In this article, we’ll explore what Linked Data is and share examples of Linked Data projects which many in the SEO and tech community refer to as knowledge graphs.

What is Linked Data? 

Linked Data is a set of design principles for publishing machine-readable interconnected data on the web. 

The term “Linked Data” first appeared in 2006 when Tim Berners-Lee published a design note about the Semantic Web. He sought to use Linked Data as a way of representing the relationship between different things on the internet. The internet would then become a huge database of interconnected (linked) objects (data) and become the Semantic Web.

Businesses or enterprises can use Linked Data to define things and the relationships between them. For example, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have undertaken Linked Data projects to represent social networks. When users perform actions like connecting to other users or liking and resharing content, these actions are reflected in a graphical representation of who they are, who they know and what they like.

As a result, these social media platforms can gain knowledge about a person and enable things like targeted advertising to users based on their relationship to other things. However, the knowledge that these social media platforms derive from their Linked Data is proprietary and not licensed for external use.

This led to a movement calling for Linked Data to be open for people to use freely for research purposes – especially from governmental organizations, and other public institutions such as museums.

In 2010, Tim Berners-Lee modified his original design note to add principles for Linked Open Data, a variation of Linked Data permitting reuse.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is Linked Data released under an open license, which allows others to freely access and reuse it.

Principles of Linked Data

When Tim Berners-Lee first published the design note about Linked Data, he defined the 4 principles of Linked Data. Based on this note, people or machines would be able to explore the web of data if it adhered to the following 4 principles:

1. Use URIs as names for things

A URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is a string of characters that identifies a resource. It provides a consistent way to identify resources across different systems and protocols.  A resource (also known as an entity) is anything that can be identified and described, such as people, places, objects, or concepts.

2. Use HTTP [or HTTPS] URIs so that people can look up those names

An HTTP/HTTPS URI is a specific type of URI that uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or Protocol Secure. This means that when you access an HTTP/HTTPS URI in a web browser or through an HTTP request, you should get back information about the resource it identifies.

3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)

When a user or application accesses a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), the information returned should be both meaningful and structured according to standardized semantic technologies, specifically RDF (for expressing the data) and SPARQL (for querying the data).

4. Include links to other URIs so that they can discover more things

When you create or publish data, you should include links within your data to other resources or entities (in the form of URIs). These URIs can point to related or relevant information, such as other resources, definitions, or attributes. This provides additional context about your own resources.

By following these principles, you contribute to a growing network of interlinked data across the web. This allows consumers of the data (human or machine) to gather more insights, context, and knowledge.

The benefit of using Linked Data for SEO

Linked Data is great for SEO because it can provide search engines with more contextual knowledge about your content. Search engines now look at relevancy to provide searchers with the most accurate results.

One of the most common forms of linked data on the web is Schema Markup which primarily describes webpage contents for search engines. Schema Markup uses the Schema.org vocabulary which can express RDF linked data in formats like JSON-LD.

When you use machine-readable code like Schema Markup to express the relationship between the entities on your site, it helps search engines understand and derive knowledge about your organization.

For example, if you have a page about your organization’s proprietary software application, you can tell search engines that this software application is provided by your organization by linking the URI that contains all the information about your organization to the provider property in the markup for your page.

{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "SoftwareApplication",
  "@id": "https://www.schemaapp.com/solutions/schema-app-highlighter/#SoftwareApplication",
  "name": "Schema App Highlighter",
  "description": "Use the Schema App Highlighter to customize your Schema Markup...",
  "applicationCategory": "Search Engine Optimization",
  "provider": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "@id": "https://www.schemaapp.com/#Organization",
    "url": "https://www.schemaapp.com/",
    "name": "Schema App",
    "description": "Schema App is an end-to-end Schema Markup solution...",
    "telephone": "18554448624",
    "email": "support@schemaapp.com",
    "areaServed": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13780930",
  }
}

The URI appears in JSON-LD in the @id attribute. Your Schema Markup can be generated and authored without including identifiers (@id). Search engines like Google will still read it and make it eligible for rich results. However, by generating your Schema Markup with a URI, you can link it to other entities.

You can also link your Schema Markup to other Linked Data projects to be more explicit about the entities you are talking about on your website.

For example, if you are talking about football on a page, this can be confusing to search engines because the term football can mean different things depending on where you are in the world. You can help search engines disambiguate which football you are referring to by linking your page to the same entity described in Wikipedia, Wikidata or Google’s Knowledge Graph.

If you are talking about American football, you can use the sameAs property in your Schema Markup to link to the same entity on Wikipedia, Wikidata or Google’s Knowledge graph.

{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "@id": "https://www.schemaapp.com/blog/what-is-football/#BlogPosting",
  "url": "https://www.schemaapp.com/blog/what-is-football/",
  "name": "What is Football?",
  "headline": "What is Football?",
  "description": "Learn about the rules and history of Football.",
  "mentions": {
    "@type": "Thing",
    "name": "Football",
    "sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q41323",
    "sameAs": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football",
    "sameAs": "kg:/m/0jm_",
  }
}

However, applying Linked Data on your site can be a technically challenging task.

1. Quality – You need to keep the data up-to-date, accurate and complete.
2. Scalability – Handling this huge volume of data can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
3. Expertise – Transforming your content into Linked Data requires knowledge of the technologies to do this work and how to apply them effectively.
4. Sustainability – You need resources to maintain the data quality.

Examples of Linked Data Projects in SEO

There are many examples of Linked Data Projects in use today. These Linked Data Projects are also often referred to as Knowledge Graphs.

