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

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

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

Does Schema Markup help SEO?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Schema Markup a search ranking factor?

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

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

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

Can bad Schema Markup cause ranking loss?

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

What constitutes “bad” Schema Markup?

It could be markup that…

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

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

Some ways incorrect Schema Markup can impact your rankings include:

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

Can duplicate Schema Markup affect rankings?

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

What is duplicate markup?

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

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

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

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

Can there be two Schema Markup blocks on one page?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Search Console

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

Search Results Performance Report by Search Appearance

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

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

Schema Performance Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are, however, some strategies to consider:

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

Supporting you on your Schema Markup journey

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

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

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

Google has continued to expand the properties around Product structured data, enabled Merchant Listing experiences through structured data, and provided more opportunities for web publishers to enhance their Product rich results with more information like return and shipping details.

Additionally, Google can now award Product rich results even without structured data. This, in theory, might sound great. But the problem is that even Google can get it wrong sometimes.

So what do we do when our Product rich results aren’t showing up as expected? Let’s jump in.

Different Types of Product Rich Results You Can Achieve

Firstly, it is important to distinguish the types of Product rich results available as this might modify how you tackle correcting the enhanced search result.

When reviewing website performance on Google Search Console, you’ll see three different types of Product search appearances in your performance report:

• Product results
• Product snippets
• Merchant listings

Product Results = Product Snippets + Merchant listings

Product results are an all-encompassing view of performance around your Product rich results. This can include Product rich results awarded directly by Google, Product rich results awarded through the use of structured data, and Merchant listings results.

Product Snippets

Product snippets are a type of Product rich result that are awarded through structured data. They typically include information such as ratings, reviews, prices and stock availability.

Example of a Product Snippet

Merchant Listings

Merchant listings, also known as merchant listing experiences, are another type of Product rich result that you can achieve through structured data or through Google Merchant Center. They tend to have more detailed information than product snippets and can show up in the Popular Products, Shopping Knowledge Panel and Google images section of the SERP.

Example of a Merchant Listing Experience

How To Determine If Your Product Rich Result Isn’t Showing Up Correctly

The answer is simple, but often overlooked industry-wide.

The easiest way to determine if your Product results are not showing up as expected is to simply find them on the search engine results page (SERP). This should provide you with all the details you may need to determine if the rich result achieved is aligned with your product details.

So, is that it? Assuming you’ve reviewed your Product rich results on the SERP, everything looks good and your traffic is increasing, then yes, it’s as simple as that!

But, let’s say your Product rich result is not showing up the way you want and you want to correct those issues. In that case, here are some of the common Product rich result pitfalls and what you can do to fix them.

Common Product Rich Results Mistakes

1. Not utilizing structured data

Google has the ability to grant Product rich results on your behalf. However, giving away control of your search appearance means you might not always get your desired display.

In our experience, we’ve seen Google award Product results to blog pages based on a price stated in a headline, or target an incorrect price on a Product page with different prices that varied depending on membership standing.

Adding Product markup to your pages is the first step to regaining control over the information you want presented on your Product rich result in the SERP. This means that you’ll need to add Product structured data to all your product detail pages and manage the markup on an ongoing basis, which can be tedious if done manually. At Schema App, our Highlighter tool allows SEO teams to automatically create and deploy Schema Markup dynamically to thousands of pages at once. If you struggle to implement and manage your Product markup at scale, we can help.

As previously mentioned, Google can award your pages the merchant listing experience based on the data in your Google Merchant Center feed. If you are not relying on structured data for your Product rich results, you should ensure that the product information on your Google Merchant Center feed is accurate and up-to-date.

2. Not utilizing the recommended Schema.org Product properties

Do you have an aggregate rating for your Product that is not showing up alongside your pricing information? Are you hoping to show off some of your shipping or return details?

All this comes down to ensuring you’re incorporating the recommended properties from Google’s Product feature guide. In the guide, Google lists all the result enhancements that you can achieve for your Product rich results by adding the relevant content and recommended properties in your markup.

For example: If you want to highlight your offer of free shipping with your product, you can include the shippingDetails property in your product markup. Your Product rich result will then showcase the free shipping offer.

It is important to follow each of the examples to determine which result enhancement is best suited for your pages and how you want to stand out in search.

