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

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

What does our high-touch support service entail? 

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

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

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

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

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

Initial strategy and scope implementation

1. Creating your Schema Markup Strategy

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

Identifying desired outcomes

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

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

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

Scoping website for appropriate Schema.org types and properties

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

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

2. Authoring your markup using our tools

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

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

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

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

3. Deployment

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

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

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

Ongoing Maintenance

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

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

1. Regular sync ups

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

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

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

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

2. Optimize your Schema Markup

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

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

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

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

3. Perform Quarterly Business Reporting

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

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

Stay Agile with Schema App’s High Touch Support Service

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

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

With our high-touch support service, you get:

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

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

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

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

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.

Example of a Product rich result.

Schema Markup has been around since 2011 and is now considered a must-do SEO strategy. As search engines shift to become more semantic and competition heats up, Schema Markup provides organizations with a measurable way to stay relevant on the SERP and differentiate themselves from other competitors in the market.

However, implementing a semantic Schema Markup strategy is often challenging and costly. Some organizations lack the expertise and internal resources to manage their markup. Other organizations have complicated web architectures or multiple domains, adding further complexity to the implementation process.

Fortunately, you can overcome the challenges of managing Schema Markup by partnering with Schema App. Our team provides an end-to-end scalable Schema Markup solution to help enterprise SEO teams execute their Schema Markup strategy with scale and agility.

Not sure if Schema App’s end-to-end Schema Markup solution is right for your organization? Here are five distinct benefits of our Schema Markup solution:

Benefit 1: Ability to Manage Schema Markup at Scale

Managing your Schema Markup on a page-by-page basis is incredibly complicated and time-consuming. This approach is not nearly scalable enough to facilitate implementation across a large-scale site.

For instance, let’s say that you wanted to add Review Schema Markup to all of your company’s location pages. To accomplish this, you would have to write the Schema Markup for each location page, and then add it to the individual pages manually. If you change the content on your page, you’ll also need to go back and update the Schema Markup to avoid Schema Drift.

As a Schema App customer, you would gain access to our Schema App platform, including our Highlighter. The Schema App Highlighter allows users to create semantic Schema Markup templates for pages with similar layouts (i.e. blogs, location pages, etc.) and deploy Schema Markup to those pages in a scalable manner.

When you first become a Schema App customer, you will be assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) who will help you customize your Schema Markup strategy and create your templates on the Highlighter accordingly.

After setting up the templates, the Highlighter will dynamically generate and deploy Schema Markup based on the content on your page. Your team can make content updates to the page without manually updating the markup.

When you create a new blog post, for example, the Highlighter will automatically deploy the appropriate Schema Markup to the page if it fits the template. This avoids the need for teams to take the time to add Schema Markup to these new pages each time.

Adding to this scalability, once your entities have been identified using Schema Markup, our Omni Linked Entity Recognition (LER) can link the known entities on your page to external authoritative knowledge bases.

Benefit 2: Develop a Reusable Knowledge Graph to Future-Proof for AI

Many organizations implement Schema Markup to help their pages stand out on search through rich results. They use plugins to automatically add Schema Markup that offers easy implementation. However, plugins restrict Schema Markup to a surface-level approach without establishing connections among entities on the site or linking them to external knowledge bases. This impedes the creation of a robust knowledge graph.

In doing so, they miss out on the semantic value of implementing Schema Markup. The main purpose of doing Schema Markup is to help search engines understand and contextualize the content on your site so that they can provide more relevant results to searchers.

Knowledge graphs are important for understanding the relationship between your entities and disambiguating what your content is about.

At Schema App, we go beyond the mere generation of Schema Markup; we leverage our semantic technologies to connect the entities on your site using Schema Markup and help you develop a reusable content knowledge graph. This involves not only defining entities but also establishing connections on and off the site, using features such as Omni LER.

The outcome is a comprehensive RDF knowledge graph that informs search engines about your business. This graph consolidates all your Schema Markup into a single, accessible marketing data layer.

On top of informing search engines, you can go on to re-use this knowledge graph to ground your Language Model Models (LLMs) with factual information about your business in a structured manner. This puts you in control of how your brand content is being interpreted by these intelligent systems.

Benefits of a Content Knowledge Graph

Implementing semantic Schema Markup and entity linking helps build your content knowledge graph, which:

1. Enhances search engines’ understanding of your entity relationships, optimizing content relevance and query accuracy in the SERP.
2. Facilitates effective matching of pages with user queries and driving higher qualified traffic and click-through rates.
3. Positions your content to be AI-search ready, improving search engines’ understanding and ensuring a refined user experience as AI becomes integral to delivering relevant answers.