Knowledge graphs are a collection of related entities expressed as RDF triples. When you use Schema Markup to express the relationship between two entities on your site, you are implementing Linked Data. When you connect the various entities on your site, you are effectively developing an internal knowledge graph about your organization. Your internal knowledge graph becomes even more robust and useful when linked to other external knowledge graphs.

Some of these external knowledge graphs are also useful for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. SEO teams can connect their internal knowledge graphs to external knowledge graphs to tell search engines that the entity defined in this external knowledge graph is the same as the entity defined on their website.

Let’s explore some of the Linked Data Projects / External Knowledge Graphs pertaining to the SEO world.

Google’s Knowledge Graph

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a knowledge database that Google uses to provide quick answers to queries about certain topics or entities (people, places, organizations, things). This can show up in search in the form of a knowledge panel. The knowledge panel contains a snapshot of information about the topic based on Google’s understanding of the available content on the internet.

The story of Google’s Knowledge Graph starts with Freebase, a Metaweb project launched in 2007. Freebase was described as “a system for building the synapses for the global brain”. This massive knowledge base, which formally became a linked open data project in 2008, was one of the largest and most ambitious Linked Data projects of its time.

In 2010, Google acquired Freebase from Metaweb and imported Freebase’s massive knowledge base into Google’s proprietary Knowledge Graph. Soon after, Google introduced their Knowledge Graph in their famous ‘things, not strings’ article, indicating a pivot from lexical to semantic search.

The Google Knowledge Graph is a Linked Data project because it adheres to the 4 principles of Linked Data. However, the Google Knowledge Graph is NOT a linked open data project because the data is not published with an open license. That being said, it is possible to find identifiers (URIs) for entities in the Google Knowledge Graph and link them to your own knowledge graph.

How to access Google’s Knowledge Graph?

The Google Knowledge Graph has a search API that is read-only. You’ll notice the URIs in the output are structured with a “kg” namespace (which stands in for http://g.co/kg) and either /m/ or /g/ before a string of characters. These identifiers are called “mid”s, or Machine IDs, which is a legacy term from Freebase.

For example, the Freebase object for the entity Barack Obama has the mid /m/02mjmr. This same entity can be accessed in Google’s Knowledge Graph by going to https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/02mjmr. The entity has the same mid in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

How is Google’s Knowledge Graph used?

Google uses its knowledge graph to improve the search experience on its search engine. When you search for something like “Berkshire Hathaway”, Google identifies the entities in your query and provides information on those entities from both its knowledge graph and other sources on the web. One of the most common sources is Wikipedia.

Wikipedia & DBpedia

Wikipedia is a free, collaborative online encyclopedia composed of more than 61 million articles. Wikipedia articles represent entities, such as people, places, events, concepts, or other things.

The URLs of Wikipedia articles also function as URIs for the entities they represent. So the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Janeway is both an article that can be visited on the web, and the URI that represents the entity, Kathryn Janeway, in Wikipedia’s knowledge base.

Articles within Wikipedia contain structured elements, as well as links to other related entities. While Wikipedia on its own isn’t a traditional Linked Data project, it plays a significant role in the Linked Data ecosystem on the web, particularly with regard to DBpedia and Wikidata.

DBpedia is a linked open data project that extracts information from Wikipedia to generate RDF triples, which can be semantically queried alongside other related datasets. It pulls information from the structured elements of Wikipedia pages, such as “infobox” tables like this:

While Wikipedia might be an excellent source of summarized information for general use, the depth and breadth of information on Wikipedia means it has become an essential source of training data for many AI initiatives such as natural language processing, named entity recognition, and the development of Knowledge Graphs like Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Post from Wikipedia Engineering Manager, Joseph S.; inspired by https://xkcd.com/2347/

Wikidata

Wikidata is a collaborative Linked Open Data project that’s been operated by the Wikimedia Foundation since its inception in 2012 (source).

Despite having Wiki in its name, Wikidata is not the same as Wikipedia. Wikidata is a broader knowledge base than Wikipedia, containing data about a wider range of topics. Wikidata also allows users to create RDF Linked Data directly.

Even though Wikidata and DBpedia are both Linked Open Data projects related to Wikipedia, they have different aims and serve different functions.

DBpedia extracts information to generate Linked Data from Wikipedia’s structured sources like infoboxes. As a result, DBpedia treats the knowledge derived as facts.

Rather than extracting information from Wikipedia, Wikidata creates Linked Data for Wikipedia (source). Since Wikidata also treats statements within the Linked Data as claims rather than facts, these statements must be annotated with provenance information (i.e. who made each claim).

Instead of “mid”s (identifiers used by Freebase/Google’s Knowledge Graph), each entity in Wikidata has a “qid”.

Here’s a summary of the identifiers for each of the Linked Data projects listed above.

Google’s Knowledge Graph, Wikipedia, and Wikidata are the most common Linked Data projects utilized in SEO. When we talk about connecting your Schema Markup to external authoritative knowledge bases at Schema App, these are the external knowledge graphs we are referring to.

How to use Linked Data with Schema App

At Schema App, our semantic technologies allow SEO teams to easily generate Linked Data for their website content.

Generate URIs for your entities

When you publish your Schema Markup using the Schema App Editor or Highlighter, our tool automatically generates HTTPS URIs for the entities you define in your Schema Markup. These URIs, which appear in the @id attribute, link to the URLs of the pages where they’ve been mentioned.