3. Highlighting incorrect information

As a user who makes informed decisions based on details provided on the SERP, it can be disheartening to see the information presented on the rich result differ from the information displayed on the product detail page.

Examples of this could include indicating an incorrect price, incorrect aggregate review values or counts, and stating a product is in stock when it actually isn’t. This can easily happen when you implement structured data manually on your site and make updates to your content without updating the structured data accordingly. More commonly known as Schema Drift, this mistake can impact the accuracy of the information shown in your Product rich results and reduce your rich result eligibility.

These are challenges that need to be addressed within the structured data. If you notice your Product rich result displaying incorrect information for any of the required and recommended properties, it is important to revisit your Schema Markup to avoid any possible manual action levied against your site for presenting incorrect information.

The Schema App Highlighter can help you overcome the issue of schema drift by creating Schema Markup templates for similar page sets. Your Schema Markup will update dynamically based on the content on the page. Contact us to learn more.

4. Not correcting errors in GSC

If there is an error with your structured data, you’ll likely see it in the enhancement report on Google Search Console.

The product snippet and merchant listing enhancement reports in Google Search Console will show you:

1. Valid items that are eligible for product rich results
2. Valid items that could be improved in appearance
3. Invalid items that are not eligible for rich results and the reason for invalidity

Improve item appearances
Items that show up in this category are valid items that could be presented with more features if more recommended properties and content were included.

This can be viewed as an opportunity to ensure you’re calling out those properties where content permits. It is quite common, however, for Products to have a list of “issues” in this section because most product pages will rarely include all the recommended properties and content for those properties.

Invalid items
Items that show up in this category are invalid items that have issues preventing Google from using your structured data. This will render your page ineligible for the rich result until the issue is rectified.

If you see any invalid items on your enhancement report, you need to revisit the product markup on those pages and ensure your markup, at the very least, includes the product’s name, and either a review of the product, an aggregate rating, or a price.

5. Not being more semantic with your product markup

Search engines are shifting to semantic search and it is important for your organization to include as many details in your Product markup as possible and be more semantic with your Schema Markup.

You can be more semantic with your Product markup by linking the entities on your page to other entities on your site. For example, you can link your Brand to your Product markup under the brand property. This tells search engines that the product on this page is maintained or associated with your brand.

You can also be more semantic by linking entities on your page to external authoritative knowledge bases like Wikipedia or Wikidata. For example, if you offer free shipping within the US, you can link the USA wikidata page (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30) using the sameAs property to the DefinedRegion of the shippingDestination.

That way, search engines have a clear understanding of which destination you offer free shipping to.

Linking the entities on your site and beyond can help you develop a knowledge graph and provide search engines with more contextual information about your organization. It can also future-proof your organization for a more conversational style of search through AI chatbots like Google’s Search Generative Experience, ChatGPT or even your own chatbot.

Consider how users might engage with a chatbot where they request a product that has a certain pattern, free shipping in the United States, and is a suitable gift for a female – these can all be informed through Schema Markup!

6. Not monitoring performance

You might’ve reviewed the mistakes we covered above and not made any of them. But that does not guarantee improved performance with your Product rich result.

E-commerce is a competitive space and your customers’ purchasing decisions could easily be swayed – both positively and negatively – based on the enhanced results provided in the SERP.

If you find your click-through rate declining when a Product rich result is awarded, you need to analyze the factors that might be influencing performance and run experiments to determine whether it needs to be corrected.

Example 1: If your product listing page contains poor reviews and you’ve included aggregate rating markup on that page, your Product rich result is very likely to showcase these poor ratings and reviews. Buyers could see the rating on the SERP and choose not to explore your product further, thus reducing clicks and click-through rate to your page. In this situation, you can consider removing the aggregate rating markup to see if your click-through rates improve after.

Example 2: If your product is expensive and you have a high price tag on your Product rich result, at first glance you might see your traffic decline. But you should also consider whether the decline is impacting your website conversion rate. Having users qualify themselves might not be a bad thing as long as it doesn’t affect sales. In fact, it might better align with user intent and lead to higher-quality traffic for your site.

At the end of the day, your rich result performance should align with your desired outcomes. If it isn’t aligning with your organization’s goals, you should consider enhancing it with different information or maybe even targeting a completely different rich result as a whole.