Benefit 3: Access to Schema Markup Experts

Schema Markup is one of the most technical strategies in SEO. On top of learning the Schema.org vocabulary, one would also need to be able to implement the code and manage the markup on an ongoing basis to succeed.

So, while most SEO teams undoubtedly understand the benefits of implementing Schema Markup, they are unlikely to have the time or expertise to do it well.

It’s essential to view Schema Markup as more than a one-off SEO task; it’s an ongoing business strategy shaping your brand’s search presence.

Therefore, it’s crucial to have a dedicated, knowledgeable resource like Schema App managing your Schema Markup strategy on an ongoing basis and ensuring that it aligns with your business objectives.

You will partner with a team of experts and a dedicated CSM, ensuring effective Schema Markup management from strategy to results.

To start, your CSM will create a customized Schema Markup strategy to fit your organization’s desired outcomes. Next, they will bring your strategy to life by setting up, authoring, and deploying your Schema Markup on the Schema App platform.

As an extension of your SEO team, your CSM will also monitor your Schema Markup strategy regularly and provide content recommendations and improvements to it during your monthly High Touch Support hour. This ensures that you maximize your return from our solution.

Here’s what our customer, Laura Losito from Sonova, has to say about their Customer Success Manager.

Our customer success manager is very responsive and helpful whenever we find errors in Google Search Console or see a decline in certain metrics. She’s always able to assist and willing to investigate the issue and provide explanations or solutions.

Read the Sonova Audiological Care Business case study to learn about the value and services provided by a Schema App CSM.

Benefit 4: Reduce Dependency on IT and Increased Agility

One of the primary reasons enterprises struggle to implement an effective Schema Markup strategy is the limited bandwidth of their IT team.

To deploy and update the markup, SEO teams often require support from IT. If the IT team has other competing priorities, they often delay the implementation and management of Schema Markup.

With our Schema App platform and Customer Success team, your SEO team can operate with more agility. After the initial integration process, your SEO team can rely on their Schema App Customer Success Manager to make any updates to the markup using our Editor or Highlighter tool.

They’ll no longer require the assistance of the IT team to implement and manage their Schema Markup strategy.

Ultimately, that will prevent markup implementation delays and help your SEO staff manage your new strategy more effectively.

Benefit 5: Measurable ROI

According to a 2021 survey, 84% of marketing professionals feel pressured to demonstrate their ROI to justify marketing spending. While paid digital advertising offers an easy-to-measure ROI, the results are often lackluster.

Although measuring the ROI of SEO is widely considered quite difficult, many view SEO as one of the most effective marketing tactics.

Schema Markup offers a perfect balance between the two, as you can clearly measure the impact of it on your business objectives and achieve an exceptional ROI.

When you incorporate Schema Markup on your site, you will start achieving rich results on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Results of rich results can be measured through Google Search Console as well as our Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) platform. On SPA, you can view detailed reports about the impressions, clicks and click-through rates (CTR) you generate from those rich results and more.

One of the reports in Schema Performance Analytics shows the CTR for a URL or group of URLs when it achieves a rich result and when it does not achieve a rich result. Most often, URLs with rich results yield a higher click-through rate and contribute to higher conversion.

By using these ROI measurement methods, Schema App clients can see a positive return on their work with Schema App.

The Value of Schema Markup Beyond Rich Results

It’s important to note, however, that the value of Schema Markup goes beyond rich results. Your content should be tailored to your audience’s needs and not produced solely for the purpose of achieving a rich result. Instead of only focusing on rich result eligibility in your Schema Markup strategy, focus on the semantic value of implementing Schema Markup and identifying and connecting your entities within a knowledge graph. This is where you will see the true return on investment.

Read our customer stories to see how we’ve helped clients across different industries gain measurable results from implementing Schema App.

Schema App: The Ideal Solution for Schema Markup Management

Our Schema Markup solution can help you accelerate your Schema Markup, provide measurable results, and yield a strong ROI. Our customers, like SAP, CAPREIT, Avid Technology, and Baptist Health have all seen significant growth in organic traffic through our Schema App solution.

Not only have they been able to get measurable results, but they have also increased their agility as search evolves and used our expertise to execute their Schema Markup strategy with confidence.

If you need help implementing a semantic Schema Markup strategy at scale, we can help. Get in touch with us today.

The post 5 Benefits of Hiring Schema App to Manage Your Schema Markup appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

At Schema App, our Customer Success Team is constantly navigating and pivoting through these changes to help our customers maintain and grow their visibility in search. As such, we’ve gathered some key insights from our team on their learnings from 2022 and what they expect to see for Schema Markup in 2023.

