust to people seeking that service.

Step 2. Ensure the content on your page fulfills the required Schema.org properties

Based on Google’s Structured Data Guidelines, you need to markup your page with the required properties for the specific Schema.org Type that you are using to achieve your targeted rich result.

For example, if you want to target a review snippet for your physician page, you need to add Review structured data markup and include the required properties listed in the guidelines.

You can also include the recommended properties to add more information to your structured data to decorate your rich result with even more information. A good example of this would be the product rich result.

At its basic level, a Product rich result requires at least one of the following three properties in your content: review, aggregate rating, and offer (price). However, by including all three properties or additional ones like price ranges, shipping availability, starting prices, and discounts, you can make the product rich result more informative and compelling.

This way, a more dynamic and detailed result will appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

That said, you should only mark up content that exists on your page and is visible to the readers of the page. If you mark up content that is not present on your page, it will result in schema drift and you will not be awarded the rich result.

Here are some additional tips on how you can optimize your content to achieve a rich result.

Step 3. Author the structured data markup for your page

Once you’ve ensured that your page has the content needed to fulfill the required properties, you can go ahead and author your structured data markup.

To be eligible for a rich result, Google requires you to markup your web page using one of the three supported formats: JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa. However, Google prefers JSON-LD as its markup format.

You can manually write the JSON-LD code or you can use tools like the Schema App Editor to generate the JSON-LD code for you. Before adding the JSON-LD code to your web page, you should also check to ensure your markup follows Google’s structured data guidelines and content guidelines.

Step 4. Add the JSON-LD structured data markup to your web page

There are a few ways to add the JSON-LD code to your web page. You can manually paste the JSON-LD structured data to the HTML of your web page. However, if you make any changes to the content on your site, you will need to manually update the structured data to prevent schema drift.

Alternatively, you can use the Schema App Editor to generate and deploy the JSON-LD code to your web page. This method is less complicated and allows you to easily manage and update your structured data without having to do any coding.

Once you’ve added the structured data to your page, you can use Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool or the Schema.org Validator to test that your structured data is working properly.

It is important to know that adding structured data to your web page does not guarantee that it will appear as a rich result, despite rich results being powered by structured data. Google tailors the search results to provide users with the best search experience. If they do not deem a specific rich result to be appropriate for the query, they will not award you the rich result.

Make Your Content Eligible for Rich Results

Rich results are a valuable asset for businesses aiming to enhance their online visibility, organic traffic, and user experience. Utilizing Schema Markup is key to achieving these results, as it allows search engines to understand and present content in a more contextual, visually appealing and informative way.

While adding structured data to your pages doesn’t guarantee a rich result with Google, you can increase your chances by ensuring high-quality content, expertly implemented markup and alignment with Google’s structured data and content guidelines.

To see how Schema App can help your organization leverage quality content to execute an effective Schema Markup strategy and drive measurable results, contact Schema App today.

The post What is a Rich Result? appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

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

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

What we do know:

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

Opportunity for FAQ optimization 

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

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

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

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

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

The questions with the FAQ markup on the article were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While we remain uncertain about the impact of these new experiences on search engine optimization, there are a few things that we know:

• Google’s Search Generative Experience (SEG) will feature source links.
• Generative AI is in its infancy, but it is not going away.
• AI uses large language models to train. Large language models use Knowledge Graphs to learn and ground their data to increase accuracy.
• Schema Markup when done in a connected way, creates a knowledge graph that AI can consume.

Organizations should use Schema Markup (also known as Structured Data) on their websites if they want to be prepared and thrive in AI search.

The last point is especially important because AI is going to need help understanding and contextualizing the content on a website to provide searchers with the right answers.

Before exploring deeper into the threats and opportunities of this new technology, let’s talk about generative AI in the context of search.

What Is Generative AI for Search?

Generative AI is a specific type of artificial intelligence algorithm that is designed to generate new content and outputs based on data they have been trained on. Some of the content that generative AI can create includes text, audio, code, and images.

Bard and ChatGPT are prime examples of generative AI chatbots that have been trained on large quantities of unlabeled, unstructured data. While generative AI chatbots are a groundbreaking development in the world of artificial intelligence, they are only the beginning.

During Google I/O 2023, the search engine giant showcased how it has incorporated generative AI technologies into its search engine and other products such as Workspace. This newly integrated AI technology will have a significant impact on Google’s responses to queries and the composition of the search engine results page (SERP).