Scalability of Product Rich Results

Despite all of Google’s recent rich result changes, Product continues to be an exciting rich result to pursue. However, you should consistently monitor how your products are showing up in search to fully maximize your performance through this rich result.

Many of the recommendations we’ve provided can be easily tackled on a page-by-page basis. But if you’re having difficulty finding a scalable solution to help you drive performance through your Product rich results, Schema App can help.

Get in touch with us today to learn more!

The post 6 Common Product Rich Result Mistakes You Might Be Making appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

FAQ rich results will only be available for “well-known, authoritative government and health websites”. Other sites won’t receive FAQ rich results “regularly” (which is not the same as saying “ever”). We have yet to see what Google considers an authoritative site or health site, but this is one of the many questions we endeavour to answer in the coming weeks.

How-to rich results, on the other hand, will exclusively appear on desktop and no longer be visible to mobile users. That said, with Google’s mobile-first indexing, websites should still include HowTo markup on both their mobile and desktop site to achieve the How-to rich result on desktop.

Even though this change will not have an impact on search rankings, websites that leverage FAQ and How-to rich results will likely see a decline in traffic and impressions from these rich results on the Google Search Console performance report.

This announcement garnered strong reactions from the SEO community, as many mourned the loss of some of their best-performing (and content-heavy) rich results. In response to some of the tweets, John Mueller referenced “the tragedy of the commons”, and other SEOs remarked on the overuse of FAQs, in particular, as “spammy”.

Independent of abuse / over-use, things can change on the web / with users / with focus shifts, and it’s important to clean up from time to time. (And it’s a good reminder to read up about the tragedy of the commons :-)).

— John Mueller (official) · #MaybeABot (@JohnMu) August 8, 2023

But Mueller also recommended SEOs “really focus on structured data to make your pages eligible for a specific treatment in search. Additional structured data can be useful to understand the content better, but [he] wouldn’t assume there’s a visible effect / ranking change.”

What Schema Performance Analytics is Showing

We are monitoring the industry data from Schema Performance Analytics on a daily basis to see when the changes announced take place.

We have seen varied results after August 8th. We have seen drops in FAQ performance in some of our clients.

As of August 14, we’ve seen a decline in FAQ performance on mobile for customers in the Healthcare Industry, while FAQ performance on desktop remains stable. Stay tuned for more updates on FAQ performance.

Schema App Perspective on this Change

Here are our key takeaways from this change:

1. Focus on targeting a diverse range of rich results.
2. Continue adding connected schema markup to support machine understanding.
3. Create quality content that prioritizes a human audience.

These three recommendations are already considered best practices here at Schema App and what we already work on with our customers.

Focus on targeting a diverse range of rich results

At Schema App, we’ve seen lots of fluctuations from various rich results over time. As such, we always recommend diversifying the rich results in your portfolio.

Google’s goal is to provide searchers with the best quality results, and we’ve seen them make countless changes to the algorithm or the SERP to inch closer to that goal.

Whenever Google makes a change like this, we’ve been able to detect the drop in performance and test solutions to help our customers overcome them. For example, FAQs not being granted unless questions matched keywords exactly or videos needing to be the main content of the page to achieve a Video rich result. Our approach to this announcement is no different.

FAQ rich results have historically performed well for many of our customers. It brought more website content to the SERP and allowed the inclusion of HTML to improve the readability of the answers and embed hyperlinks. We will continue to monitor FAQ rich results to see who Google awards this rich result to and look for opportunities for our customers to qualify for it.

In the meantime, our customer success managers will work closely with our customers to identify other rich result opportunities and ways to improve their content to achieve a wider range of rich results.

Continue adding connected Schema Markup to support machine understanding

At its core, Schema Markup is a code that helps machines better understand the content on your page.

As Google and Bing accelerate their AI search capabilities, they will need to overcome the challenge of AI hallucinations to achieve a reasonable level of efficacy. By adding Schema Markup to your site, you can provide search engines with reliable, structured content that they can use to train and hone the accuracy of their Large Language Models.

Google might have eliminated the FAQ rich result but there is still an opportunity for your organization to appear in their Search Generative Experience (SGE).

