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.