Schema Markup Essentials

it's peter mead and hello and welcome to the australian search marketing academy today we have a really fun and exciting topic and an important topic schema markup essentials with judith lewis andrea of valpini and co-hosted by nick ranger and so we're it's good to see people joining the webinar we can see people from all over the world from people who got up in the middle of the night like jenny hill and many others so that's great it makes it it really makes it worthwhile us doing this especially during these crazy times where i won't mention the c word but we're all doing our best and we're all diving straight into seo but today we have some amazing seo people with us and i would love to introduce each person separately i'm going to start with nick ranger nick is a seo specialist at studio hawk overseeing digital strategy data analysis content site architecture for large enterprise and local business and uh nick focuses on data driven results and i've worked with nick myself and i've seen she does a mean technical seo audit and uh so welcome nick ranger how are you today i am fantastic thank you so much for having me really really excited to be on this because um as i think we're all here to kind of explore a little bit more structured data is exceptionally important it's how we show authority around our websites and to web crawlers and it can really really make a huge impact in the long term so excited to get stuck into it great thanks for co-hosting and now i'd like to introduce judith judith lewis is a renowned seo and digital marketing consultant with over 20 years experience pre-dating google yes i was there too and working with some of the world's largest brands she's a regular speaker around the world on seo and has been recognized by her peers as one of the most influential people in the uk digital industry judith also judges the mina eu us uk and australian search awards and uh also helps with the london girl geek dinners and blogs about chocolate how can i forget to mention that bit judith how are you do you know strangely i haven't had any chocolate yet today and that's a that's a rare thing for me to say usually you know there's a little bit of squares of something dark for breakfast just to get that little bit of a caffeine boost so shockingly i haven't had my chocolate well that's okay we can have some later and um we'll have to hold off on that one can't do it on camera uh thank you so much for joining uh it's in the it's in the morning for you in the uk over here it's the uh late afternoon and same uh andrea thank you for joining i'm going to introduce you andrea volpini is a highly successful internet entrepreneur and the ceo of word lift and inside out 10 andrea also has 20 plus years of world-class experience in online strategies digital media and seo it's also been a co-founder of another company red link and andrea also has been so um so it's so important the the information andre has been giving us to do with schema and and appearing on lots of talks and contributing to the community so andrea thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me it's it's really a pleasure it reminds me when i went to australia a few years ago so i'm excited to have the australian audience uh attending this webinar and yes it's an interesting topic absolutely we'd love to have you back mate yeah we'll try we'll try to make something i mean as soon as the pandemic is over i'll get some get some kangaroos ready for you yeah take them out of storage i i should have some vegemite now you know it's early in the morning here so i would start i should start with yeah oh absolutely that's a good start quite all right yeah terrific so look we're getting people joining um but i think that you know there's so much to talk about and i've had a preview of these slides and i hope you know nick will also help me to co-host here because there is so much information regarding schema and this is why when we talked about this uh from two different perspectives uh judith yourself as a consultant and andrea as a tool provider and so this is um fantastic stuff so uh without any further ado um judith are you are you ready to start showing us what you have for us absolutely i'll i'll pop these in and i will pray that everybody can see them because you know what it's like you're virtual and on a stage it it shows up behind you so you know what's going on but on a computer you're just like well i'll throw them out there and let's just hope for the best so this is me hoping for the best so um this is me if you want to look me up on the search engine of your choice please do i do stuff online there you go um it's been a long time for me but schema is something that's quite new um what isn't new about schema is the attempt that we all have of creating relationships between things so understanding why something exists on a web page what it means and and search engines back when i started were crap at this now they're amazing at it i hope that's okay i hope i don't have anton getting angry at me and saying now i have to bloop you um but i'll do it i'll do the beeps it's not just about understanding things but it's understanding their relationships no matter how weird those relationships might be because sometimes you're like i don't understand why this is related to the other thing but okay google you know whatever but what we really want to be doing is planning and scheming with our schema i have been waiting so long to say that well said we want to scheme um with our schemas what we want to do is we want to plan things out and i'm a huge proponent of planning because if we don't if we if we fail to plan we plan to fail as my dad would say um so what we want to do is really map things out because it's too easy to get caught up in like looking at all the things online and looking at all the the stars and the prices and if it's in stock and how many calories a salted caramel fudge truffle has we all want one of those now except that they're 239 calories how big are these truffles and so you want to mark up all the things um or at least you know some of us want to mark up all the things and you go in and you're like oh my god schema this is amazing it has all the markup i could possibly ever want don't do that just just don't i'm just telling you now don't mark up all the things mark up the most important things but not all the things and there are some really really smart things that you can do they're really really useful things that you could mark up because you know it's not just about what is possible