If you want Google to provide an accurate answer regarding your organization in their new AI search experience, adding robust, semantic Schema Markup on your site is necessary. Doing so will allow your organization to generate a marketing knowledge graph from the content on your site. AI search engines can then use this knowledge graph to provide users with more accurate information about your organization.

Conclusion

We will be sharing more insights on the situation as Google rolls out the changes to FAQ and How-To rich results in the next week. Our team is also actively testing various alternative solutions to ensure our customers continue to see great results from implementing Schema Markup.

If you have more questions, please reach out to your assigned customer success manager or support@schemaapp.com.

The post Changes to FAQ and How-to rich results on Google appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

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

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

What we do know:

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

Opportunity for FAQ optimization 

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

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

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

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

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

The questions with the FAQ markup on the article were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Performance Analytics vs Google Search Console

Schema Performance Analytics provides similar data to Google Search Console, but with the added ability to dig a little deeper into the data with different visualizations and customizable reports. We put an infographic together to explain these benefits:

With SPA, you are able to see performance (clicks, impressions, rich results) over a myriad of visualizations. You have the flexibility to select one, two or more time periods and compare how metrics have performed over the periods selected. You can also compare how different search types, search appearances, and branded vs non-branded keywords have performed over time.

You’re able to see the growth of your schema markup efforts over time with high level insights.

All of these insights can then help you to enhance your website content, so that you’re actually using structured data opportunities to inform your content strategy. Many users have reported using the data from SPA during their periodic reporting, comparing data from specific marketing periods and also identifying their highest performing Schema App templates.

Learn more about Schema Performance Analytics here.

Why Schema Performance Analytics?

At Schema App, we love using data to support our customers and to help them reach their online business goals. That’s why we created Schema Performance Analytics! Use the data to:

• Identify structured data opportunities on your website
• Use structured data opportunities to inform your website content strategy
• Quantify the results of your schema markup efforts

Who is Schema Performance Analytics for?

Schema Performance Analytics is offered to enterprise-level customers with growth mindsets, looking for a scalable structured data reporting solution. This expert tool empowers your SEO team to visualize the performance of their schema markup efforts, and to use that data to inform their content strategies.

Are you ready to unleash the power of structured data through Schema Performance Analytics? Reach out to your customer success manager to get started!

If you aren’t yet a Schema App customer, we’d love to help you reach your structured data potential. Let’s start building some meaningful connections.

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

The Rich Results status reports identify any errors in your structured data that could be preventing content from being eligible for rich results in search engine page results. 

What has changed in the Google Search Console rich results status reports?

Google Search Console is not reporting on any new errors related to rich result eligibility. The recent change is specifically adding more information about errors it already checks for, including:

• Invalid attribute string length
• Invalid attribute enum value
• Invalid object
• Type conversion failed
• Out of numeric range

What’s exciting is that these additional details may not have been exposed in Google’s now deprecated Structured Data Testing Tool (SDTT), which has been replaced with the Schema Markup Validator (SMV). Google is helping to make these errors more actionable for SEOs, so that we can ensure that our structured data is valid and eligible for rich results.

That being said, eligibility does not mean that Google will always reward your content with a rich snippet, but you are setting your content up for the opportunity to be awarded with one. You’re doing all you can from a technical standpoint, but you should also focus on building more credibility with search engines to set your website up for long-term success. For example, by increasing your E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness), Google will start to understand how your website and business overall relates to entities in its knowledge graph. This streamlines Google’s ability to match a user’s search query to the most relevant content from your site!

We keep an eye on updates to Google’s structured data documentation so that you don’t have to! If you’re looking for help with your structured data implementation, we’d love to hear from you. 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 New Error Reporting in Google Search Console appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

The general rich results Search Appearance group captured multiple rich result types, including those that didn’t have their own breakout reports, in Google Search Console. This particular group is no longer required since Google now provides reporting for specific Search Appearances, including Event, HowTo, FAQ, and many more.

So, why are we so excited?

1. Specific rich results reporting adds clarity

Grouping data for rich results isn’t ideal since each type may have different behaviours. Plus, Google was opaque when it came to explaining exactly which rich result types from their search gallery made up this amalgamation of performance data. Frequent users of GSC found that the Rich Result category was not a summation of all specific Search Appearances, nor did the numbers consistently match specific rich result types. Even when there was evidence of some kind of equivalence, there was almost always a discrepancy in the numbers.

