Two key takeaways:

• Search is changing – with Google making updates to the SERP, in Video, FAQ, and Product Rich results.
• Diversify your rich results and manage your Schema Markup to achieve optimal results in changing search landscape. 

Rich Result Changes in September 2022

FAQ Rich Result Changes

This past August, we reported seeing 42% of our customers experience a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results across mobile and desktop. 

This trend has continued into September as we continue to see 45.88% of our customers drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the first two weeks of the month and 43.53% of our customers have continued to see a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the second half of September. To date, we’re seeing this decline affect a wide range of industries. 

Healthcare is one of the industries that took a huge hit. 57% of our healthcare customers saw a further decrease in clicks and impressions this September. Google is no longer awarding the FAQ rich results for Physician pages, resulting in a decline in clicks for their FAQ rich results. However, many of these customers are still getting clicks from the FAQ rich results on their services and blog pages. 

We have yet to identify the cause of the decline for other industries but we do know that Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. FAQ rich results continue to perform, however, organizations should be reviewing their Schema Markup strategy to ensure they have a diversified portfolio of rich results.

This means reviewing the rich results your organization is achieving today and proactively looking for content on your site that is eligible for more types of rich results opportunities. Diversifying your rich results allows your website to keep performing despite Google’s changes and your team can quickly double down when a specific rich result is performing. 

Google preferring Youtube for Video Rich Results

We first observed a sharp decline in clicks and impressions for Video Rich Results in June, where 70% of our customers saw a decrease in the performance of their Video Rich Results on desktop devices. The Video Rich Results started to recover in August until this sudden drop again in September. 

In the first half of September, we saw 41.86% of our customers decline in clicks and a 53.49% decline in impressions for their Video Rich Results compared to the second half of August. 

In addition to the number of customers impacted, we also saw a big change in how Video rich results are showing up in the SERP. Google is preferring Youtube over other providers. 

Could this be a result of Google’s September core update or is it just Google continuing to refine the search experience? Stay tuned to find out. For now, we will continue to monitor the Video rich results every week to see how this trend progresses over time. 

Growth of Impressions for Recipe Rich Results

In August, 83% of our customers reported seeing the impressions for their Recipe rich results grow at an average of 3513% compared to July. 

This September, we are continuing to see an upward trend in the clicks and impressions for Recipe rich results with 60% of our customers seeing growth in impressions for their Recipe rich results. 

Google Updates in September 2022

More Product Search Features can be achieved with Product Schema Markup

On September 13, Google announced that merchants can now be eligible for merchant listing experiences simply by adding Product Schema Markup to their web pages, even if they do not have a Google Merchant Center account. 

This is awesome news! Now instead of just getting review ratings, price and availability, Product Schema Markup can help you achieve new experiences in search. With Google and Amazon battling for product search, we see this as Google’s move towards enabling more products to be shown on the SERP. 

Google currently has two broad categories of experiences:

1. Merchant listing experiences for web pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the site.
   
   In the past, these merchant listing experiences (Shopping Knowledge panel, Popular products rich result, shopping experiences in Google Images and Google lens) were only open to users with Google Merchant Center accounts and the product details shown in these rich results were supplied from the Google Merchant Center feed.
2. Product snippets for a broader set of web pages with product information (including pages that sell products, publish product reviews, and/or aggregate information from other sites).
   
   In the past, these product snippets were powered by schema.org Product Schema Markup. This is now no longer the case.

The Google Merchant Center feeds are no longer necessary for merchants to be eligible for these enhanced Product search features. Google has added more Product Schema properties (i.e. colours, size, material, pattern, audience, hasEnergyConsumptionDetails, etc.), which allows merchants to add more product details to their Schema Markup and achieve the rich results that drive traffic to their site. 

To help you monitor and manage your Product rich results, Google has introduced two new Search Console Reports. 

1. Merchant listing report
   This is a new report that identifies Schema Markup issues for free listing experiences in the search results. Merchants that sell products on their online should use this report.
2. Product snippets report
   This report replaces the previous Product report with adjustments related to the separation of the merchant listing report. The data from the previous Product report is still available within this report. The report identifies Schema Markup issues for product snippets in the search results. Sites that don’t sell products online but still publish pages with Product Schema Markup should use this report.

September Core and Product Review Update

This month, Google rolled out their September Core Update (the second broad core update of the year) and the Product Reviews Update. Both updates came after the Helpful Content Update finished rolling out on September 9, 2022. We have yet to correlate the impact of these updates with the fluctuations in the search results. However, we will continue to monitor and report on any fluctuations we’ve observed.

Google using Structured Data for Machine Learning

Marie Haynes and Alan Kent from Google released a podcast episode on Product Reviews this September. 

In the episode, Alan Kent said “They look at behaviour to decide if the review is helpful. The machine learning then looks at patterns to see if the review is helpful.” 

This wasn’t the first mention of machine learning from Google in the past year. 

In the podcast, “Structured Data what’s it all about” on April 7, 2022, Ryan Levering from Google said, “Most of our features over time migrate to that approach where we ingest it. Maybe we start with one approach where we’re just using ML. And then we eventually add markups so people have control. Or it’s the opposite way around. And we start– we bootstrap with markup in an eco-system approach where people are giving us data. And then we enhance coverage of the feature by adding ML long run.” (Ryan Levering @ 8:34)

To do machine learning, Google needs to broaden its data sources. They now get data from their crawls, Merchant Center, user clicks, and Structured Data.

Conclusion

Google is making a lot of updates to the algorithm and evolving how they are using machine learning to delight the user in their search experience. As a result of these changes, SEOs need to diversify their rich result portfolio, stay agile and be ready to evolve their content and Schema Markup to capitalize on the changes.