Insight #1. Google is investing a lot in Structured Data

In 2020, Google invested heavily in COVID-related Structured Data changes. In 2021, things were quieter and we saw fewer activities.

This year, Google introduced significant updates to their Structured Data documentation and 2023 is likely to maintain the same momentum.

Machine learning complements Structured Data

In April 2022, Google released an episode on their Search off the Record Podcast called “Structured Data: What’s it all about?”.

In the episode, Ryan Levering shared how Google uses Structured Data to complement their machine-learning work. Structured Data is currently provided by users to help Google understand the content on a page and improve the accuracy of its search results. Levering has emphasized that “it’s always good to empower people who are giving you data, to have control over that.” Rather than rendering Structured Data obsolete, machine learning will fill the information gaps or “enhance coverage of the feature” on Google search.

According to Levering, Google will also “…continue to flesh out the Structured Data usage in terms of adding more features and looking into more ways [they] can use it in cooler things that are not just visual treatments but actually help with more understanding on the page”. This is reflected in the changes we saw in 2022 and foreshadows what is to come in the new year.

Notable changes from Google in 2022

Changes in Video rich results

In June 2022, we observed a decrease in clicks and impressions for Video Rich Results on desktop. This trend was also noticed by other SEOs. At the same time, we noticed a change in how the Video Rich Results were being presented on the SERPs.

Data provided by Schema App / Schema Performance Analytics

The Video Rich Results showing up on the ‘All’ search results page only featured Youtube videos. Upon clicking on these results, users would be directed to the video’s Youtube page rather than the site where the video was embedded. Learn more about the changes in Video rich results here.

Volatility in FAQ rich results

In April 2022, 65% of our clients experienced a drop in clicks on their FAQ rich results and saw their results recover again in May. This happened again in August 2022, only for the results to recover again in late October.

Data provided by Schema App / Schema Performance Analytics

Despite the disruptiveness of these fluctuations, you should not “abandon certain rich result targeting should performance start to drop”, says Kevin Veilleux, a Customer Success Manager at Schema App.

“As we saw with Videos and FAQ, there’s value in staying the course”.

Major developments in Product search results

This past year, Google also made waves in Product search. Google is enabling more Products to be shown on the SERP, which comes as no surprise as their competition with Amazon heats up in the eCommerce space.

Expanding eligibility for Merchant Listing Experiences with Product Structured Data

In September 2022, Google announced that businesses can now be eligible for Merchant Listing Experiences by adding Product Structured Data to their web pages. At the same time, they added more recommended Product Structured Data properties such as colours, size, and material for merchant listings.

New Merchant Listings report on Google Search Console

On top of expanding the eligibility for Merchant Listing Experiences with Product Structured Data, Google also introduced a new Merchant Listing Report on GSC. This new report will help merchants identify Structured Data errors, warnings and valid pages for free listing experiences in search.

New Pros and Cons enhancement for editorial Product review pages

Product reviews are a helpful resource in the buyer journey and Google added a new ‘Pros and Cons’ enhancement to the product review snippets. Businesses can add Pros and Cons Structured Data on their pages with product reviews to be eligible for this new enhancement.

2022 was a busy year for Structured Data and we see this as a signal of its growing importance in Google’s search environment. What does this mean for SEO teams in 2023? It means, it’s time for SEO teams to start prioritizing Structured Data as part of their SEO strategy.

Insight #2. Invest in your SEO Structured Data strategy as soon as possible to stay ahead of the competition

According to research by the HTTP Archive, the usage of Structured Data has increased in 2022, in comparison to 2021. Of the websites they surveyed, they found that the use of JSON-LD on homepages increased from 34% in 2021 to 37% in 2022 on mobile devices. This upward trend of Structured Data usage reflects the growing popularity of Structured Data as an SEO strategy, and we predict this trend to continue in 2023.

The HTTP Archive’s research also showed that WebSite, Organization and Local Business were three of the most used Schema.org types in 2022. Even though more sites are implementing Structured Data, many of them are implementing it on a basic level.Image by HTTP Archive

Google has over 32 rich result opportunities and there are many other types of Structured Data that have yet to be utilized en masse. There is no better time to invest in a more complex Structured Data strategy to stay ahead of this growing trend.

At Schema App, we’ve seen other Schema.org types and their Rich Results like FAQPage, Product, and Reviews performing well for our customers.

You can also opt for other eye-catching interactive rich results like Aggregate Ratings, HowTo and Video. These untapped opportunities could help your organization stand out in search against your competitors and drive click-through rates and conversions on your site. 

How to get started with a Schema Markup strategy

Before you start, you have to set a goal for what you want to achieve and the metrics you want to move. If you want to drive clicks, impressions or CTR for pages that are essential to your business, Schema Markup can help.