but what is practical and reasonable everybody's in love with faq schema right now um there's a number of different things that you can put on your page you don't have to be restricted to just faq schema and like breadcrumbs uh schema.org itself gives you a hugely easy way to surf through now i've put in here a search for product because you know ecommerce is one of the places that schema is often employed it's not just on blogs for recipes it's also products um and also a lot of other things it's it's not just restricted to those areas so there are lots of things that you could mark up with schema but you want to be thinking about the why because when you get into each thing this is the faq properties that are available for schema and one of the things that i work a lot in b2b i always forget about it speakable because we don't really have that many engineers going into their alexa devices or google devices and saying okay google um where can i buy a three-quarter inch torque made of tungsten or whatever you just don't get those kinds of voice searches for speakable answers but on faqs especially for product pages it's a great way to ensure that when somebody goes to google or to alexa that you can hopefully get your answer spoken out but just like we see here sixty percent of the time works every time because it doesn't work every time and this is why you have to be really strategic and tactical with your schema implementation it's not just about implementing it and thinking somehow magically it will work first of all it has to be implemented correctly but second of all it doesn't always stay so here in the uk this is an example of somebody that i'm monitoring in the uk the uk has lost all sorts of rich snippets on products in the run-up to christmas thanks google i'm sure that everybody in retail thought that that was a really nice christmas gift yeah i mean look at this yeah semrush doesn't start explaining that yeah it's just like i was looking at it because it's one of the things i monitor just for i say uh the s word and giggles uh see i'm trying to i'm trying to blooper myself um and i went and i was like you what uh and it just you've lost all of these featured snippets now the the error there is google not not um not google removing feature snippets but that's an actual google error but you can see it's gone from a huge number in the hundreds i think it was over 300 um at the beginning and it's just dropped straight off so just because you mark stuff up doesn't mean it'll remain but also just because it's there today does not mean it'll be there tomorrow i don't know why google decided to punish all the retailers out there but hey merry christmas guys you have to think of something else now let me think oh ppc maybe i wonder yeah that's not all but that's not all that google did to us man because you know they like to make things just a little bit more interesting for retailers so what did they do they introduced these fantastic not just shopping results you know with your lovely stars and your prices and everything they gave us a whole side panel where we can price comparison shop good luck to all those people who aren't the cheapest because now you're uh sol as we like to say also you can't click through to any of these reviews so let's say i wanted to go to overstocker or zulily or any of these i can't because those are not clickable i have to actually copy and paste i can't go to spy x night vision mission whatever night mission goggles on overstock or zoo lily i have to actually go there and then search again thanks google usability my butt [Laughter] you can see i'm very opinionated about these things but i think you know what it's all about is the fact that we have to be thinking about oh hello mom yeah no i'm on tv um so what can we do then uh because you know you think about it you've marked up all this stuff and then google went and came along and went hey we're just gonna take that away from you make it more difficult so what can you do um you can actually look at what's relevant for you to mark up so go in and look at the competition what's going on and oh wait that price is a lot higher than other people and hmm is two and a half stars out of five really helpful i mean do you really want to be showing that in search results are you really confident enough in your brand boardgamegeek.com that you really want to be showing those do stars down there maybe not and this is the risk i think is that you know they they get 3.7 out of 10 out of 38 reviews congratulations that's a new low at least for what's pulled through to the search results at a certain point i believe it's 3.4 they stop pulling it through because they're just like you know what this is embarrassing so we we do have to make choices about what we implement because you know if we don't make better choices then it's just useful so faq schema right everybody's hot on faq schema everybody's like in love with faq schema i see gambling using it a lot so we go through and i just what i did the search from google.co.uk in the uk on a uk ip and what do i care about whether u.s players can play real money on eu poker sites or if online poker is legal in the us i'm in the uk come on people think about this and this is the exact reason why we have to be careful about our even our faq schema because if we don't if we aren't perceived as relevant we're not going to get the click and and gambling online gambling is hugely competitive and you screw that up and you lose a click that's well ranking but we've just screwed up and lost the click so it means that your click-through rate on a number one or number two position goes down because you're not relevant oh it's a u.s site not relevant for the uk so we can do better than this we we don't have to just stick with this kind of bad implementation because you know dev time costs money and we really want to be adding value with schema we don't want to just do it because we can because let me tell you we can do it you know if you want us to implement schemas devs we can do it there's plugins there's all sorts but should we because dev time costs money so if you have to convince a boss or a ceo or a client about whether you should implement schema because you know dev time costs money then actually you can show the practical value oh oh very at the bottom there oh sorry babes did you forget your schema cause everybody else has it lady and oh i'm sorry but you look a little naked down there but also oops out of stock i'm not going to be clicking on that one so this is an example of schema where it actually