There is considerable excitement surrounding the AI revolution. That said, there are also significant concerns around bias, plagiarism, trustworthiness, and accuracy of generative AI search results.

Currently, generative AI search engines are largely trained on unlabeled/unstructured data which can lead to inaccurate results. Adding structured data or Schema Markup to your site can allow search engines to:

• train on quality data,
• improve the accuracy of their answers,
• and give you a control point to inform generative AI on your web content.

There are underlying risks and exciting opportunities associated with the implementation of any new technology, especially when that technology is as powerful and sophisticated as generative AI.

Google’s new Search Generative Experience will have an impact on the way SEO is done. So is generative AI a threat or an opportunity for search engine optimization?

Let’s explore some of the potential threats and clear opportunities that have emerged in the wake of generative AI search.

Is AI Search an Opportunity or Threat for SEOs?

At first glance, Google’s new generative AI search has a few glaring threats to SEO.

Threats

1. Potential Loss of Visibility on the SERP

There are a lot of unanswered questions about how website performance will be measured with AI search.

Google’s generative AI search engine does showcase links that attribute information back to reputable source content. However, users may no longer need to click to read this content (resulting in zero-click searches), which limits your visibility and overall influence over the customer journey.

Ultimately, rich results, featured snippets and other top-ranked content may be overshadowed by generative AI results. In turn, this could lead to a reduction in rankings, clicks, and impressions.

2. Success Metrics of a Website Are Going to Fundamentally Change

Generative AI has the potential to condense your sales funnel. The line between clicks, impressions, and conversions could become blurred, making it difficult to attribute sales or leads to specific marketing activities.

Bing and Google have yet to reveal how sites can measure their performance in generative AI search results. For now, you will have to draw conclusions using existing metrics.

3. Hyper Long and Specific Search Queries

If you haven’t watched the Google I/O segment on search yet, we strongly recommend doing so. In their demonstration, we saw that the Search Generative Experience (SGE) allows for more natural, specific conversational search queries in comparison to the traditional keywords or questions we see today.

Image Credit: Google

This capability will lead users to conduct very specific queries. And as a result, question fragments and traditional keyword searches will become less prominent.

These long specific queries are a shift from traditional keywords and will likely have little to no search volume. It also reflects SGE’s ability to understand the context behind a query rather than the keywords used. Therefore, it is crucial for content publishers to focus on utilizing Schema Markup helping search engines to understand and contextualize the on-page content.

Furthermore, Google has previously emphasized the importance of a website focusing on content around a specific topic as a way of creating people-first content.

Instead of focusing heavily on optimizing for keywords, focus on creating content for topics within your expertise and around your customers’ needs. You can then use Schema Markup to communicate your expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness with the AI search engine.

Opportunities

The world of SEO is constantly evolving. Long-time marketing professionals understand that this level of change is not a new phenomenon. To stay relevant in the world of organic search and differentiate yourself from the competition, you must adapt to the latest trends (such as generative AI) and capitalize on the opportunities they provide.

The key opportunities created by generative AI search include the following:

1. Provide a Better Customer Experience

You can provide customers with a better experience by answering their queries directly on the search engine results page. Today, content publishers can already utilize rich results such as FAQ and How-To as well as other features like Featured snippets to answer the questions in search.

However, the generative AI search engine can help you reduce friction with your customers by showing users the key information they need to know or providing follow-up information.

The eCommerce industry is one of the first industries to be truly disrupted by this because Google already has great eCommerce data from Google’s Shopping Graph for their AI search engine to train on.

Image credit: Google

Generative AI can shorten the consumer funnel by allowing searchers to convert immediately through the SERP and purchase an item directly from the SERP instead of having to navigate the site. This will mean that conversion data and source-to-conversion pages will be one of the key metrics during this evolution.

2. Links Are Not Going Away

Based on the demo and the responses from the early experimental rollout of Search Generative Experience, Google’s generative AI search engine is linking back to sources more frequently than initially expected. In fact, Google’s SGE demo gave a lot of real estate to the websites where the content was originally sourced from.

Though far from perfect, this is an opportunity for search engine optimizers to capitalize. We believe that content publishers can focus on optimizing their website for search by following Google’s guidelines of creating people-first content and E-E-A-T, optimizing on-page experiences for your audience, and monitoring or optimizing core web vitals.