1. Identify the key pages on your site that you want to target with rich results. (i.e. your location pages, product pages, physician pages, etc.) You might want to start by testing out a few pages for a specific rich result.
2. Check if the content on your page fulfills Google’s required Structured Data properties for the targeted rich result. If it does not, review Google’s required Structured Data properties and add the required content to make your page eligible for the targeted rich result.
3. Once you have the required content on your page, apply Schema Markup to make your page eligible for the targeted rich result. You can add Schema Markup to individual unique pages using our Editor tool, or at a larger scale using our Highlighter tool.
4. After applying the Schema Markup to your page, test your results to ensure the markup is eligible using Google’s Rich Results test tool.
5. To measure the results, use Google Search Console or Schema App’s Schema Performance Analytics tool to compare the performance of your optimized pages to the rest of your site, or compare the performance of the optimized pages before and after the implementation of Schema Markup to see how it has contributed to your desired outcome.

Learn how to develop a Schema Markup strategy for your website here.

Insight #3. Diversify your Schema Markup strategy

As we saw in 2022, there can be a lot of volatility around Google’s rich results. In June, we saw Video rich results on desktop disappear for many of our customers, causing a change in site traffic. In August, we saw FAQ rich results settling to new levels following the Helpful Content Update.

We expect Google to continue experimenting/changing/introducing new things in 2023, which necessitates the need for more diverse content for rich result targeting,” says Veilleux.

Organizations that have more diversity in their rich results are less impacted when an algorithm change targets a specific type of rich result. Here’s how you can start diversifying your Schema Markup strategy.

1. Monitor your rich results on Google Search Console

To start, you need to know which rich results you are currently achieving. Most of this information is available on Google Search Console, or through Schema Performance Analytics for Schema App enterprise customers.

Once you know which rich results you are currently achieving, explore Google’s search gallery to see other rich results your content could be eligible for.

2. Maintain thorough markup

Google’s required and recommended Structured Data properties only make up a small percentage of the properties available for Schema.org types.

At Schema App, one of our best practices is to markup page content with all the relevant properties available through Schema.org, not just what Google has listed as required or recommended. By ensuring markup is as descriptive as possible, Schema App supports semantic SEO beyond attaining rich result eligibility.

This year, when authoring the Schema Markup for our customer’s Product pages, we marked up their images even though it wasn’t a required property for Product rich results. Shortly after, Google expanded the eligibility for Merchant Listing Experiences with Product Structured Data and image was a required property for it. As a result, our customer was instantly eligible for Merchant Listing rich results.

By marking up as many properties as you can, you are optimizing all eligible content on your page to maximize your opportunities for rich results both now and in the future.

Insight #4. Content and Structured Data go hand in hand

SEO is a team sport and results happen when you work together. Schema Markup strategy can be challenging for SEO teams when they’re siloed off from content and unable to make additions or updates.

For your Schema Markup strategy to succeed, your content needs to:

1. Match the intent of search queries, and
2. Align with Google’s required and recommended Structured Data properties for your targeted type.

Content must match the intent of the searcher

The quality of your content is a key factor to a successful Schema Markup strategy. With Google’s recent Helpful Content Update, we see Google drilling down into the quality of the content. If your content does not meet the needs of the searcher, Google will not award you with a rich result.

We saw this firsthand after Google’s rolled out the Helpful Content Update in August. After the update, content previously receiving FAQ rich results lost the feature because the “questions” were actually statements or headings that did not match user queries.

Align your content with the Structured Data requirements 

Content is at the core of your Schema Markup strategy. Letting your content team know what content needs to be on a page for your SEO team to mark up is the best way to ensure alignment. That way, every piece of content produced is more likely to drive clicks and conversions.

How to align content with Structured Data

1. Make sure your content team knows Google’s content requirements for rich result eligibility

If your content team is looking to drive more traffic to Blog posts, make sure they know what Google’s required and recommended properties are. They should also keep these required and recommended properties in mind when creating other types of new content on an ongoing basis.

2. Use Google’s rich result documentation as a guideline for what constitutes “high-quality content”.

“The required and recommended properties are a “cheat guide” for what might be important and relevant to end users AND Google’s algorithm,” says Ruby Ross, Customer Success Manager at Schema App.

When developing new content, looking at Google’s required and recommended properties can give you a good idea of what Google has decided is important for users to know, and align your content with that.

Insight #5. Experiment with Structured Data

Google is constantly experimenting and updating its algorithms to best meet the searcher’s needs. This year, we saw many updates to the SERP and Google’s Structured Data documentation. These changes reaffirm that you shouldn’t take a set-in-and-forget-it approach to Structured Data on your site (read our article on schema drift). You have to be ready to deploy the necessary changes when Google makes an update.

