This past August, Google first removed How-To rich results on mobile. As a result, we saw a huge decline in clicks and impressions for How-To rich results across our customers. This updated announcement will undoubtedly remove all traffic and impressions from the rich result.

Why is this happening?

Prior to this change, content publishers would add HowTo Schema Markup to pages with instructional content that defined the steps needed to successfully complete a task. If appropriate, Google would then award the page with a How-To rich result that outlined the steps in the SERP.

However, we’ve often found How-To rich results to be somewhat controversial. On one hand, rich results were supposed to increase user engagement and drive click-through rates to a site. On the other hand, How-To rich results usually provided users with the answer directly on the SERP, resulting in a lower click-through rate. As such, How-To rich results were not as widely adopted as other rich results like product, review snippets and FAQ.

That said, How-To rich results still provided users with valuable information on the SERP and could help organizations improve their customer journey. So why is Google removing this rich result from the SERP?

In their announcement, Google mentioned that this was a continued effort on their end to ‘simplify search results’. This year, Google has made some significant changes to the SERP.

• They introduced Search Generative Experience (SGE) – their generative AI-powered search interface.
• They stopped awarding video rich results to pages that did not have a video as their main content.
• They stopped awarding FAQ rich results on both desktop and mobile for most websites and will only be showing FAQ rich results for well-known, authoritative government and health websites.
• They deprecated How-To rich results entirely from the SERP.

However, this begs the question: What does Google mean by simplifying search results?

Are they trying to declutter the search engine results page? They did reduce the visibility of video and FAQ rich results in the past few months, possibly because people were abusing them. However, the SERP is still littered with advertisements, making it tougher for users to identify the most appropriate result for their query.

Or could they be simplifying search results that SGE can also provide? As seen in SEO expert, Glenn Gabe’s tweet, the content from the same How-To was shown in SGE and in the first position in the SERP as a How-To rich result.

Ah, yes. But this is about the desktop version being removed. This is how it looked. See my listing below SGE (when HowTo was still there on desktop). pic.twitter.com/S1nqtYukNa

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 14, 2023

One of the glowing features of SGE is its ability to provide users with answers and additional relevant information that they might need. If you search up how to perform a task, SGE can provide you the steps to perform the task successfully and links to a few pages that also capture those steps.

If you search for the top Italian restaurants, SGE can provide you with a list of restaurants together with a map showing where they’re located in proximity to you, and links to aggregator sites that also have a list of top Italian restaurants in your city. These are just two of the many examples of how SGE creates helpful experiences based on the wealth of information on the web.

At its core, Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Rich results were first introduced to provide users with more useful information in search, help them make better decisions and find answers. It was also a way for Google to incentivize website owners to add structured data to their sites to help search engines understand the content on a page.

But with SGE providing the information in a simplified way, more rich results could be rendered obsolete in the coming years. That said, this does not mean that you should abandon adding Schema Markup to your site.

What should you do next?

Schema Markup helps machines understand and contextualize the content and information on your website.

Even though you will no longer achieve a How-To rich result on your page, you should still add Schema Markup to your pages to futureproof your organization for search.

This is a paradigm shift that requires SEOs to think about the value of Schema Markup beyond rich results. 

Over the past few years, search algorithms have shifted from lexical to semantic search. Instead of ranking pages based on keyword matching, search engines are ranking pages based on the relevance of the concepts and entities in the page’s content to the searcher’s query.

And how do you identify and define the entities on your website for search engines? You can define the entities on your website using Schema Markup.

By marking up the content on your site, you are helping search engines understand the concepts and entities on your website and providing them with contextual information about these entities. In return, they can better match your page to a query and ideally improve your ranking on search in the long run.

If you are interested in learning more about entities and semantic search, you can tune in to our recent webinar with Mike King or Schema Markup expert, Dave Ojeda’s latest interview on iPullRank’s Rankable podcast.

Generative AI search engines like SGE and the new Bing still face hallucination challenges resulting in inaccurate results. At Schema App, we’ve been advising our customers to think about the semantic value of Schema Markup.

Instead of implementing Schema Markup on a handful of pages for the sole purpose of achieving a rich result, you should implement Schema Markup across your site to define the entities and concepts on your site and link them to develop your very own marketing knowledge graph.