It doesn’t matter whether you are new to search or simply want to stay ahead of the pack. You should refine all these key SEO areas to gain an edge over the competition.

3. Schema Markup Is Key to Helping AI Search Engines Understand Your Content

In a keynote address at Pubcon 2023, Fabrice Canel from Bing expressed that annotating great content with Schema Markup is how search engine optimization experts should prepare for generative AI search.

Thus, you should craft compelling, people-first content before implementing Schema Markup across all web pages. Schema Markup helps search engines understand the content on your site so it can provide users with useful results.

While many SEO teams already use Structured Data to achieve rich results, few implement proper semantic Schema Markup across their entire site. To help generative AI search engines truly understand and contextualize your content, you need to ensure your Schema Markup is connected to other entities on your site and other external authoritative sources.

Implementing connected Schema Markup can help you develop your knowledge graph that generative AI search engines can then utilize to infer new knowledge.

At Schema App, we are a semantic technology company. Since we started doing Schema Markup at scale in 2016, we’ve focused on implementing proper, connected Schema Markup across our customers’ sites to help search engines fully understand and contextualize their content.

If you are looking to optimize your website for AI search using Schema Markup, get in touch with our team for more information.

4. Focus on Content Quality

Over the previous year, Google launched a helpful content system intended to ensure that content is “people-first” instead of “search-engine first.” This emphasis on content made by people, for people, demonstrates Google’s commitment to providing users with relevant results that address their pain points. These changes are aligned with the type of content that Google SGE and the new Bing experience are highlighting.

Generative AI is still in its early stages and the accuracy of their answers is still questionable. In light of this, there is an opportunity for content publishers to create high-quality, trustworthy content for Google’s generative AI search engine to train on.

You should also ensure that your content is created by human writers and that each piece of copy addresses specific topics relevant to your audience.

SEO Is Changing

The bottom line is that the SEO landscape is evolving quickly. Google’s Search Generative Experience is still in its experimental phase and we don’t know its full impact on SEO or the SERP.

While it is unclear what these changes will mean for your SEO strategy, now is the time to start preparing for this change. In a world where many circumstances are out of your control, you should focus on the factors that you can manage – such as the quality of the Schema Markup on your website.

Schema Markup is one of the SEO tactics you can implement immediately to prepare for AI Search and Schema App can help your business implement semantic Schema Markup using our end-to-end solution. Get in touch with our team to learn more about how we can help you prepare for generative AI search.

The post Is Google’s Generative AI Search an Opportunity or Threat for SEOs? appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

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

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

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

Video Rich Result Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAQ Rich Results Fluctuations

Our relationship with FAQ rich results is tumultuous at best.

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

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

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

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

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 29, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Updates: Generative AI on Search

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

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

Image: Google

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

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

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

These topics were also discussed at length during the keynote presentations at Pubcon Austin 2023. Our CEO, Martha van Berkel was there to hear it and left Pubcon with an insight or two on the future of Schema Markup and AI-powered search.

The relationship between Schema Markup & AI 

This past week, Martha presented at Pubcon Austin 2023 on the Top Ways to Use Schema Markup. During the presentation, she discussed how Schema Markup relates to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the importance of connected Schema Markup in an era of AI-powered search.

Connected Schema Markup helps build your Knowledge Graph

When you implement connected Schema Markup across your site, you are essentially building a knowledge graph.

“A knowledge graph is defined as a collection of relationships between things  defined using a standardized vocabulary, from which new knowledge can be gained through inferencing.”

Schema.org is the standard vocabulary used by search engines to understand the content on a page and when you use it to define relationships between entities on a website you are creating a knowledge graph for that organization. In fact, when you look closely at Schema.org, you can see how it was build with creating knowledge graphs in mind.

When you look at the Schema.org vocabulary definitions, you’ll often see many properties expecting the value of the property to be another Type instead of a text or URL value.

Using Physician as an example, the Expected Type for the hospitalAffliation property is another schema.org Type called Hospital. By embedding the Hospital Type under the hospitalAffliation property, you are defining the relationship between the Physician and the Hospital that they are affiliated with.

This example showcases how the Schema.org vocabulary defines relationships between things on your website. When you connect and define these relationships using Schema Markup, you are building your knowledge graph.