For example, we publish Organization markup to our Schema App home page. The URI for our Organization entity would then be the URL of our homepage + #Organization – https://www.schemaapp.com/#Organization. If you navigate to this URI, it will take you to the page about our Organization.

Creating URIs for entities on your site allows you to easily link to those entities in your Schema Markup. For example, if your organization has published a blog post you can link your Organization URI to the publisher property in your BlogPosting Schema Markup.

{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "@id": "https://www.schemaapp.com/schema-markup/what-is-a-rich-result/#BlogPosting",
  "url": "https://www.schemaapp.com/schema-markup/what-is-a-rich-result/",
  "name": "What is a Rich Result?",
  "headline": "What is a Rich Result?",
  "description": "A rich result is an enhanced search result shown on search engine results page. Find out how you can achieve a rich result for your page.",
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "@id": "https://www.schemaapp.com/#Organization",
    "url": "https://www.schemaapp.com/",
    "name": "Schema App",
    "description": "Schema App is an end-to-end Schema Markup solution...", 
    "telephone": "18554448624",
    "email": "support@schemaapp.com",
    "areaServed": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13780930",
  }
}

Linking to external entities

Our tools also allow SEO teams to link to external entities using a variety of methods such as:

• Manually linking to external entities using properties like sameAs and additionalType
• Automatically linking to external entities using our Omni Linked Entity Recognition feature in the Schema App Highlighter tool
• Automatically linking the categories and tags on a WordPress site to existing Wikipedia and Wikidata entities using our Advanced WordPress plugin.

You can read this article to learn more about our entity linking methods.

Overcome the challenges of implementing Linked Data

In summary, Linked Data facilitates the connection of data from different sources to provide machines with more contextual information, enabling them to infer new knowledge from existing facts.

Applying Linked Data through the Schema Markup on your site can help search engines understand the relationship between the entities on your site and disambiguate the entities mentioned in your content.

If you need help implementing Linked Data on your site, we can help. At Schema App, we provide SEO teams with the tools and expertise to implement Linked Data at scale. Get in touch with us to learn more.

The post Linked Data in SEO: What You Need To Know appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

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

What is a Rich Result?

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of Rich Results for Businesses

Stand Out in Search & Gain a Competitive Advantage

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

Reduce Spend on Sponsored Content

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

Drive Qualified Traffic

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

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

Delight Your Customers With Answers

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

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

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

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

Build Trust With Your Audience

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

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

Drive Measurable Results for Your Business

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

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

Develop Your Content Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Result Examples & How They Support Business Objectives

Review Snippets

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

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

Product Rich Result

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

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

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

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

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

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

Job Posting Rich Result

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

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

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

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

What is NOT a Rich Result?

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

Knowledge Panel

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

Featured Snippet

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

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

People Also Ask

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

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

Sponsored Content

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

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

HTML Tables

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

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

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

Rich Results Vs. Other Enhanced Results

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

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

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

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

How to Achieve a Rich Result on Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Author the structured data markup for your page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make Your Content Eligible for Rich Results

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

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

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

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

Applying schema markup allows you to define entities across your site and link them to other entities across the Web. You’re creating data points for search engines, helping Google connect the dots about you, your company, and the people who work there. Well-defined entities can also be included in Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is a knowledge base of entities and the relationships between them. 

For medical clinics and health systems, you have the opportunity to create entities for your physicians and connect them to the medical organizations or clinics they work for through schema markup. These connections create context, streamlining Google’s ability to match relevant search queries with your services and medical practitioners. Your content can also be eligible for rich results and enhanced search features like star ratings or frequently asked questions.

To be eligible for these rich results, you need to mark up visible content on your web pages and follow Google’s structured data guidelines. When you achieve a rich snippet, Google will display additional information from your markup through richer features beneath the standard page title, meta description, and URL. 

What is really exciting are the opportunities for combining multiple rich results into one striking snippet. 

Schema markup takes your content beyond the standard search result, adding enhanced search features to help your brand stand out from the competition. For many customers, their health journey begins in search. The additional information included in your structured data presents customers with the opportunity to learn more about your services directly in search results. According to BrightLocal’s 2020 Local Consumer Review Survey, 89% of consumers look at reviews in the healthcare industry, and 87% of consumers believe reviews are important for the industry. 

How you can achieve multiple rich results for your physician pages

Let’s take a look at how the physician rich result has evolved over time, and how each search enhancement contributes to the power of this striking snippet.

Stage One: Title Tag, Meta Description, Page URL

Without structured data, your search engine page result will display the page title, the meta description, or other information chosen by Google, and the page URL.

Stage Two: LocalBusiness (Physician) Schema Markup

When using Google to search for a local business, you may have noticed profiles displaying on the right-hand side, called the right rail, of search engine page results. These are Google Local Knowledge Panels. Local knowledge panels are information boxes that appear when Google interprets a search query to have local intent and recognizes a well-defined entity which is already connected to Google’s Knowledge Graph. Google Business Profile is the catalyst for a local knowledge panel to show in search results. 

Structured data is not a direct trigger for Google Knowledge Panels, but it does feed and enhance them. Adding schema markup to your web pages means that your website can be an authoritative source of information for Google’s Knowledge Graph, rather than relying on a Wikipedia page (which you don’t own) or a LinkedIn or Twitter profile (which you only semi-own). Schema markup gives you more control over how your brand and website appear in search results. 