Our Highlighter tool’s dynamic deployment enables our customers to easily apply markup changes at scale within minutes to keep up with Google’s changes. It also means you can easily experiment with new types of Schema Markup and properties at scale.

Experimenting with new types of rich results can help your organization diversify and proactively adapt to Google’s changes. At Schema App, our Customer Success Team runs experiments with our customers every quarter. The experiments vary based on our customers’ desired outcomes and strategies.

Examples of the experiments include:

• Experimenting with different rich results on the same page set to see which rich result performs better
• Experimenting with adding rich result-eligible content to drive traffic to high-priority pages (i.e. FAQs for BlogPosts)
• Experimenting with different properties for a single rich result (e.g. Pros and Cons, or lowPrice vs. highPrice for Product)

These experiments help our customers uncover opportunities, diversify their rich results, and optimize their Schema Markup strategy to maximize their results.

Insight #6. Schema Markup is a safe bet during a recession

The recession is looming over many marketing teams as we wade through tighter cash flows and smaller budgets for the new year. However, maintaining market share and keeping up with the competition is more important than ever.

Measurable ROI

In times like these, marketing teams should invest in strategies that have a measurable return on investment. Schema Markup is one of them.

When you add Schema Markup to your pages and achieve rich results, you’ll want to see the clicks and impressions that you’ve achieved specifically from the URLs that are getting these rich results.

We created the Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) tool with this in mind. With the SPA Page Level Report, users can see the performance of URLs with Schema Markup and calculate if the increase in traffic drives more revenue for their business.

As Schema Markup becomes a growing trend, there has never been a better time to experiment and invest in this strategy. You can justify the investment by starting small and measuring its impact on your business results.

Point of Differentiation

Implementing a Schema Markup strategy for your site also serves as a point of differentiation if you operate in a competitive industry.

Based on an analysis across our entire customer set, pages with markup from Schema App have a 40% higher click-through rate than pages without. The click-through rate for pages achieving rich results is notably higher than those without. In 2022, we also saw the click-through rate for pages with FAQ, Videos, and Q&A rich results performing exceptionally well.

If your competitors aren’t using Schema Markup, your brand and pages can stand out on the SERP and get more traffic onto your site. Investing and experimenting with Structured Data at a time when teams are more risk-averse can help your organization gain greater visibility on the SERP and beat the competition.

Conclusion

Needless to say, our Schema App team has learned a lot from 2022. As we enter 2023 with uncertain economic conditions, understanding what is working, what is delivering value and what you can scale is vital.

Schema Markup is a scalable SEO strategy that delivers measurable results and returns. If you haven’t invested in Schema Markup, 2023 is a good time to start. If you have budgetary constraints, you can always start small and expand when you see results. Your SEO and content teams should also be working cross-functionally to ensure every piece of content you invest in aligns with the Structured Data best practices to maximize clicks.

If you are looking to start or take your Schema Markup strategy to the next level, we can help! Get in touch with our team today to learn more about our scalable end-to-end Schema Markup solution.

The post Schema Markup SEO in 2023: What To Expect appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Schema Markup (aka Structured Data) can help your websites stand out in search and drive traffic to your site. However, calculating the return on investment on your Schema Markup efforts can be tough – even more so when you’re trying to measure value by department, geography location, or line of business.

To solve this challenge, we’re excited to announce Page-Level Report – a new reporting dashboard on Schema App’s Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) platform.

What is the SPA Page Level Report?

The new SPA Page Level Report combines data from Google Search Console and Schema App’s Highlighter and Editor. This allows users to customize their reporting and gain more granular, page-level insights on their Schema Markup strategy and performance.

Users can see the performance metrics (clicks, impressions, click-through rate) by URLs, date, and query, as well as the performance of a specific URL and the corresponding query in a single table.

What insights can I gain from the SPA Page Level Report?

Stakeholder Reporting

With the Page Level Report, users can filter their data by groups of pages/URLs using the URL Match and URL Wildcard filters. This feature enables users to view their performance based on certain groups of URLs, departments or lines of business.

They can then report to each business unit on their Schema Markup share, allowing each area of the business to better measure the ROI of Schema Markup on their business unit and the impact SEO has on their business results.

Identify Opportunities for Content Improvement

With the Page Level Report, users can get insights on their top-performing keywords, rich results, and Schema App template. These insights can help users identify areas in their Schema Markup strategy that are working / not working and implement these learnings across their sites.

URLs without Schema Markup – Users can view the URLs that do not currently have any Schema Markup on the page and look at expanding their Schema coverage to those pages to be eligible for more types of rich results.