Here is an example of data discrepancies with the “Rich results” category. The Rich results clicks match the Product results category, but the impressions differ.

2. Utilize specific reports for your content strategy

Removing the Rich results category from reporting means the remaining Search Appearances can be used more explicitly to inform content strategy. This is especially useful since you’re now able to compare the performance of different Search Appearances. This makes it easy to measure the impact of applying structured data to certain types of content. Not sure if your content team should invest in more FAQs or more HowTo’s? Wondering whether Review Snippets will yield a better ROI than basic Product results? Add the markup to a sample of URLs and compare their clicks, impressions and click through rates.

Here is an example comparing the performance of Product and Review Snippet rich results on an ecommerce site.

3. More specific reporting is on its way for Google Search Console

In the same announcement about sunsetting general rich results, Google also said they’d “keep investing in adding more rich result types to Search Console”. There are currently 19 different Search Appearance types supported by Google, and we’re looking forward to any new additions they may have on the horizon.

We love digging into the data and seeing results from structured data. Google Search Console is an awesome resource for monitoring your structured data performance, but we also recommend our own analytics tools that can dig even deeper. Contact us to learn more.

The post Say Goodbye to the General Rich Results Search Appearance in Google Search Console appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

In this article, we’ll take you through:

• Measuring the Performance of Your Structured Data
• Capture your Starting Point
• Interpreting the Data
• Monitoring Rich Results with Enhancement Reports
• Next Steps
• Frequently Asked Questions

Note: If you’re looking for a more general introduction to Google Search Console, see Google’s documentation on getting started, or check out Hubspot’s Ultimate Guide to Google Search Console in 2020.

Measure the Performance of Your Structured Data

When you first log into Search Console, it will open with an Overview page, as shown below.

To dig into the search engine results page (SERP) data, click on “Open Report”. You can also access this information by choosing “Search results” from the sidebar on the left.

You will now be presented with the site performance for organic traffic. This includes total clicks, total impressions, average click-through rate, and average position. The default setting will display the last three months’ worth of data.

You can click on any of the squares to toggle their metrics on and off in the graph. For a cleaner result, we recommend starting with only “Total clicks” and “Total impressions”.

Capture your Starting Point

If you’re just starting to implement your structured data, we recommend benchmarking the current site performance trends to date. 

Google Search Console provides a 16-month window of metrics, which means there is always a three-month overlap with the previous year. This data can be used to measure year-over-year progress. You have a window of opportunity to record the data now so that you have a larger frame of reference moving forward.

Below we will outline how to apply filters to capture specific segments of your data.

Interpreting the Data

Google Search Console has several options for displaying data including by specific date range, page set, and search appearance. These parameters can be combined using filters in the “Performance on Search Results” view.

You’ll also find Enhancement reports which provide a breakdown of the health of individual rich results and their associated URLs.

Date Range

This filter allows you to segment the time period you want to explore.

By default, GSC presents data for the last 3 months, but this can easily be modified by clicking on the filter. Then, you can select a preset or custom date range.

Setting a date range that includes before and after you implemented structured data can help you measure its impact on performance. 

Time Period Comparison 

Google Search Console provides some predefined comparison periods. These can be found under the “Compare” tab within the Date range selection tool. To capture the largest amount of year over year data, select “Compare last 3 months year over year”. 

Due to how the years line up, sometimes the graph won’t portray the data in an easily accessible view.

To accommodate for this, you can manually select the comparison period (start and end dates) to align with the same day of the week (e.g. Saturday or Monday). This will provide a better-aligned view when it comes to gauging growth.

Page

The Page filter allows you to look at the performance of an individual URL, or a set of pages that have the same URL pattern. You can implement this filter by clicking the “+ New” button beside the date filter and selecting the “Page…” option.

Next, you can either copy and paste the URL of a unique page you’d like to measure, or a URL segment that represents a page set. Maybe you want to gauge the performance of all pages on your site containing /blog/ or /products/.

This is useful for assessing types that aren’t eligible for Rich Results or don’t have a related Enhancement Report. Have “Service” markup deploying to all pages within the /health subfolder? Just implement that as the Page filter to measure your results. 