For any LocalBusiness schema markup, you want to use the most specific schema.org type that you can to explain to Google what your organization is and does. The physician pages on your website should be marked up with the Physician schema.org type, which is a subclass of LocalBusiness and has all the attributes of LocalBusiness schema within it.

With LocalBusiness schema markup, you want to use the schema.org type that is as specific to your business as possible. Learn more about the benefits of LocalBusiness schema markup in our Ultimate Guide.

Stage Three: LocalBusiness (Physician) + aggregateRating

You’ve probably already noticed star ratings showing up for products or local businesses in search results. Those little stars are achieved through aggregateRating schema markup. You can nest aggregate ratings into another schema.org type using the aggregateRating property, such as within an instance of Physician.

Stage Four: LocalBusiness (Physician) + aggregateRating + FAQ

Star ratings are one of the more eye-catching rich snippets you can achieve through schema markup. To build on your aggregateRating structured data, we recommend next adding FAQPage schema. Frequently asked questions are an effective way for customers to engage with your brand directly in search engine page results. Consider what questions your customers may ask, and dedicate a section for these frequently asked questions and answers on your physician page. Then, mark up these FAQs with FAQPage structured data. For physician pages, this could be their credentials or area served as seen in our example below:

Adding frequently asked questions to your website to unlock FAQ rich results is just one example of how structured data should inform your content strategy.

Physician Rich Result: What’s Next?

As you can see, structured data can be layered and nested to achieve different search appearances for your content. The schema.org vocabulary is evolving, and with Google testing how different rich results behave in search, there are many exciting opportunities ahead for schema markup. For example, during a limited time in early August of 2021, we saw Physician rich results with aggregateRating, FAQ, AND an image of the physician in live search engine page results. 

These tests may be a glimpse into what could soon be coming for certain types of content, and how they’re marked up with structured data, in search. If you’re interested in learning more about where to start with healthcare structured data, check out our article, “The Value of Schema Markup for Healthcare Organizations.” 

Why structured data for healthcare?

Schema markup explains to search engines how the physician pages on your website relate back to your healthcare organization. These connections create relevance as Google crawls your web pages, which leads to more relevant search queries being matched with services like yours. The benefits of structured data extend beyond achieving multiple rich results in search. Those benefits are visible and effective, as we’ve demonstrated above. To maximize your search engine optimization performance, it’s important to understand how structured data really works. 

You’re actually taking control of how the data on your website is defined to show the best information in search results, and not just hoping Google will figure it out on its own. This control helps medical organizations—and their physicians—retain credibility with customers and search engines alike.

Through schema markup, you can also increase your E-E-A-T, establishing your brand as a trustworthy source of information. Schema markup is all about context and relevance, and when done effectively, you can increase both the quantity and quality of leads coming through your website. For healthcare organizations, this means more appointments booked by customers who are well-aligned with the services you offer.

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 Baptist Health—executing business results using our expertise and technology.

The post Healthcare Schema Markup: Evolution of the Physician Rich Result appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Search engine optimization is a long-term investment, but during periods of change in user behavior SEO can also be your greatest short-term ally. Remember that SEO doesn’t just increase traffic to your website; it also drives higher-quality traffic. Users finding their way to your site are interested in what you have to offer because of how you’ve communicated your business in search, underlining how SEO helps you identify more qualified leads for your business. 

For example, many patients begin their healthcare journey in Google search. When choosing a provider, they want to know things like the area served, the contact hours, how to book an appointment, and any medical specialties.

With structured data markup, you have more control over what information appears in search engine results pages, and how it appears. This additional information is displayed through enhanced Google search features like rich results, that allow you to stand out from your competition.

What is Structured Data Markup?

Structured data markup is metadata that can be added to the backend of your website. In SEO, this usually refers to Schema.org, a specific structured data vocabulary created by Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo! back in 2014. This standardized vocabulary is always being updated with new types and properties to categorize and connect data.

The fact that Google continues to invest in schema markup demonstrates that it’s an investment worth making for your website. It essentially provides an enhanced description of your content that allows search engines to relay additional information in search through engaging rich results and other Google features.  The more that Google understands, the better it can match your content to a user’s search query.

When getting started, it helps to think of structured data as a way of defining entities across your web pages, and connecting them in a graph. Your homepage will be your primary entity, or entity home, so it’s best to add markup to that page first. Typically, you’ll want to mark up your homepage as either an Organization, LocalBusiness, or a more specific subtype. Our Ultimate How-to Guide for Local Business Schema Markup can help you establish which type to use, and which properties are most useful for describing your homepage. 

One of the benefits of LocalBusiness schema is that Google uses the information in your markup to enhance your local Google Knowledge Panel, which is the information box that appears on the right side of desktop search results, and at the top and throughout the search engine results page (SERP) for mobile devices.

Schema Markup Enhances your Google Knowledge Panel

If you’re a small or medium-sized business offering local or essential services, keeping your Google Business Profile (GBP) up-to-date is so important during times of change. Marking up your website with LocalBusiness structured data can also enhance your Google Knowledge Panel. Most consumers don’t become customers immediately, which is why increasing your findability and viewability in search engine page results will help you nurture that customer journey from start to finish. 

It’s important to note that there are many subclasses of LocalBusiness schema, including AnimalShelter, ChildCare, Dentist, ShoppingCenter, and more! See the full list in our guide. Try to be as specific as possible when defining your type of  business, but if there isn’t an existing type at schema.org LocalBusiness will do just fine.