helps the user so i know here that lookfantastic.com is not where i want to be going for my schema for my schema oh my god for my sanctuary five-minute mask um there are lots of plugins for schema and the steps that you can take to implement are super easy i swear very really very dark cody k please it's easy pay attention now now's the time uh so the first thing to do is don't panic because you know you're like oh dev time oh dear um well we've got to do something so don't panic about implementing stuff just really focus on what's possible this is a really cute um cute everything's cute in my world i'm old and i'm female um and i have nieces and nephews um so you can see here this is a really easy way to build some jason ld and all i've done here is like drop downs and i put a url in a picture image link um of a pint because you know i was doing this in the evening um so you can see here it is so easy you know that's a nice fun tool as well from uh yeah yeah don't be don't be intimidated it's it's not time is money people so you know think about it that one don't be intimidated it is super easy to do and you can actually get a plug-in as well there's lots of ways to generate your structured data to check it with google so you can generate anything you want but there is of course there are no guarantees right so if you are just because google says that you can do a thing does not mean that they're guaranteeing that it will show up in the search results so there are no guarantees with this like like you know ron jeremy says 60 of the time it works every time and we've lost schema in the uk so like don't don't think that just because you're marking something up guarantees it'll be pulled through it won't necessarily be pulled through we do use markup to get things like featured snippets um because we're helping google understand what it is on the page that they should be looking at so we'll use jump to links we'll use breadcrumb schema we'll use all sorts of things on a website to help guide google and help it understand the relationship and guide bing and guide yandex and all the others that have their own spiders but there are never any guarantees that it'll be pulled through so thank you very much that's me um and if you want to get me online afterwards like if you're too shy to ask now you can get me afterwards but thank you very much thank you so much that was uh a load of information amazing yeah you can go back and listen to it again i love that i love the gifts they were really yeah they really really tied into what you were saying i do try i am trying very trying ask my husband um but that i found some that really expressed what i wanted to say um and and it made it just a little bit more interesting than a dry presentation about about scheme well judith actually which was just going to um i was just going to quickly before we go on to andrea uh janine jenny hill she actually had a comment about what you were saying about the faq and some some drops happening for the products and uh judith we are having success recovering faq product drops by removing embedded html yeah i mean that don't forget the faq not that not faq the schema drop was all over so that that that's a semrush tool um overview of the number of opportunities for a um for an enhanced enriched search result and what happened to the number of search results that actually gave that um so it's not that faq in it in and of itself disappeared but uh all of the opportunities to have an enriched search result disappeared so that was removed by google from the search results it wasn't just faq it was everything for me faq is is challenging because google is not choosing the most relevant faq questions and answers to display in the search results they're still relying on you what you input and hopefully that will change in the future but as you saw with the best poker sites it can actually result in you not um getting the click so one of the things i advise clients is you have to be very careful i don't normally put embedded html within an faq i know that some people put links in there because they're not clickable unlike people also ask those are not clickable question answers so some people put embedded links in there to make it easier but that was a loss of everyone in the search result so nobody got anything nobody got a featured snippet nobody got anything so that that's that was what that was the first your first three are critical so try not to make them two countries specific like we saw on the poker site uh andrea do you have anything to comment on uh regards what judith has been saying so far so faq yes it's very very relevant topic i believe because everyone has been playing because it's so simple and uh immediately you know appeared on serp for for a few months but um reality is that faq tells the search engine this is an faq page which kills you know what other any other intent that is news related so my my uh my thing here is that we notice that on on news and media specifically when we add faq and we lose traffic from let's say discover and we lose traffic from you know news carousels top stories so faq can be you know very valuable um when you have like an evergreen type of content that has a high ranking and and and you believe that you can add some value on the serp with that content otherwise it's a waste of time so so we have to be very careful in the way in which we use it but but that has to do with the way in which google interprets the schema because because we shouldn't use faq you know because faq it's meant for faq pages it's not meant for an article it's been designed for a different purpose but then google has interpreted in a way that that the community got mislead and then everyone started to use it and then we got a lot of pixels but then we lost clicks and then and then things change again so so we have to kind of interpret the way in which the you know the vocabulary is designed and how google plays with it and and we saw i think you know the the the product panel you know the knowledge graph product panel this is the biggest thing on on serp you know judy does show us you know one of the biggest hit on on the serve for for anyone doing e-commerce so google is is getting all the information in one place and that turns into you know a negative impact in terms of clicks for all the retailers it's it can be very beneficial for the manufacturers but it can be very bad for the retailers and i think that they're still playing around um currently they are not releasing an interview about these topics so it's still probably