At Schema App, we know the importance of creating connected Schema Markup and building a reusable knowledge graph. Our enterprise solution utilizes semantic technology that creates and stores your Schema Markup and web content in a knowledge graph.

But what do knowledge graphs have to do with AI and Machine Learning? Why is it important for organizations to develop their knowledge graph using Schema Markup?

We asked ChatGPT why knowledge graphs are important and here’s what it had to say.

“Knowledge graphs are a powerful tool for representing and organizing information in a structured way.

Here are three reasons why knowledge graphs are important:

1. Integration and Interoperability: Knowledge graphs allow for the integration of heterogeneous data from different sources, formats, and languages. This enables organizations to gain a holistic view of their data, making it easier to identify patterns and insights that might not be visible when data is siloed. Knowledge graphs also enable interoperability between different systems, making it easier to share and reuse data across different applications.
2. Semantic Search and Analysis: Knowledge graphs use semantic relationships to represent information, making it easier to perform advanced search and analysis tasks. For example, knowledge graphs can be used to perform complex queries that take into account the relationships between different entities, such as “find all the people who have worked at companies in the same industry as Microsoft.” This can help organizations identify patterns and insights that would be difficult to discover using traditional search and analysis methods.
3. Machine Learning and AI: Knowledge graphs are a foundational technology for machine learning and AI. By representing information in a structured and standardized way, knowledge graphs make it easier for algorithms to extract insights and make predictions. For example, knowledge graphs can be used to train natural language processing models (NLPs), or to build recommendation engines that suggest products or content based on a user’s preferences and behaviours.”

(Source: ChatGPT, Open Ai)

Search engines leverage your Schema Markup and knowledge graph as data sources to train their machines and infer new knowledge. By developing your organization’s knowledge graph, you can prime your organization’s web data to be ‘AI-ready’.

Earlier this year, Ryan Levering, Google’s champion for structured data, said the following with regard to what Google wants from Schema Markup.

Also, over time richer/correct semantics will favour more connected graphs.
– Ryan Levering, Google (Source: Mastodon)

Even though Google has yet to release any official documentation around connected Schema Markup, Levering’s comment indicates its growing importance in the world of search.

Our sentiments on connected Schema Markup were also echoed by Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager for Bing, at his keynote presentation in Pubcon Austin 2023.

SEO recommendations for Bing AI Search

During his keynote presentation, Canel offered valuable tips and insights on optimizing for Bing’s new AI search engine. Even though AI search is in its infancy days, Canel shared that one of the ways SEOs can prepare for this new AI-enabled search is by writing great content and annotating with Schema Markup. 

In a later slide, he further elaborated on what they mean by great content and Schema Markup. They specifically mentioned using ‘Semantic markup’ to convey information about the pages. 

Semantic markup is also known as connected Schema Markup, where you define the relationships between the content on your pages and other definitions on the web using the properties defined in Schema.org.

This goes to show that connected Schema Markup is important for AI search engines and SEOs need to invest in it. It is also why our team at Schema App constantly emphasizes it when building a Schema Markup strategy for our customers.

How AI will transform the search experience

During his keynote presentation, Canel also shared about the various types of search queries and how the search engine results will vary to best satisfy the user’s query.

Our takeaway from it is that the new Bing Chatbot experience will suit some queries, while others other queries will be better answered with a table or a version of today’s search results.

For example, for queries such as ‘Tell me all the hotels in the Dominican that have waterslides’, users might be satisfied with a chatbot summary answer and even accept a margin of error.

On the other hand, for queries such as ‘What is the recovery time from a hip surgery”, users might want to read different articles on the subject and personally determine who the subject matter expert is before accepting the answer.

Over time it will be interesting to see how these different experiences and types of searches evolve with this new AI chat technology.

Despite the recent buzz, AI and machine learning are not new to search. Gary Ilyes from Google kicked off Pubcon with his keynote presentation on how AI dates back to the bronze age, how these concepts are already deeply entrenched in how we conduct business, and how they will continue to evolve.

We really enjoyed seeing how existing industries today are using machine learning and AI through the tools and process automation that are already adopted.

However, Ilyes did not comment on Bard or whether Google would be releasing a Chatbot in response to the New Bing so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Schema App & AI

At Schema App, we also utilize AI and machine learning in our tools. We use it for our Linked Entity Recognition feature and our Schema Performance Analytics tool.