Demonstrate your credibility by letting customers leave reviews, and then mark up that content with Review structured data while following Google’s structured data guidelines. Here are some important technical guidelines for Review schema markup to keep in mind, pulled from Google’s documentation:

• Mark up an aggregate evaluation of an item with AggregateRating schema
• Refer to a specific product or service by nesting the review in the markup of another schema.org type, like Book or Recipe, or by using a schema.org type as the value for itemReviewed
• Your reviews and ratings should be immediately available to users from the marked up page
• Reviews should be about a specific item, not a category or list of items
• Don’t aggregate reviews from other websites
• For a LocalBusiness or Organization, your markup is not eligible for star review features if the entity being reviewed, aka your local business or organization, controls those reviews. In other words, don’t review yourself and mark those reviews up with structured data! 
• Your ratings should be directly sourced from users
• Don’t use human editors to create, curate, or compile ratings or reviews for a local business

Learn more about creating review schema markup in our guide.

You’re building trust and familiarity with your brand, both with your customers and with search engines. Publishing quality content engages and converts more quality leads, and the more engaging touchpoints you have, the more likely quality prospects will get in touch with you.

Diversify Your Rich Results Portfolio

In the height of COVID and vaccinations, people need reliable and up-to-date information. Google introduced the SpecialAnnouncement schema.org type, the markup of which was used for urgent announcements published by locally-oriented organizations such as schools, pharmacies, healthcare providers, community groups, police, and local governments. Learn more about implementing SpecialAnnouncement structured data in our Guide to COVID-19 Structured Data.

On May 20th, 2021, we suddenly saw this type of rich result drop off. That is why we recommend diversifying the rich results that your content is eligible for. We expect medical organizations to create new content that is in line with any changes in the healthcare industry, but making sure that rich result eligibility is part of your content strategy will set you up for success in terms of your search engine optimization performance. 

Here is a list of the rich results available through Google’s Search Gallery:

To learn more about each rich result opportunity, click on the links in our list above or explore the Search Gallery here.

It is even possible to achieve more rich result opportunities through multi-type entities. A multi-type entity (MTE) is one entity that is defined using multiple schema.org types (though usually not more than two). Creating a multi-type data item allows you to utilize all the properties available to both types. You may want to create a multi-type entity for your business if, for example, you’re using the Physician Local Business type and want to add alumni information that’s only available to the Person type. To resolve this, your local business would be typed as both Physician and Person.

Diversification of rich results prepares your SEO team to switch focus from one search enhancement to another whenever there are updates to Google’s structured data documentation, demonstrating the agility a robust structured data strategy provides.

Google Continues to Invest in Schema Markup

As we mentioned above, Google continues to demonstrate their investment in schema markup by regularly updating their structured data documentation, and introducing new schema.org properties.

We always get excited about new schema markup properties, because that means more opportunities for our customers to maximize their results from structured data! Your schema markup should stay updated and in line with the visible content on your website, so as not to violate any of Google’s structured data guidelines.

There have already been two hearty schema.org releases this year, but in 2020 we saw eleven releases, so we are expecting many more to come before the end of 2021. Some of our favorites from this most recent release include a number of terms proposed by the Bioschemas project, additions around ecommerce returns and job postings, and the addition of startOffset to the SeekToAction schema.org type for Videos. Read more about this latest release in our news post.

Keeping an eye on new schema.org releases and updates to Google’s structured data documentation will help you diversify your rich result portfolio, as you never know when the next opportunity for your content to stand out in search will come along. Having the foundation in place across your site gives you a head start. Sign up for the Schema App Newsletter to receive regular updates to the schema markup vocabulary and Google’s structured data guidelines.

Example of Healthcare Client being Agile with Structured Data

Here’s an example. One of our healthcare clients is currently restructuring their service lines and simultaneously using structured data to inform their content strategy by targeting different audiences in different geographic locations. This is one way structured data can make your SEO team more agile. 

Through structured data, they’re implementing a number of pending schema.org types and properties that were introduced to support medical content. This follows our best practice of diversifying your rich result portfolio by remaining informed of any updates to the schema.org vocabulary.

SEO is especially important for healthcare organizations, as their success relies on how easily users can find them online. In August of 2018, Google rolled out a core update named the “Medic” update, which disproportionately affected sites in the health and wellness vertical as part of a large-scale impact across all verticals. Structured data has become even more strategic for healthcare organizations as they try to regain any SEO ground lost from said update.

How the Schema App Highlighter Increases Your SEO Agility

At Schema App, one of our key values is agility. Technology is advancing quickly, but the ability to be agile means we are prepared for anything at any time. That’s why we created the Schema App Highlighter, a world-class, scalable structured data authoring and management platform. 

One of the best parts about the Highlighter is that you don’t need to write a line of code! The tool does it for you at scale and with accuracy. Because the Highlighter is dynamic, any changes made to your content will be reflected in your structured data automatically, and any changes to Google’s Documentation will be reflected in our tools. If you make any changes to your website structure, the Highlighter can accommodate this with ease. You’ll also be working with a schema markup expert from our Customer Success team, who is always up to date with Google’s changes to structured data so you don’t have to be.

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

How does your website content currently look in search results? How do you want it to look? Structured data markup gives you more control over what content appears in search, and how it appears. A diverse portfolio of rich results will empower your SEO team to be more agile, letting them focus on strategy and when/where to add more structured data markup to your website instead of chasing after trending keyphrases for short-term boosts of traffic.

We’ve helped customers across multiple industries diversify their digital strategies with a robust schema markup portfolio, but especially in healthcare where the rich result opportunities are vast, and building trust with patients is important. If you need help getting started with your structured data markup or want to analyze the rich result opportunities on your website, set up a call with our technical experts today!