Filter by search appearances – Users can also see their mix of rich results. This information can help users identify opportunities to diversify their rich results and inform their content strategy moving forward.

Compare Performance over Different Time Periods

The Time Periods Comparison tab in Page Level Report will allow users to compare the performance of specific URLs over two time periods. Users can see trends or match the changes with their Schema Markup efforts to gain insights into the effectiveness of their strategy.

Downloads for Further Analysis

Unlike Google Search Console, Schema Performance Analytics enables users to export more than 1000 lines of data for further analysis. They can download an entire dashboard to PDF or download specific widgets to Excel. This dashboard can then be shared with different stakeholders and used for further analysis. 

Learn more about the 6 main reporting tabs in the Page Level Report dashboard here. 

Difference between Schema Performance Analytics and Google Search Console

Schema Performance Analytics provides users with data from Google Search Console, with the added ability to view more data. Users can also drill down further into data dimensions such as their Schema App template and branded keywords that are not available on GSC.

Here are some key differences between SPA and GSC.

Who can get access to SPA Page Level Report?

Schema Performance Analytics is available to all Schema App Enterprise Customers. The analytics reporting tool will help your SEO team better visualize the performance of their Schema Markup efforts and gain insights to inform their content strategy and continue to stand out in search. 

If you are currently a Schema App Enterprise Customer, please contact your Customer Success Manager to set up SPA. 

If you’re not currently a Schema App customer, we’d love to help you leverage Schema Markup to stand out in search. Get in touch with us today to learn more!

The post Introducing Schema Performance Analytics Page Level Report appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

1. Lean into Semantic Search

Back in 2008, SEOs were more focused on keyword stuffing and adding as many backlinks as possible to improve search rankings. The goal was to appear for as many related terms in the highest position possible on SERPs (search engine results pages). Over ten years later, the shift towards semantic search and a more entity-based approach has become a best practice for advanced SEO.

In September 2013, Google announced the algorithm update Hummingbird, designed to handle more complex queries. This was the first time the search algorithm was rewritten in about 12 years. While Hummingbird did not seem to have a negative effect on website performance, SEOs started noticing that the algorithm update was having a positive effect on the accuracy of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is a digital database of information from sources Google trusts—launched just one year before the Hummingbird announcement. Google was placing more importance on search intent when supplying information in the SERPs. For Google to produce results that will satisfy a user’s search intent is where semantic search comes in.

What is Semantic Search?

Semantics is the philosophical study of meaning. Semantic search is the process of search engines generating the most accurate SERPs possible by looking at the intent and context of a user’s search query. It’s artificial intelligence attempting to understand natural language the way a human would. Each search query is driven by something, and it’s our job as SEOs to understand that motivation. For example, if someone uses the phrase “how to” in their search query, that user is looking for a list of steps and will focus on the most relevant, helpful content in the SERPs.

PRO TIP

Add HowTo structured data to your how-to content to stand out from the competition with enhanced search results.

Tip #1

Stop keyword stuffing and start evolving your content to meet the “something” people are looking for.

2. Consider User Intent in your Content Strategy

You want your content type to match the query. For a “how to” query, you need how-to content on your site; for a “frequently asked question”, you need FAQ content. Not only will this satisfy search intent, but it will also help search engines understand the context and relevance of your content, so that Google can better match search queries to information on your site.

You can help Google contextualize your website content with a technical SEO practice called structured data, also known as schema markup. Schema markup is a form of microdata that provides additional information to search engines when added to your website. When all required and recommended properties are added, your content will be eligible for enhanced search experiences called rich results, making your content appear more prominently in the SERPs.

Schema markup is especially important during the age of Hummingbird—when how Google interprets the context of a query will determine the quality of a search result.

We like to tell our customers that structured data should be a part of their content strategy. As you consider the motivations and pain points of your customers and develop content to satisfy their search intent, build the structured data in tandem for a more effective process. That way, your new content has more potential to match the relevant search query AND to engage users with enhanced search results.

Tip #2

Consider the motivations of your customers; then, satisfy their pain points with content and use schema markup to make that content stand out in search.

3. Build Connections with Google’s Knowledge Graph

Hummingbird uses natural language processing to ensure that entire pages of content match search intent, not just a few words on the page. For this reason, creating quality content that is helpful and informative for your customers is more effective than just including popular keyphrases on your web pages to rank higher in SERPs. By creating connections with structured data between your content and entities defined in Google’s Knowledge Graph, you can help search engines better relate your information to what a user is searching for.

What is a Knowledge Graph?

A search engine’s knowledge graph is a database of facts about people, places and things from trusted sources like Wikipedia. Google’s Knowledge Graph allows it to easily answer factual questions with publicly available information, like the height of the Eiffel Tower, for example.