Knowledge graphs are a structured and organized information data layer that can help search engines to improve the accuracy of their answers and provide your organization with a control point to inform generative AI on your web content. Your marketing knowledge graph can also be reused for other AI initiatives.

As the SEO industry continues to see changes from Google and on search, organizations need to prepare to stay ahead of the competition. If you are looking to learn more about semantic Schema Markup, we can help.

Contact us to see how we can help your organization build a marketing knowledge graph and future proof your organization for AI search.

If you are a Schema App customer with concerns regarding the changes in rich results, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to see how we can support your organization through these changes.

The post Say Goodbye to How-To Rich Results on Google appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Schema Performance Analytics is Showing

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

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

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

Schema App Perspective on this Change

Here are our key takeaways from this change:

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

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

Focus on targeting a diverse range of rich results

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

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

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

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

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

Continue adding connected Schema Markup to support machine understanding

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Schema Markup, also known as Structured Data, is a standardized vocabulary that helps search engines like Google understand the information on your web pages.

What are the Benefits of Schema Markup?

When your pages contain Schema Markup, it allows search engines and AI powered machines to gain a deep, semantic understanding of your website content, which offers a host of SEO related benefits for your business.

Schema Markup also enables search engines to display your content as a rich result under certain circumstances. These rich results are displayed prominently on the SERP and include extra information about a page, like ratings and reviews of local businesses.

However, as rich results come and go, the one thing that remains consistent is the semantic value of Schema Markup.

Here are some of the top benefits of Schema Markup.

1. Help Search Engines Better Understand Your Content

Humans are great at inferring the meaning of online content. Google, on the other hand, has to teach its tech to understand your content using machine learning.

That’s why search engines need extra help interpreting the meaning and intent of your site content. You can assist them by adding semantic Schema Markup to your web pages.

Schema Markup is a standardized vocabulary developed by Google, Yandex, Yahoo, and Bing. As such, these search engines can easily interpret the Structured Data on your page, allowing the algorithms to present users with content that better aligns with their search intent. It also helps search engines be more efficient because their machine learning and algorithms are built to understand Schema Markup.

2. Build a Knowledge Graph and Re-Use It Within Your Organization

At Schema App, we do more than just generate Schema Markup. We utilize our semantic technologies to generate connected Schema Markup to build a reusable marketing knowledge graph. This knowledge graph can then be used to inform search engines or train your LLMs using structured information about your business.

When you implement connected Schema Markup, you are defining the objects in your content as individual entities with their own properties and relationships to other entities. Once defined, these entities can be connected with the people, places, things and concepts that other authorities have described like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google’s Knowledge Graph. Your Schema markup can even enhance your Google Knowledge Panel in search.

Building a knowledge graph using Schema Markup enables search engines to better understand the connections between your content, your organization, and other entities on the web. Search engines can use this information to infer new knowledge with greater context and accuracy.

At Schema App, we implement semantic Schema Markup and entity linking to assist customers in developing their knowledge graph. This knowledge graph enables search engines to effectively match your page with user search queries, driving higher qualified traffic and boosting click-through rates.

3. Be AI-Search Ready

Search engines are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to provide users with more relevant answers to their queries. By implementing Schema Markup, you can enhance search engines’ understanding of your content. This, in turn, enables them to accurately match your content with your target audience, ensuring a more precise and effective user experience.

In Google’s podcast titled, “Structured Data, What’s it all about?”, Ryan Levering shared how machine learning and structured data go hand in hand. When you take into consideration that machine learning is the building block for AI, an action you can take to prepare for more AI in search (such as Bard and ChatGPT) is to adopt structured data to inform the machine learning about your content and have it be fully understood.

By using semantic Schema Markup to develop your knowledge graph, AI can tap into this resource and be grounded in more context. This provides them with a richer understanding of your brand and its associated entities.

By developing your knowledge graph, you are creating AI search-ready content.

4. Control How Your Brand Appears in Search

Adding Schema Markup to your web pages lets you exercise greater control over your brand’s appearance in search, empowering you to shape and manage your brand image. One of the key advantages of implementing Schema Markup lies in its capacity to establish a robust control point within your Knowledge Graph, by enabling you to communicate essential information about your organization and entities directly to AI search engines.