The post How to be Agile with Structured Data in a Changing SEO World appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Google Knowledge Panels are information boxes that appear in search results when Google recognizes an entity in a user’s search query. Google pulls this information from entities defined in its knowledge graph and from trusted resources like Wikipedia. You can help Google along by feeding and enhancing your local or branded knowledge panel through structured data like schema markup.

What do knowledge panels look like on mobile devices?

On mobile, screen size doesn’t allow for side-by-side display so information from Google’s Knowledge Graph may be presented by one or more knowledge panels spread among the search engine page results. Mobile knowledge panels for companies display information similar to the desktop version including:

• Company name
• Company Logo
• Link to the company’s website
• Summary of the company
• Contact information
• Links to social media
• Stock prices and revenue (if available and/or applicable)
• People Also Search For carousel

For topic matter, mobile knowledge panels don’t show as much information as a desktop experience because of the limited screen size. 

For people, mobile knowledge panels start to get really interesting. Instead of showing a logo like company knowledge panels or corporate panels, for people Google knowledge panels show a carousel of images for the entity in question in a mobile experience. Other carousels that may show at the bottom of a person’s knowledge panel are videos, books, and of course People Also Search For. What’s really awesome about mobile knowledge panels is that they will show pertinent information for the entity being searched for. For example, when searching for LeBron James the mobile knowledge panel displays his height, because as a professional basketball player this information is relevant to the search query.

Another feature of mobile knowledge panels is to categorize and display the information in tabs. Looking back at our LeBron James example, you can see  different data displayed based on which tab is chosen.

What are the types of Google Knowledge Panels?

There are two types of Google Knowledge Panels: Local and Branded (ex. Organization, Person). This article will explain the differences between them and how to use structured data markup to get a knowledge panel for your online business.

Local Knowledge Panel

Local knowledge panels are information boxes that appear when Google interprets a search query to have local intent. For example, if I search for “Block Three Brewing Company St Jacobs”, a local brewery, its local knowledge panel will display because Google has determined that my search had local intent. You will also see multiple knowledge panels showing throughout the search engine page results.

The first step to getting a local knowledge panel for your company is to create a Google Business Profile account. Google Business Profile (GBP) is the catalyst for a local knowledge panel to show in search results. Once created, you can verify that you’re the owner of that business and start adding in any relevant information that you want to display in Google search. Your Google Business Profile can show your company’s phone number, customer ratings and reviews, address, hours, and more! This information can also be shown in your local knowledge panel.

Structured Data for Local Knowledge Panels

You should also verify your website within Google Search Console and add LocalBusiness schema markup. Through this structured data, you define your business as an entity for Google and connect it to other entities defined in Google’s Knowledge Graph. This way, search engines can contextualize your website content and better match it to a user’s search query. Structured data will also increase the chance of Google showing your local knowledge panel in search.

Branded or Personal Knowledge Panels

You can’t apply for a personal or branded knowledge panel, and Google will decide whether you or your brand has enough credibility and authority to warrant one. People and brands who are well-known and have Wikipedia pages dedicated to them often have a knowledge panel appear in Google search. See how Canadian actor Ryan Gosling has a personal Google Knowledge Panel.

However, you don’t need a Wikipedia page to have a personal knowledge panel! Schema App COO and the creator of Schema App Mark van Berkel has a personal knowledge panel without one because he is an established figure in his field with multiple sources and publications supporting his authority.

Personal knowledge panels are particularly challenging for Google. There may be hundreds or thousands of people across the web with the same name, and this ambiguity can lead to confusion for the information within knowledge panels. You can see why defining a home for your entity, the subject of the personal knowledge graph, is so important. Here’s where structured data comes in.

Structured Data for Branded Knowledge Panels

This “entity home” is the authoritative source of information for Google to reference. Examples of entity homes for people are an about me page or homepage on the person’s personal site, the about me page on the person’s company website, or a social profile. We recommend choosing an owned domain instead of a social media profile, as they are only semi-owned so you don’t have absolute authority. Once you have decided on your entity home, mark up all relevant information with structured data to help Google understand the content and better display it in your knowledge panel.

When do knowledge panels appear?

A knowledge panel will appear when Google recognizes an entity in a user’s search query. An entity, or a named entity, is a single, well-defined thing or concept. You can use specific identifiers like @ids or URIs to define objects in your web content as distinct entities with their own properties and relationships to other entities. Once defined, you can link them to Google’s Knowledge Graph using structured data. Once you’ve achieved a Knowledge Graph, your entity will receive a unique URL defining it as a part of Google’s Knowledge Graph. This can be found by clicking the share button beside the entity’s name.

Within your homepage markup, you can then use sameAs to link your organization to the knowledge graph URL, creating another credibility loop for your brand. Link the information on your website to other entities in other knowledge graphs with high E-E-A-T like Wikipedia pages. For example, you can support local search for your brand or local business by using the areaServed property to link to the Wikipedia page for that city, region, or country. Knowledge graphs, more generally, represent the linking of information and data across the web, which allows search engines to contextualize the content you mark up on your website. 

The information shown in knowledge panels comes from sources trusted by search engines to have high E-E-A-T. These sources include Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, Facebook, and many others. If Google is confident that this information is correct, it is stored in its knowledge graph.

How does structured data feed and enhance knowledge panels?