Monitoring Rich Result Performance with Search Appearance

If a page is eligible for rich results, use the “Search Appearance” filter to display the performance of specific rich result types. We caution against selecting the “Rich results” filter. While Google’s documentation alludes to this category being a superset of all rich results, the numbers are often much lower than for individual rich result types. So, it’s best to filter by specific type, like “Videos” or “FAQ rich results”, to get a more accurate picture. 

TIP! Select specific rich result types in the Search Appearance filter for more accurate results.

If the pages weren’t previously receiving rich results, you’ll likely see a steep increase from zero. Comparing the clicks and impressions from these reports to those of the overall “Performance on Search Results” allows you to see what percentage of clicks and impressions can be attributed to rich results.

Monitoring Rich Results with Enhancement Reports

Enhancement reports come in handy when you want to assess both the validity and performance of specific rich result types. Currently, Google Search Console provides reports for the following features:

• Breadcrumb
• Dataset
• Event
• FAQ
• Fact check
• Guided recipe
• How-to
• Image License
• Job posting
• Logo
• Product
• Q&A page
• Recipe
• Review snippet
• Sitelinks searchbox
• Special Announcement
• Video

These Enhancement reports show the number of instances that are valid, instances that contain errors or warnings, and the number of impressions associated with each rich result type. You’ll generally see the number of impressions rise with the number of valid instances.

If you’re deploying markup to a large number of pages, the error and warning reports give you an overview of the health of your markup. These can either inform you that something in your markup is broken, or that a required piece of information is missing. 

These reports are broken down into types which can, themselves, be clicked on in order to see which URLs are being impacted. Once you’ve resolved any issues in your markup, you can click “Validate fix” to get Google to recrawl and revalidate.

Always remember, “Error” means you’re missing something that’s required in order to be eligible for rich results. “Valid with warning” means you’re only missing recommended properties. These instances will still be eligible for rich results, they just won’t include all the available features.

For more information about troubleshooting and resolving errors, check out Google’s documentation on Rich result status reports.

Next Steps

Now that you understand the basics of using Search Console to monitor your structured data, you can create and compare any number of segments to gather interesting data points.

The following list provides some ideas for how you can use filters to gather new metrics: 

• Calculate the percentage of impressions or clicks that your rich result segments are achieving compared to the sitewide performance. 
• Calculate the change in growth rate by determining the difference between the average month-over-month growth before and after structured data implementation. Optimally, this would use the same number of months before and after for an accurate representation of this change.
• Calculate the growth of rich results as a percentage of total growth by determining the difference between two time periods for both rich results and sitewide and then calculating the rich results difference as a percentage of the sitewide difference.

Google Search Console is an excellent tool with a lot of opportunities for customization. That being said, it does have a bit of a learning curve. Having pushed Search Console to its reporting limits ourselves (at least where structured data is concerned), we’ve been working to develop an automated way to answer the kinds of questions schema users want to know.

If you’re less interested in playing with Search Console’s filters and want an easier way to access schema-specific reports, contact us and ask about our Schema Performance Analytics.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if my Schema Markup is working?

You can test whether your structured data is valid on individual pages by using the Schema Markup Validator (SMV), which officially replaced Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool on August 9th, 2021, and Rich Results testing tool.

For sitewide validation, run your site through the Schema App Analyzer. The number of rich-result-eligible items can also be measured in Google Search Console’s Enhancement Reports, though it can take some time for these reports to be populated.

To measure the impact of rich results on site performance, apply “Search appearance” filters to the Google Search Console Search results report. You can also explore our blog post: How Do I Know If My Schema Markup Is Working? How to If you want to go beyond rich results to measure the impact of structured data as a whole, ask us about Schema Performance Analytics. 

What kind of SEO impact should I expect?

Implementing structured data makes your content eligible for rich results, and provides search engines with a deeper understanding of your content. By including it in your SEO strategy, you can expect to see an increase in digital marketing objectives like clicks, impressions, click-through-rate, and conversions.

For more information about the impact our clients have experienced, check out our case studies.

How do I get rich results?

Applying the appropriate structured data to your content can make it eligible for rich results.  Not sure where to start? Check out Google’s list of Rich Result Features for the required types and properties, and make sure your markup follows Google’s General structured data guidelines.

Still have questions? Contact Schema App to learn about our full-service enterprise solutions.