How does Google’s Knowledge Graph Work?

The Knowledge Graph Search API lets you find entities—people, places and things—defined in Google’s Knowledge Graph. You can define objects on your web pages as distinct entities with their own properties and relationships to other entities through structured data like schema markup. Once defined, link your entities to Google’s Knowledge Graph with structured data so that search engines can easily relate your information to a user’s intent.

What is the difference between a Knowledge Graph and a Knowledge Panel?

It’s easy to get confused between the Google Knowledge Graph and Google Knowledge Panels. Sometimes, Google search will show special boxes with information about people, places or things. These are Google Knowledge Panels:

These information boxes appear in search results when Google recognizes an entity in a user’s search query. The information in Knowledge Panels comes from Google’s Knowledge Graph.

PRO TIP

Did you know that schema markup can enhance your Google Knowledge Panel? Learn how in our blog post here.

Hummingbird is arguably the beginning of the semantic search era as we know it today. Semantic search allows Google to distinguish between different entities, which is why adding structured data to your website can help streamline this process. The more context you can offer search engines, the better.  This way, Google can better match search intent with information on your website.

Tip #3

Connect well-defined entities on your website with Google’s Knowledge Graph to create context and relevance for your brand.

4. Start Building your E-E-A-T

The content on your website should showcase your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—your E-E-A-T—in a particular field. This content should support both your SEO and overall business goals.

What is E-E-A-T?

Google first introduced the concept of E-A-T in its 2014 edition of Search Quality Guidelines. In December 2022, a new iteration of E-E-A-T was introduced, where an extra ‘E’ was added to emphasize the importance of demonstrating ‘experience’ in website content. 

The ultimate goal of a search engine is to return accurate, truthful, and useful information to satisfy search intent, and E-E-A-T fundamentally supports that. It’s an important factor that Google uses to evaluate the quality of a web page. By increasing your E-E-A-T on and off your site, you have the opportunity to improve your Google search rankings.

Tip #4

Create quality, connected content on your website that supports your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in a particular field. Learn more about how to create connectedness with structured data from Schema App CEO Martha van Berkel:

Expertise

Your brand’s expertise is largely evaluated at the content level. Your website content should be created by recognized subject matter experts, including your brand founder, content writers, and contributing experts in your field.

PRO TIP

Mark up the author’s byline with the Author schema property to streamline Google’s evaluation of the E-E-A-T for that web page. Learn how here.

Experience

Similar to expertise, experience demonstrates the firsthand knowledge that your content creator has regarding the topic on the page. By highlighting the firsthand experience with the topic, you can reinforce the trustworthiness and relevance of your content for search engines.

Authoritativeness

Create connections with other experts in your field. With shared content opportunities—like guest blog posts, webinars, podcasts, etc—you have a new sphere of influence. Invite your collaborators to add backlinks for your brand on their website—and do the same for them!

Trustworthiness

Readers are looking for transparent, legitimate information to satisfy their search intent. One easy tactic is to ensure that the authors for any articles or news posts are explicitly mentioned.

To learn more about how to increase your E-E-A-T with schema markup, check out our blog post here.

Revolutionize your Content Strategy for Healthier SEO 

Instead of focusing on creating content around keywords, start thinking about broad topics within your niche that you can cover in depth. What are the pain points you solve, and how can you develop content to communicate these solutions? While it can be a challenging shift in mindset for your content strategy, switching from keywords to topics will help you create more quality, evergreen content for your website.

We challenge you to dig even deeper into your SEO journey. Google recommends adding structured data to your web pages so that it can better understand the intent of your content. While your content strategy is fundamental for effective search engine optimization, remember that you are writing content for humans AND for search engines to understand.

The post 4 Actionable Structured Data Strategies for Busy Digital Marketers 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.

On Thursday, October 28th, we held our first Fireside Chat with Simon Yohe, the Senior Director of E-commerce and CRM at Holiday Inn Club Vacations. Prior to this role, Simon Yohe was the Director of Web Marketing Strategy at AdventHealth, which was formerly Florida Hospital and a part of the Adventis Health System. Simon was brought on to AdventHealth because they were doing a national rebrand and wanted to mitigate any loss in organic traffic during their website consolidation. 

The Challenge

AdventHealth had dozens of hospitals in multiple locations scattered across nine states, and wanted to bring them all together as one health system. This would require consolidating over 800 different hospital and medical websites that were all branded differently into one AdventHealth.com domain and brand.

In order to do this, Simon and his team needed to put a system in place to help Google and other search engines be able to easily identify those legacy names without losing any organic search traffic in the process. They also wanted to ensure that customers were still able to locate the hospitals, medical pavilions, imaging centres, etc throughout the consolidation. One of the ways they solved this challenge was through the use of structured data. 