Because of our passion for semantic technology, your data is stored in a knowledge graph when you create your Schema Markup with Schema App. We then layer on additional AI capabilities to help you add more meaning to your content.

For example, Schema App’s Linked Entity Recognition, allows our technology to create connected Schema Markup using Natural Language Processing to connect your content to known entities in Google’s Knowledge Graph and Wikidata. This provides context to the content, connecting content using the sameAs link, or more flexibly with mentions, about, category, etc.

An upcoming release will also include a Medical BERT conceptual model that Healthcare companies can use to advertise all their specialties. We’re also working on a feature for Schema Performance Analytics to generate AI insights from the performance data, and will be releasing it in Beta shortly.

Start preparing for an AI-powered search experience

AI and machine learning are here to stay and will continue to gain prominence in the search experience. Thankfully, the evolution within search will not happen overnight. It will likely evolve over the next few years.

However, organizations need to ready themselves for what’s to come. As you adopt, deploy and manage your Schema Markup to achieve a rich result, you also want to ensure that you’re doing it semantically to build a connected knowledge graph. That way, you can lay the foundations to be relevant for search engines and perform well in this new search experience.

As a semantic technology company, Schema App is excited to provide you with the expertise and tools to do this in a scaleable, manageable way with measurable results. If you need help creating connected Schema Markup, get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you prepare for this new search experience.

The post The Future of Search: AI, Machine Learning, and Schema Markup appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Rich Result Changes in October 2022

Product, Reviews and Video are steady

After a turbulent last few months, we are happy to report that we are seeing growth in Product rich results, and steady increases in clicks on Review Snippets and Video rich results. It is definitely a relief to see some calming results after the stormy summer.

We are also happy to start to be able to share some industry data. In 2022, we’ve seen the most rich results being awarded to our Enterprise customers in the area of Video, Product and FAQ.

Data source: Schema App – Schema Performance Analytics

FAQ Rich Results Continue to Change

FAQ is one of the rich results that has had significant fluctuations this year. We continued to see an impact on the FAQ rich results, which is congruent with other reports in the industry.

52.17% of our customers saw a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the October however, impressions are increasing. The decrease in clicks is subtle, but not growing with impressions. We are seeing this across industries and are monitoring it closely to be able to attribute it to a specific strategy or content approach.

Data source: Schema App – Schema Performance Analytics

Other SEOs have observed this similar trend occurring in October but across a wider time frame. Is this the result of the October 2022 Spam update? The rollout was completed on October 21st, so the timing is off.

Is Google showing fewer FAQ rich results and maybe other results recently? https://t.co/F1idQOaN6J via @randymajors and @RankRanger pic.twitter.com/KSlXbV08wb

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 25, 2022

Barry for the win, with additional insight that another algorithm change had occurred on October 28th. This aligns more with the data we are seeing. There are additional changes going on with Google’s algorithm AFTER the spam update, and these changes are specifically impacting FAQ clicks.

Google search ranking algorithm update or adjustment on October 28th (unconfirmed) https://t.co/NfejjTKS4Y pic.twitter.com/mGmFa6olwK

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 1, 2022

@rustybrick It seems Google drastically reduced showing FAQ Rich Results in SER across the board about the same time as the Oct 19 spam rollout. Checked several queries on both desktop and mobile and only saw 1 site with a few FAQs appear. Any confirmation of this? Policy change?

— Randy Majors (@randymajors) October 24, 2022

Source: Marie Haynes Report

The good news is that the FAQ rich result has grown overall in 2022, and the early days of November are showing hopeful results. We’ll be monitoring performance week-over-week to see if there is any correlation with content or industry.

Data source: Schema App – Schema Performance Analytics

Google Updates in October 2022

Schema.org V15 Released with more properties for Products

Schema.org released another version with a focus on adding new properties in pending for products. One of the new properties to highlight is the positiveNotes and negativeNotes for use on Product. This property allows users to showcase the pros and cons of a product, and was created in support of a new structured data feature announced in August for Product Reviews.

Good news! Schema App already supports Schema.org v15 if you want to try out the new pros and cons new search feature.

Provide a site name on Google by adding WebSite Structured Data

When Google lists a page on the search engine results page, the result shows the name of the site that the page is from – also known as the site name.