Is structured data a direct trigger for Google knowledge panels? The answer is no, but it does feed and enhance your knowledge panel. Adding markup to your website translates your human-readable content into the machine-readable language of JSON-LD, making it easier for search engines to catalogue and contextualize the data on your website.

You’ll likely type your homepage as either a Person, an Organization, a LocalBusiness, or a more specific subtype. Generally speaking, you should use the LocalBusiness type if the business is a brick-and-mortar facility that has address information publicly available. If the business doesn’t have an address associated with it—for example it’s an eCommerce business, a brand, or a service provider that does house calls—the Organization type may be the better choice. The full list of schema.org types can be found in their Full Hierarchy where indentations denote a subtype relationship in the hierarchy of terms. We encourage you to check out schema.org’s definitions for any types that are relevant to your business, that way you can be sure you’re using the most accurate type. 

Refer to our Ultimate How-to Guide for Local Business Schema Markup to help you get started!

Adding schema markup to your homepage means your website can be the authoritative source of information for Google’s Knowledge Graph, rather than relying on a Wikipedia page (which you don’t own) or your LinkedIn or Twitter profile (which you only semi-own). 

But wait, didn’t we say above that the information shown in knowledge panels comes from trusted sources like Wikipedia or LinkedIn? This is another area where structured data can help! As you build your homepage schema, be sure to use the sameAs property to link to the appropriate Wikipedia page, LinkedIn profile or Twitter profile and leverage the additional E-E-A-T of these resources. Information about your organization should be consistent across all connected sources, and better yet, if those sources link back to your entity home you create an infinite loop of credibility. Everything is connected!

Advanced Tip: use the schema.org property type knowsAbout within your Person or Organization markup to link to an external vocabulary URL, such as Wikipedia, to connect your structured data to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

While Wikipedia is often used by Google to populate knowledge panels, control over your knowledge panel is key for your credibility. So, managing the information internally and through schema markup is the best route to take.

How long until my knowledge panel starts showing on Google?

The timeline for your knowledge panel to appear varies. If you’re relying on a Wikipedia article for your organization, your knowledge panel could appear in a few days. If you don’t rely on Wikipedia, it could take a few months. In this case, it’s better to wait so you have more control over the information appearing in your knowledge panel.

How do I claim my knowledge panel?

Before you can claim your knowledge panel, you need to be verified by Google as an authorized representative of your organization:

1. Ensure that you have a Google account and, if not, create a new one
2. Go to Google Search
3. Search for yourself or for your organization (the entity you are representing for the knowledge panel)
4. Scroll to the bottom and click Claim This Knowledge Panel

When you click on the option to “Claim this Knowledge Panel”, you’ll be redirected to Google Search Console. Learn more about claiming your Google Knowledge Panel here.

Why should my brand have a knowledge panel?

We’re used to seeing knowledge panels for prominent brands in search results, so if your brand is missing a knowledge panel, you may not appear as credible to users. Your brand will be able to capture users at different parts of the customer journey and funnel by providing information about your organization through your knowledge panel.

Helping you get a knowledge panel for your organization is only one of the many benefits that come from structured data markup. We’ve helped customers like SAP and Sharp Healthcare increase their clicks, impressions and click-through rates for organic search traffic through structured data, with strategies tailored to each brand’s online business goals.

The post How Schema Markup Helps You Gain or Enhance a Google Knowledge Panel appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

While this reality does not exist today, elements of it do, and evidence to how the “futuristic” parts are really more reality than fiction.

I never went to a site to shop, I merely asked for the information I needed to make a decision, reviewed the styles based on my personal taste and look and then proceeded to make the transaction all while never landing on a retailer’s website, or browsing their catalog.

This change requires companies to start managing their brands for machines. Machines like Google, Bing, Alexa, Siri, and extending as far as a Tesla car or your connected fridge. It means that marketers have a new role, they need to not only think about their brand in the context of how humans understand your content, but also machines.

This was the specific topic of a panel I chaired at Retail Week’s Tech conference in London, UK where Wendy Stonefield of Deloitte Digital, Nick Wilsdon of Vodafone, and Dawn Anderson of Move-it-Marketing shared how we saw the world changing.

“Brands are still spending large sums to build, promote and portray their brands as they wish them to be perceived across various channels. Proctor and Gamble is at the number 1 slot of the spenders with an impressive $7.12 billion in 2017, a collection of 17 auto brands spent $51 billion, and internet companies are rising through the ranks of spenders – such as Alibaba, Tencent, Rakuten and Amazon who is number 11 with a budget of $5 Billion ahead of Ford Motors, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.” says Wendy Stonefield of Deloitte Digital London.

Building, managing and sustaining brand image is more important than ever, but more and more challenging in the world where the customer experience is becoming fractured and owned by Google, Amazon, Apple, and not the brand itself.  

Loss of the Customer Experience

There is plenty of evidence that supports that brands are losing control of the customer experience. Here are a few that illustrate the change and I believe are support for where things will be going.

Job Search

If you do a job search in Google, you see a list of jobs for your area or discipline, can filter based on needs (full time vs part-time), and also keywords. But here’s the kicker, if you choose a filter, Google takes you directly to the job post to read the details!

We see the same behaviour for Events, and answers to common questions.

Health Information

Over the years we have seen the knowledge panels and answers in search evolve. Today, if you do a search for a specific medical condition, for example, Hashimoto’s disorder, details, and common questions are listed directly in search.

Product Research and Purchase

When searching for products, if you are a visual buyer, you can find out information about the product, the price, reviews directly in the image search results. The impact is that the research is being done off your website, so there is no evidence of interest until they purchase or don’t.