Without structured data, search engines rely on algorithms to infer details about your business, which can lead to inaccuracies and misunderstandings. However, with Schema Markup, you take the reins, grounding and informing the AI systems with precise, structured data. By doing so, you mitigate the risk of search engine “hallucinations” – where the algorithms misinterpret or misrepresent your brand.

Imagine your website displays two prices for the same product: one for members and another for non-members. Left unchecked, AI search engines might not recognize the difference, potentially displaying incorrect information in the SERP.

This lack of differentiation can severely impact the trustworthiness and clarity of your brand. However, by clearly indicating which pricing you want displayed using Schema Markup, you can accurately communicate these distinctions, guiding search engines to present the correct pricing information to the users.

Schema Markup is your safeguard against such discrepancies, ensuring your brand and products are accurately represented and preventing any potential confusion for users.

5. Help You Stand Out in Search With Rich Results

When Google understands your Schema Markup, it can use this data to show your content as a rich result (also known as rich snippets) on the SERP.

A standard search result will deliver a title, URL, and meta description. However, rich results include captivating images that draw users’ eyes to your search result and web page.

In total, Google has more than 32 different types of rich results. You can classify your content as local business content, recipes, articles, event pages, and more. If you’re promoting an event, you can improve its visibility by adding Event Structured Data, making your page eligible to appear in the event experience section on Google.

Once you add Schema Markup to your page, you can use Google’s rich results test to see which rich result your page is eligible for. We also suggest using the Schema Markup Validator on Schema.org to detect any mistakes in your Structured Data.

If you want to ensure that your Schema Markup efforts align with your overall branding strategy, here are some examples of rich results you can consider using.

Review Snippets

Review snippets provide prospective customers with reviews and ratings from your past customers and help improve your brand’s credibility in search results.

Product

Product rich results reveal sought-after details like pricing, availability, etc. You can generate more leads and increase interest in your product offerings by providing consumers with this information on the SERP. Beyond the fundamentals, you can also expand your Product rich result to include price drops, ratings, reviews, shipping details and more.

6. Drive Business Results

Schema Markup is an SEO strategy that can provide your company with measurable results and a strong return on investment.

You can use tools like Google Search Console and Schema Performance Analytics to closely monitor how your newly marked-up pages are performing.

When implemented strategically, Schema Markup can:

• Help ensure that your content appears in search results for highly relevant queries. This means that the traffic you receive is more likely to be interested in your products or services, which leads to increased CTR and an overall higher likelihood of conversion and engagement.
• Make your search results more appealing and informative to users, leading to higher CTR. Rich results can provide users with additional information about your content, such as star ratings, prices, and product availability, making them more likely to click your link.
• Be particularly beneficial for local businesses. By marking up local business information, you can improve your visibility in local search results and map listings, driving foot traffic to your physical locations.

Achieving robust results with Schema Markup isn’t unusual. At Schema App, we’ve seen customers across a wide range of industries achieve great results with this SEO strategy.

For instance, SAP saw a 400% growth in clicks from rich results after working with our team, and Sharp Healthcare enjoyed an 843% increase in clicks in just nine months.

As more businesses recognize the benefits of Schema Markup, implementing it can give you a competitive edge. Your content will stand out in search results and provide a more comprehensive, informative, and trustworthy experience to users.

7. Attract Job Applicants

You can incorporate Schema Markup into job postings to help attract quality talent. By applying Structured Data to your job listing pages, your job posting will be eligible for display among Google’s job search experience results.

Top listings are displayed at the top of the SERP. If your listings make the cut, they’ll feature reviews, ratings from past employees, job details, and your company logo.

8. Improve Your Content Strategy

Chances are that you’re already investing heavily in creating SEO content, optimizing it for priority keywords, and engaging in other on-page SEO tactics to rank higher on the SERP. Unfortunately, your competitors are likely doing the same.

Fortunately, you can beat the competition and inform your content strategy by utilizing Schema Markup. Thinking about your content from the perspective of the rich results you want to achieve can help to generate ideas for new content or existing content. If you want your page to be eligible for a Review Snippet, you can improve your content by adding customer reviews and ratings on your site.