Previously, Google would automatically generate a site name by using sources such as

• Content in <title> elements
• Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
• Og:site_name

This October, Google announced that you can indicate your preferred site name by adding WebSite Structured Data. The site names are currently supported at a domain level, and not at the subdomain or subdirectory level.  

These changes indicate Google’s increased use of Structured Data as a key source of information. 

New Image Structured Data Properties

Google has added 3 new Structured Data properties – creditText, creator and copyrightNotice – that can be used with the ImageObject type to provide support for image credits, copyright and creator information. 

“Previously, you could only provide image credit information with IPTC photo metadata.”

By adding these Structured Data properties, web publishers can simplify the way they add creator data and add it in a scalable way across their sites. 

According to Schema.org, this is what each property is for:  

• creditText: Text that can be used to credit person(s) and/or organization(s) associated with a published Creative Work.
• creator: The creator/author of this CreativeWork. This is the same as the Author property for CreativeWork.
• copyrightNotice: Text of a notice appropriate for describing the copyright aspects of this Creative Work, ideally indicating the owner of the copyright for the Work.”

Unlike the IPTC photo metadata, you will need to add Structured Data every time you use the photo on your site. 

What’s interesting about this new use of Structured Data is that it is being used beyond search. This information is helping Google understand the copyright of the image. Are more teams at Google using Structured Data beyond search features? Only time will tell. 

To do machine learning, Google needs to broaden its data sources. They now get data from their crawls, Merchant Center, user clicks, and Structured Data.

Measure ROI of Schema Markup using Schema Performance Analytics

One of the things we love about Schema Markup is that you can attribute clicks directly to this nerdy SEO strategy. To help our customers measure the impact, we’ve recently released our Schema Performance Analytics Page-Level Reporting Dashboard.

This new Page Level Report combines data from Google Search Console and the Schema App Highlighter and Editor, to provide users with more granular page-level insights on their Schema Markup performance. 

Users can also filter their data by groups of URLs to better understand how the Schema Markup is performing for different lines of business or departments. This allows our customers to better measure the ROI of Schema Markup on each business unit and the impact SEO has on their business outcomes. 

Read more about Schema Performance Analytics Page Level Report on our blog.

Conclusion

This last quarter, we have seen a record number of core algorithm changes from Google. 

We are seeing rich results – like FAQs – fluctuate, which further emphasizes the need for diversity in your Schema Markup portfolio so that you can not only weather these changes but also thrive in them. 

Want to hear more? Listen to Martha’s latest podcast on Voices of Search, on how you can manage your Schema Markup like a financial portfolio. 

The post October 2022 Rich Results Weather Report Update appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Two key takeaways:

• Search is changing – with Google making updates to the SERP, in Video, FAQ, and Product Rich results.
• Diversify your rich results and manage your Schema Markup to achieve optimal results in changing search landscape. 

Rich Result Changes in September 2022

FAQ Rich Result Changes

This past August, we reported seeing 42% of our customers experience a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results across mobile and desktop. 

This trend has continued into September as we continue to see 45.88% of our customers drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the first two weeks of the month and 43.53% of our customers have continued to see a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the second half of September. To date, we’re seeing this decline affect a wide range of industries. 

Healthcare is one of the industries that took a huge hit. 57% of our healthcare customers saw a further decrease in clicks and impressions this September. Google is no longer awarding the FAQ rich results for Physician pages, resulting in a decline in clicks for their FAQ rich results. However, many of these customers are still getting clicks from the FAQ rich results on their services and blog pages. 

We have yet to identify the cause of the decline for other industries but we do know that Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. FAQ rich results continue to perform, however, organizations should be reviewing their Schema Markup strategy to ensure they have a diversified portfolio of rich results.

This means reviewing the rich results your organization is achieving today and proactively looking for content on your site that is eligible for more types of rich results opportunities. Diversifying your rich results allows your website to keep performing despite Google’s changes and your team can quickly double down when a specific rich result is performing. 

Google preferring Youtube for Video Rich Results

We first observed a sharp decline in clicks and impressions for Video Rich Results in June, where 70% of our customers saw a decrease in the performance of their Video Rich Results on desktop devices. The Video Rich Results started to recover in August until this sudden drop again in September. 

In the first half of September, we saw 41.86% of our customers decline in clicks and a 53.49% decline in impressions for their Video Rich Results compared to the second half of August. 