How do I fix errors in my structured data?

It’s very important that you check your schema markup so you can be sure that it is working hard behind the scenes for your website! While you’re waiting for the Google Search Console results to appear, there are a variety of tools that allow you to check for any errors or warnings that your markup may be generating.

We recommend the following:

• Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool (for single-page validation)
• The Schema App Analyzer (for site-wide validation)
• The Schema Markup Validator (to check for errors in your schema markup syntax)

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. 

The post How to Measure the Impact of Structured Data for SEO appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Assuming you want to know both, this article breaks down which tools to use, and how to use them.

Schema Markup doesn’t stop with deployment. By properly defining entities in your content through structured data like Schema Markup, these entities can be linked to a search engine’s knowledge graph. Knowledge graphs connect information from all across the web, and structured data helps search engines like Google contextualize your content to better match your site with search queries.

Your content can also be eligible for rich results in search, which can help your brand stand out from the competition.

For example, for two eCommerce stores selling the same product, if one displays the price, customer ratings, and reviews and the other does not, our eyes are typically drawn to the differences. This additional information can all be included in your Schema Markup as long as you follow Google’s structured data guidelines.

Test that your Schema Markup is working using the following methods so that your website doesn’t miss out on the opportunities of structured data.

Has my Schema Markup Been Successfully Deployed?

The first step is to make sure that your markup is on the page.

If you are copying and pasting the JSON-LD into the page, you can simply right-click on the web page, view the source and search within the elements tab for “LD+JSON” to see if the code is there.

If you are using Schema App or Google Tag Manager to deploy your code, it’s easier to use Google’s Rich Result Testing Tool for rich result eligibility and the Schema Markup Validator (SMV) for any errors in your Schema Markup syntax.

Alternatively, you can wait and check within Google Search Console to report on the rich results or features tied to certain structured data. This could take anywhere from a few days up to a month, depending on how regularly Google crawls your site.

For websites that populate the Schema Markup dynamically, e.g. using JavaScript, then only the Schema Markup Validator will show these results.

Dynamic Schema Markup requires the structured data testing tool to load the HTML and process JavaScript, something Google has supported for a couple of years.

If you create Schema Markup using inline HTML (e.g. microdata, RDFa) or the JSON-LD is created Server side, all tools should work.

Are There Any Errors in the Implementation?

It’s very important that you check your Schema Markup to ensure it is working hard behind the scenes for your website. While you are waiting for the Google Search Console results to appear, there are a variety of tools that allow you to check for any errors or warnings that your markup may be generating.

Schema Markup Validator (SMV)

The Schema Markup Validator went live May 2021, and officially replaced Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool on August 9th, 2021. Google originally intended the Rich Results Testing Tool to replace the SDTT, but following backlash about this change Google decided to incorporate validation tooling into Schema.Org to support SEOs as they test their structured data markup.

The Schema Markup Validator is based on the Google Structured Data Testing Tool and is essentially a Schema Markup checker. The service, provided by Google for the Schema.Org community, can validate Schema.Org based structured data embedded in web pages, otherwise known as Schema Markup.

The SMV has the ability to extract JSON-LD, RDFa, and Microdata markup, display a summary of the extracted structured data, and identify syntax mistakes in the markup.

Rich Results Testing Tool (RRTT)

The Rich Results Testing Tool supports all rich result features, and is most closely aligned with Google Search Console. This tool lists all the rich results one page may be eligible for, and—in some instances—shows you a preview of how your rich result could appear in the SERP.

It’s important to remember that the Rich Results Testing Tool only validates schema.org Types that are eligible for rich results in search. If you’re using Types that aren’t eligible for rich results, view the “raw” JSON-LD, to ensure it’s being crawled, but that’s it.

If you want a comprehensive view of all markup on a page, rather than only the types that are eligible for rich results, this tool is best used in tandem with other structured data testing tools.

Schema App’s Analyzer

The Schema App Analyzer validates markup site-wide, for up to 10K pages. Run the Analyzer on any site and discover JSON-LD, RDFa and microdata, even when loaded dynamically.

Once the site has been crawled, the Analyzer provides a comprehensive health report in the form of data visualization and a list of “Items Analyzed” by Type. Clicking “Show Details” for a specific item presents a list of each URL containing that item and a breakdown of any errors or warnings.