The Solution

For AdventHealth, the rebranding and consolidation was one piece, but where the structured data really played to AdventHealth’s advantage was the connectedness of entities within AdventHealth’s company knowledge graph. It wasn’t simply a rebrand from the term “Florida Hospital” to “AdventHealth”; it was a complete restructure of how Google contextualized those hospitals, their geographical areas, and how they relate to this new consolidated health system.

For Holiday Inn Club Vacations, Simon and his team wanted to build out and grow their digital platform in a way that could be self-sufficient. It wasn’t just about building functionality that would allow customers to book online reservations or creating a new member portal; they were architecting ways that they could overall enhance and improve how their website is found by using structured data to inform their content strategy.

Working together with Simon and his team to understand the unique value these initiatives proposed, we were able to design customized schema markup strategies that would help them achieve these online business goals.

Structured data became a strategic opportunity to achieve these goals, but the AdventHealth team wasn’t sure how they were going to implement it and were limited in regards to their development team, as they were actively working on developing the new platforms.

Through their design agency, AdventHealth came across Schema App and loved the idea of a “plug and play” option instead of managing the software themselves. A development team can build this solution in-house, and a lot of companies do, but where it can become a struggle is that you only have a finite amount of developers.

When you’re working on different website features and functionality, it becomes harder to make sure that you have those dedicated resources focused on your structured data markup. You also have to have someone that’s knowledgeable and understanding of what you’re trying to mark up, and someone who can maintain, monitor, track and optimize it. 

Why Schema App?

As a beginner, structured data can be challenging. That’s why Schema App was created in the first place: to provide a scalable solution paired with expert support so that structured data could become a more approachable practice for any SEO team.

Working with Schema App and structured data even ended up helping Simon and his team with their content strategy, and with how they organized content as they built their new consolidated website. Through schema markup and the linking of entities across your site, you’re helping Google categorize and understand your content. Two areas that really impacted AdventHealth were the facility pages and the physician profile pages.

The ability to connect physicians with their services, the physicians with their locations and the locations to the services—structured data markup gave Simon and his team a better understanding of how to structurally organize and display content on their website.

The Return on Investment

One of the most effective ways to show the impact of structured data is by looking through search engine page results (SERPs). You can visually see how adding structured data enhances your content in the SERPs, like the FAQ rich result for AdventHealth below. 

The visual change is clear, but structured data also empowers your SEO team with measurable results. AdventHealth saw a 90% increase in clicks and a 40% increase in impressions that could be attributed to the addition of schema markup to their website. 

Structured data is a long term investment in the success of your website. You’re building meaningful connections with Google through well-defined entities, and with your customers through enhanced content in the SERPs. By using structured data opportunities to inform your content strategy, you’re ensuring that your website is organized in a way that search engines can easily understand your content and then show that information to the right customers at the right time.

We help you leverage structured data to showcase the unique value of your health system in search. By working cross-functionally with different areas of your organization, we introduce agility to your team in the rapidly changing landscape of search engine optimization. We’ve worked with some of the top healthcare leaders in the industry, such as Sharp Healthcare, AdventHealth, and Henry Ford Health System—executing business results using our expertise and technology. Let’s start building some meaningful connections!

The post How Structured Data Empowers your Content Strategy: A Fireside Chat 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.

The post How To Sell Schema Markup Services To Your Company appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Martha is an active member of the search engine optimization community, and the work that she does through Schema App is helping brands from all over the world improve their organic search performance.

“I am so honoured and humbled to be included in this amazing list of experts. I love the fact that I get to share our knowledge with the SEO community as a way to live our values of Teaching and Learning. Thank you for the recognition.”

In addition to being the face and voice of Schema App, Martha is a visionary who possesses the unique ability to create and define new markets and get customers excited about opportunities. What makes Schema App so accessible is that we combine expert technical solutions with a dedicated customer success team that works with you every step of the way. The Schema App team uses their semantic search expertise to drive results for customers through innovative and targeted structured data strategies.

Schema App helps you stand out in search resulting in high-quality traffic to your website. We are experts in schema markup, an advanced SEO strategy, and our technology enables you to deploy it to any content management system. 

Get started on your schema strategy today with Schema App! Our enterprise schema markup solutions help your brand to generate quality search traffic for your website. Contact us to start making an impression in search.

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Since the inception of Schema App, we’ve helped customers like SAP and Keen Footwear to reach their online business goals through customized schema strategies.

The post Schema App’s Martha van Berkel Chosen as one of Top SEO Experts You Should Be Following appeared first on Schema App Solutions.