In addition to the number of customers impacted, we also saw a big change in how Video rich results are showing up in the SERP. Google is preferring Youtube over other providers. 

Could this be a result of Google’s September core update or is it just Google continuing to refine the search experience? Stay tuned to find out. For now, we will continue to monitor the Video rich results every week to see how this trend progresses over time. 

Growth of Impressions for Recipe Rich Results

In August, 83% of our customers reported seeing the impressions for their Recipe rich results grow at an average of 3513% compared to July. 

This September, we are continuing to see an upward trend in the clicks and impressions for Recipe rich results with 60% of our customers seeing growth in impressions for their Recipe rich results. 

Google Updates in September 2022

More Product Search Features can be achieved with Product Schema Markup

On September 13, Google announced that merchants can now be eligible for merchant listing experiences simply by adding Product Schema Markup to their web pages, even if they do not have a Google Merchant Center account. 

This is awesome news! Now instead of just getting review ratings, price and availability, Product Schema Markup can help you achieve new experiences in search. With Google and Amazon battling for product search, we see this as Google’s move towards enabling more products to be shown on the SERP. 

Google currently has two broad categories of experiences:

1. Merchant listing experiences for web pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the site.
   
   In the past, these merchant listing experiences (Shopping Knowledge panel, Popular products rich result, shopping experiences in Google Images and Google lens) were only open to users with Google Merchant Center accounts and the product details shown in these rich results were supplied from the Google Merchant Center feed.
2. Product snippets for a broader set of web pages with product information (including pages that sell products, publish product reviews, and/or aggregate information from other sites).
   
   In the past, these product snippets were powered by schema.org Product Schema Markup. This is now no longer the case.

The Google Merchant Center feeds are no longer necessary for merchants to be eligible for these enhanced Product search features. Google has added more Product Schema properties (i.e. colours, size, material, pattern, audience, hasEnergyConsumptionDetails, etc.), which allows merchants to add more product details to their Schema Markup and achieve the rich results that drive traffic to their site. 

To help you monitor and manage your Product rich results, Google has introduced two new Search Console Reports. 

1. Merchant listing report
   This is a new report that identifies Schema Markup issues for free listing experiences in the search results. Merchants that sell products on their online should use this report.
2. Product snippets report
   This report replaces the previous Product report with adjustments related to the separation of the merchant listing report. The data from the previous Product report is still available within this report. The report identifies Schema Markup issues for product snippets in the search results. Sites that don’t sell products online but still publish pages with Product Schema Markup should use this report.

September Core and Product Review Update

This month, Google rolled out their September Core Update (the second broad core update of the year) and the Product Reviews Update. Both updates came after the Helpful Content Update finished rolling out on September 9, 2022. We have yet to correlate the impact of these updates with the fluctuations in the search results. However, we will continue to monitor and report on any fluctuations we’ve observed.

Google using Structured Data for Machine Learning

Marie Haynes and Alan Kent from Google released a podcast episode on Product Reviews this September. 

In the episode, Alan Kent said “They look at behaviour to decide if the review is helpful. The machine learning then looks at patterns to see if the review is helpful.” 

This wasn’t the first mention of machine learning from Google in the past year. 

In the podcast, “Structured Data what’s it all about” on April 7, 2022, Ryan Levering from Google said, “Most of our features over time migrate to that approach where we ingest it. Maybe we start with one approach where we’re just using ML. And then we eventually add markups so people have control. Or it’s the opposite way around. And we start– we bootstrap with markup in an eco-system approach where people are giving us data. And then we enhance coverage of the feature by adding ML long run.” (Ryan Levering @ 8:34)

To do machine learning, Google needs to broaden its data sources. They now get data from their crawls, Merchant Center, user clicks, and Structured Data.

Conclusion

Google is making a lot of updates to the algorithm and evolving how they are using machine learning to delight the user in their search experience. As a result of these changes, SEOs need to diversify their rich result portfolio, stay agile and be ready to evolve their content and Schema Markup to capitalize on the changes.

Schema Markup (aka Structured Data) helps search engines understand your content because you’re translating it into machine language. With Google relying more on machine learning, Schema Markup will increasingly be of greater importance for sites to communicate with Google’s machines and maintain their visibility on the SERP.

If you haven’t already implemented Schema Markup as part of your SEO strategy, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with us today to learn how Schema App can help your organization stand out in search through Schema Markup.

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