Since this tool validates schema.org syntax, it follows more stringent rules. These can guide your Schema Markup beyond just the requirements of Google features.

The Schema App Analyzer identifies markup that Google won’t be able to read as a result of site speed issues. If you see errors or warnings about “missing” properties that definitely exist on your page, you should investigate site speed to ensure all your markup is visible to search engine crawlers.

Ultimately, this tool provides a micro and macro view of the overall health of your markup, pointing out what to revisit for enhanced performance.

The Analyzer is available to all Schema App subscribers from Pro through to Enterprise.

Note: Be on the lookout for imminent changes to the Analyzer, as we are readying reports to provide new ways of understanding your Schema Markup:

• Schema Markup by Type
• Schema Markup by Error / Warning
• Schema Markup by Page Path
• Schema Markup by Google Feature

Moreover, an updated user flow and historical view of your data will show how your markup is trending over time.

Schema App’s Structured Data Tester 

The Schema App Structured Data Tester can be found in the “Maintenance” tab in Schema App. Enter any URL, and this tool will display the Schema Markup found on that page. It is the only testing tool that displays dynamic schema.org data and does not cache the results.

Having a testing tool integrated within Schema App improves your markup workflow so you don’t always have to go to another site to check your markup.

We recommend getting into the habit of using at least one of these tools when authoring your markup. It not only confirms whether it’s deployed correctly but also gives you an idea of the scope of your markup, allowing you to assess its accuracy.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an excellent tool for monitoring both whether your markup is valid, and the impact it’s having on site performance. For more information about using Google Search Console, check out our article How to Measure the Impact of Structured Data.

Frequently Asked Questions About Testing Schema Markup

How do I know if my site has Schema Markup?

There are several tools you can use to know if your site has Schema Markup.

Google Search Console provides insights into how Googlebot views your website. Within Google Search Console, you can check the “Enhancements” section to see if Google has detected and processed your structured data.

Schema.org Validator allows you to input a URL and check for Schema Markup. It provides a detailed report of the structured data found on your webpage.

Rich Results Testing Tool is another valuable tool provided by Google for checking and validating structured data on a webpage, specifically focusing on how it may impact search results. This tool will state whether the markup is valid to create an eligible rich result and whether any opportunities exist to improve the item’s appearance. From there, it also states whether there are any errors in the markup to identify what needs to be addressed to create a valid instance. This is particularly useful for websites looking to visually enhance their appearance in search using structured data.

Before you add custom schema markup to your website, it is important to review your site for any existing markup. Many SEO plugins like Yoast tend to automatically inject Schema Markup on your site. Though convenient, the markup added by these plugins tends to be generic and less customizable.

Therefore, we recommend checking to see if your site has any existing Schema Markup before you go ahead and implement custom Schema Markup that accurately describes your website content. That way, you can remove any existing markup added by any plugins and prevent duplicate markup issues.

Where do I start with Schema Markup?

When you decide to implement Schema Markup on a website, first identify what pages you want to optimize. From there, decide what part of the schema.org vocabulary will achieve the best organic search results and most Google rich results. Start with developing your schema strategy using our guide: How to Develop a Schema Markup Strategy for a Website.

Then, move to authoring and deployment. Schema App makes Schema Markup implementation and validation easy. Our expert tools help you mark up your content with structured data—no coding required on your part! Validate your Schema Markup using the tips and tools we mentioned in this article.

How do I find errors in my Schema Markup?

The first step is to make sure that your markup is on the page using the Schema Markup Validator (SMV). You can also use Google Search Console to report on the rich results or features tied to certain structured data. Another powerful tool is Schema App’s Analyzer, which validates markup side-wide for up to 10K pages.

What is the purpose of Schema Markup?

Adding Schema Markup to existing pages helps search engines find information and present it to users through engaging rich results. Schema Markup is code added to your website that translates content into a language search engines understand. This advanced SEO strategy can increase your E-E-A-T, improve your brand findability, and help your online business drive more quality organic traffic to your website.

There are plenty of helpful tools out there to gauge whether your markup is working. We have experience with testing Schema Markup for enterprise organizations and have created testing tools for testing at scale. 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. We deliver your online business goals using our structured data expertise and advanced technology.

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