Schema Markup (aka Structured Data) helps search engines understand your content because you’re translating it into machine language. With Google relying more on machine learning, Schema Markup will increasingly be of greater importance for sites to communicate with Google’s machines and maintain their visibility on the SERP.

If you haven’t already implemented Schema Markup as part of your SEO strategy, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with us today to learn how Schema App can help your organization stand out in search through Schema Markup.

The post September 2022 Rich Results Weather Report Update appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

This August, we’ve observed some ups and downs in rich results across our customers. Our data scientist, Iram Fatima, and our Customer Success Team keep a close eye on the rich result performance across our customers so that we can dig into trends and explore opportunities for updating our strategy to capture more clicks and manage drops.

This month, we saw both ups and downs in several rich results including FAQ, Recipe and Video.

1. Decline in FAQ Rich Results

In the first half of August, 42% of our customers experienced a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results across both mobile and desktop.

We first observed this decline with customers in the Healthcare industry. But we quickly saw customers across a wide range of industries with a similar downward trend on their FAQ rich results. We will be reviewing them weekly to see where the trend goes over time.

However, other fortunate SEOs have also reported seeing zero changes to their FAQ rich results.

I just checked several client sites that receive a lot of impressions and clicks for FAQs and I’m not seeing any drop. Just my 2 cents.

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 17, 2022

2. Improvement in Recipe Rich Results

Thankfully, the weather in the Structured Data world isn’t always gloomy.

83% of our customers in the healthcare industry observed a huge spike in Impressions and Clicks from their Recipe rich results in the first two weeks of August. These customers saw clicks grow at an average of 1030%, and impressions grow at an average of 3513% in comparison to the last two weeks of July.

3. Improvement in Video Rich Results

In other good news, we’re seeing 58.46% of our customers recover in clicks or impressions for their video rich results on desktop since the sudden decline in June when we saw video rich result volatility.

Earlier in June, we saw 70% of customers drop in clicks and impressions for their video rich results on desktop. In July, that drop was synonymous with all our customers. We hypothesized that this drop resulted from Google’s core update in May, affecting how Videos were shown on the Search Engine Result Page.

Is this the result of Google’s adjustment period after the May core update? We’ll continue to watch and explore the SERP composition.

4. Helpful Content Update

Last but not least, Google released a blog this month regarding their upcoming ‘Helpful Content Update’ as part of a broad effort to show more unique, authentic information in the search results. The goal of this update is to ensure people see more original and useful content that was written by people with expertise on the subject.

Here are 3 main themes we’ve identified from this upcoming ‘Helpful Content Update’:

1. E-A-T will play a huge role in this update

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Since 2019, Google has confirmed that E-A-T has been an important part of their algorithms and page quality rating.

One of the key factors affecting E-A-T is the Author E-A-T. Google has suggested that content written or produced by (real) people who have historically written about the topic will see their articles improve in ranking.

For example: Medical advice articles with high E-A-T should be written or produced by medical professionals or organizations with appropriate medical accreditation and expertise. The content should also be updated on a regular basis to reflect the latest findings.

Tip: You can use Structured Data to define the person’s authority (including their degrees, affiliations, etc) and connect those author profiles and details to the articles you are publishing.

2. You can use Structured Data on your high-quality content to better articulate the details of a topic

Sites that rely on tactics like keyword stuffing and bot-generated content to drive traffic are considered to have a search engine-first focus. These sites seek to produce content that would allow the page to rank rather than producing helpful content that would satisfy the searcher’s needs.

Sites with a search engine-first focus will likely see a significant drop in ranking after the upcoming “Helpful content update” as Google starts classifying the content as unhelpful.

How can you communicate the quality of your content to a search engine? 

Earlier this year, Google shared in their Search Off the Record podcast episode “Structured data: What’s it all about”, that they use structured data to help search engines understand content uniqueness.

Deploying structured data to the high-quality content on your site will allow search engines to better understand your content and how it relates to other parts of your website, or products.

Interested in learning how you can use structured data to highlight the uniqueness and specificity of your content? 

Watch our CEO, Martha’s ‘SEO in 2022’ podcast with Majestic to learn how you can markup your content to stand out in search.

3. Focus your site on providing specific content that answers the question

Generic websites that write about a wide variety of topics may also find it tough to rank after this update. Google has stated that the update will reward sites that have E-A-T on the topic. Focusing your site on a specific topic can position your site as an authoritative figure on the subject matter.

Google’s focus on rewarding sites that answer questions and meet the searcher’s intent is not new.

We’ve seen the search results focus on specific topical pages. Over the last year, we’ve seen generic and not specific enough category pages perform poorly.

Tip: You can identify topics and questions that people are searching for through Google Search Console Keywords, which in turn allows you to offer better, satisfactory answers to your searcher.

If the questions revolve around a specific topic, that’s even better! The topic could be about your services, products, industry problems or more. You can compile these questions and create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on your topical page to allow that page to be eligible for an FAQ rich result.

Conclusion

We are excited to see Google evolving the way rich results are shown in various parts of the search experience.

In addition, they are also updating their documentation to make certain rich results more accessible. This August, Google updated the Article structured data guidelines to include all articles, not just AMP Articles, in the Top Stories Carousel. More on this next month.

These changes mean that you have to manage your structured data actively, monitor the results and be ready to capture new opportunities as they arise. This is what we love doing at Schema App. We look forward to sharing our findings and helping you stay on your toes so that you can continue to navigate and succeed in this world of structured data.

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