Start by looking at Google’s Structured Data Guidelines, then generate the required Schema Markup using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or our Schema App Editor. Once you’ve generated the markup, you can add the Schema Markup to your pages so your content can stand out as a rich result.

You can go one step further to create connected Schema Markup by linking the topic covered in your content to the Wikipedia or Wikidata page for the specific topic within your Schema Markup.

Read our step-by-step guide to learn how to develop a Schema Markup strategy for your website.

Start implementing Schema Markup today

The benefits of Schema Markup are undeniable.

When you add Schema Markup to your website, you’ll help search engines understand your content and make your pages more visible in organic search. In turn, you’ll increase your click-through rates and generate more organic traffic for your web pages.

Any business with an online presence can generate measurable results using Structured Data. However, to tap into the full potential of Schema Markup and stand out online, you must build, manage and optimize it as part of your ongoing site strategy. Otherwise, you’ll encounter issues like Schema Drift which hinder your ability to achieve rich results.

The good news is you can streamline the implementation and management of your Schema Markup by working with Schema App. We work with enterprise SEO teams to fully leverage the benefits of Schema Markup. Contact us today to learn more.

The post 8 Benefits of Schema Markup and Why It’s Important for SEO appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

By marking up your how-to instructions with HowTo structured data, not only will your content be eligible for enhanced Google features in search results but search engines will be able to better match your data to a user’s search query.

Required and Recommended Properties for HowTo Schema Markup

Google maintains documentation to explain exactly what is required for How-To markup. We’ve captured the required and recommended fields below. You must include the required properties for your content to be eligible for display as a rich result. Recommended properties add more information to your structured data, which could provide a better user experience.

HowTo

https://schema.org/HowTo

HowToStep

https://schema.org/HowToStep

HowToDirection

https://schema.org/HowToDirection

For the most current guidelines on required and recommended fields, reference the Google Developers Reference Guide.

How to Create HowTo Schema Markup

To help you get started, we put together the fundamental steps for creating HowTo schema markup:

Step One: Add the required properties for HowTo Schema Markup

Add the required schema.org properties for HowTo Schema Markup using our reference above. We recommend our own tools, the Schema App Editor and Schema App Highlighter, but there are many different options out there.

Step Two: Review your HowTo Schema Markup to ensure it follows Google’s Structured Data Guidelines

Check that your markup follows Google’s structured data guidelines

Step Three: Deploy your HowTo Schema Markup to the relevant pages

Deploy your markup. Google recommends using JSON-LD, which is also our favourite format for deployment!

Step Four: Validate your page to make sure the Schema Markup is working

Test that your schema markup is working using Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool and the Schema Markup Validator, which has officially replaced Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Read more about this change in our news post here.

This short video demonstrates the basics of creating HowTo schema markup using the Schema App Editor.

Learn how to create HowTo schema markup using Schema App with our how-to tutorial here.

Testing Your HowTo Schema Markup

Schema Markup Validator

The Schema Markup Validator (SMV) was modeled after and has officially replaced Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool (SDTT). Many SEOs still prefer the SDTT, as the SMV only validates your schema.org syntax and does not show your eligibility for rich results.

Rich Results Testing Tool

Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool helps you to see which rich results can be generated by the structured data it contains.

Frequently Asked Questions about HowTo Schema Markup

What is HowTo schema markup?

HowTo schema markup is code you can add to the backend of your website, explaining to search engines what your content is and what information you would like displayed in search results. When HowTo content on your website is properly marked up with structured data, you will be eligible for Google search enhancements like rich results, helping your content to engage with users before they even enter your website.

When should you use HowTo schema markup?

You should only mark up content that is visible on your web pages. If you have how-to content, or see an opportunity to add this content to your website, marking it up with HowTo structured data will make that content eligible for Google search enhancements like rich results. Additionally, you will be improving your E-E-A-T by demonstrating to Google your expertise in that subject matter.

Do you see opportunities for how-to content on your website? Structured data not only enhances your existing content, but SEO experts use rich result opportunities to actually inform their content strategy. If you’re looking for a way to stand out in search results and take control of what information is being shown about your brand and website, get in touch! We’d love to help.

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