It makes sense that Google wants to keep you in the search results as long as possible, since the longer you are there, the more ads they can display, and the more money they make.

Voice Search

Don’t believe me that the customer experience is moving away from your website? OK, let’s talk about Alexa. Amazon has done a great job getting us excited about asking Alexa questions, having her build our shopping list, or playing “We will Rock You” for dance parties in the kitchen. What we haven’t all realized is that Alexa’s presence means that we are informing Amazon of our preferences, family habits, and are being provided with very easy access to a single ordering channel. As a working parent, I can’t help but revel at the experience of creating my personalized shopping list and having it ordered, never having to get out pen or paper, or leave my home.

I believe that Google and Amazon are only at the tip of the iceberg with this trend. We know that Apple is playing already in the voice assistant world with Siri, Google too with Google Home, and that Facebook are working on their voice strategy.   Microsoft recently announced how they are using Bing across their customer experience to bring data from search, email and the desktop into results.

Challenges for Retailers and Large Organizations

Retailers are already struggling with the changes of the current internet with online brochures/flyers, ecommerce, and social. The largest retailers not only have to keep up with the pace of change across channels, but they also have the challenge of being large, slow and complicated. Their size alone makes it difficult to keep up.

And now they have to figure out how to manage their brand for the machine channel?

Wendy adds, “The  introduction of voice search, the Internet of Things (IoT), Chatbots, are all there for the taking or breaking of brands.”

The challenges are real. How do you get a large organization to be nimble enough to change, and move quickly to take advantage of these changes, while bringing value to the organization in the process?

Nick Wilsdon from Vodafone, shared his biggest challenge in trying to be agile in this very fast, evolving “machine channel” In his role as the Head of Search, he is challenged with finding ways for Vodafone to show up in search in Google, but also in voice, on Alexa. Simply put, his challenge is Data.

“Data is spread out and siloed. For example, the team built a well-received Vodafone Alexa Skill  to let pay monthly customers to retrieve their bill amount, question bill differences over the month and find information on new services. However, this application currently only works for accounts paid monthly and not pay as you go (PAYG) or B2B customers.”

“In addition, driving change is slow. To overcome this, we come up with small tasks that move things forward and celebrate their achievements. For example, organise a hackathon with your developers over pizza. Create an agile environment, where teams can try new things and use the outputs to show executives the business value in managing the brand for these new channels.”

One of the key challenges is ownership. Is this new world of brand marketing a Marketing Initiative or IT.  Dawn Anderson of Move-it-Marketing explains that “there are so many technological choices and options afforded to organizations, and at various stages of maturity, often knowing which is the optimal path to take is overwhelming.”  So where should you start and who should lead it?

How to Start Building a Foundation for the Machine Channel

In my 15+ years working with Enterprise customers at Cisco and now at Schema App, I am a big believer that wherever you start, you need to be able to show value quickly, to support ongoing investment, and also to keep the teams engaged, and motivated.

Start with Structured Data

Marketing teams have an easy, high-value opportunity to help Google, Alexa, and other machine consumers understand their content using the advanced SEO strategy called Structured Data (aka Schema Markup).  

What is Structured Data? In 2011, Google, Yahoo and Bing created a vocabulary called schema.org (a machine language), to help them understand content on web pages. This vocabulary enables companies to translate their content into machine language, aka code, and as a result of doing this translation, Google rewards the website with features in search and better-matched traffic because the content is fully understood.

We experience these enriched search results through review rich snippets, images in search, prices in rich results and more.

In November 2017, Gary Illyse from Google stood up and said, “[Add] structure data to your pages because, during indexing, we will be able to better understand what your site is about.” SEMpost

Today, Google, Bing, Alexa and others identify features as a result of embracing structured data, and we only see these accelerating. In the recent months, we’ve seen Google release new features, such Media, Speakable, Podcasts, and Fact Check. With Speakable being a specific feature to enable control on what is an answer is Voice Search.

Brands can leverage tools like Schema App Highlighter, or built in Apps in their Ecommerce Platform to add schema markup to content on your site you want customers to find, and therefore want the search engines and voice to understand.   Many of these solutions require little to no IT involvement, empowering marketing to start managing the brand for machines, and speed to value.

As a result of taking this first step into managing your brand for machines, there will be tangible benefits such as increased organic search traffic, increase clicks, higher customer engagement and perhaps the opportunity to reduce paid Ad investments all while starting to future-proof the brand.

Voice Search Alexa Skill Pilot

Nick Wilsdon of Vodafone said it best, buy a couple of pizza’s and a couple of developers and build something simple. What should you build? We recommend looking at the top questions customer service teams get and turn them into a skill. Often companies are already answering these questions on their phone system (IVR).  One digital marketing company, decided to create an Alexa Skill to answer the top questions in their area of search expertise, so that they could showcase the value of owning that answer.  Retailers might start with answering questions about their locations opening hours. Something I can imagine asking Alexa as I sit on the couch browsing clothing in search results.

Take Control of How your Brand is Understood by Machines

We have lost control of the customer experience, and it is only just starting. Retailers and Brands can start taking control of this new sales and marketing channel with some advanced SEO tactics, and through experiments to show value, and the experience of the future.

Marketers have a new role, they need to not only think about their brand in the context of how humans understand your content, but also machines.

If you need a hand getting started with your structured data strategy, we’ve helped customers such as SAP and Keen Footwear drive more quality search traffic to their websites. 

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