you know within within the testing phase so we'll see let's see what we get um yeah that's yeah that's um a lot to think about right there nick what's your take on this yeah i kind of i kind of think like um you made a really good point judith like what you're talking about there is really pertains to like just rich snippets like but schemer in general um is a really really powerful way to be able to show web crawlers the authority of the sites i mean um you know we've got like organizational we've got like local schema we've got um breadcrumbs and now you know now that um uh real nexum real prev isn't a thing anymore like how do we show web crawlers like um you know where we want them to look how we want them to be able to like crawl through our sites um i've noticed that like um just simply just adding like um you know breadcrumb schema um i've seen like webcaws be able to like have much much better crawl rates throughout throughout pages i've been able to like make sure that users can be able to find things and toggle through pages a lot more um a lot more intuitively and there's like some really really great um like little chrome extension like the google analytics chrome extension and actually shows you how many people are clicking onto that without having to have like hotshot or anything like that but they really do use that as um a bit of an anchor to be able to find things so um i think that's that's a important one to kind of note that yeah while this is happening um not all schemer is relevant [Laughter] just because you can does not mean you should but it's so much fun general advice like in life just because you can't eat the entire pint of ice cream does not mean you should so you can apply it to anything and just like that chocolate we're holding out for yeah i think the whole bar does not yeah a little bit of discipline yeah and we um highlight the important bits there yeah and that's why planning is so important save it the flavor yeah you want to sing the flavor and the schema but yeah i've seen a lot of points come through about recovering schema just to be clear that loss was not faq schema that was not faq in in google search results so that that that loss that you're seeing in in um sem rush somebody one day will come down with a definitive decision on that and i won't have to say it twice um although it's a good branding thing um that was um i think that was featured snippets or something similar in the search results so it wasn't just faq that i was looking at for that i was looking at all of the enhancements like ratings which is the stars um stock levels all of that sort of stuff so product all the product markups as well as the um feature snippets and things like that that you're getting into google search results those are disappearing so for individual products like i think one of them was the the night goggles i looked at horrible histories i looked at all sorts of things so for individual products you've got that panel at the side where you can comparison shop sorry for the people who have high markups um but you've also got other other elements and other things like you saw best poker site you saw the faq being pulled through it's not it's not just those things that are being lost it's that nobody gets them not just somebody lost them nobody gets them so that was my point yeah around yeah what was the time period around that because i noticed like when um you know famously there was a little google glitch um all of mine like yeah a lot of the feature snippets that um like one of my clients were ranking for just completely disappeared so yeah that was that was recently so that that was just like that graph goes up to i think three days ago okay or something like that it's not that old so that graph is not old it goes from i think mid august um until just the other day so it's only about 30 days worth of data and it shows how it's gone from really really high numbers of every so that's the the number of opportunities to get something enhanced in the search results so semrush has a really great product where you can um you can monitor things a campaign so you can monitor a project and one of the things you can do is monitor your search results for certain keywords i think that's about 400 keywords and we were looking at about 400 or 600 keywords for that and across all those 400 or 600 keywords all of those search results were very few of them were still showing uh any sort of enhancements that are related to schema so ratings um featured snippets which aren't really schema but all those enhancements that could be pulled through like like links site links which are related to schema and that you mark up with breadcrumb um they were gone so it wasn't just faq it was nobody was getting anything yeah fair enough okay that's i mean that's the power of google right here you go giveth with one hand take away with the other so this is this is uh this is part of our bread and butter this is what we do we want to be found in google so we play google's game and this is this is part of life but i but i want to keep moving because i want to get onto andreia's presentation now first though i thought there's a question here which may be a good lead-in because uh one of our viewers has asked which plugins would you recommend well of course there's so many plugins i mean just just jump online and start uh googling uh for for plugins for a schema but of course we have with us uh andreia who's the ceo of word lift which is a fantastic plug-in so i would say rudo definitely give that one a go um so but anyway that was a nice little plug for your tool um and but you know there's so much you can do using semrush there are so many uh that helps you with your scheme so much there's so many tools available uh but let's please andrea i i'm so interested in what you have to say i've had a sneak peek at your slides and nick nick ranger i hope you can help me here uh co-hosting along with andrea because please take it away slides let's um let's find out what people need to know yeah uh these are way more boring than juliet so i will try to be fast but uh okay so my name is andrea uh i've been playing on the web for many many years and i focused on seo and automation of seo but here i want to start with a completely different perspective so i want to talk a little bit about why we do this why we why we decided to invest in metadata in the first place and there is this very beautiful concept by by a philosopher that works at the oxford university that described the semantic capital which is uh what we do to provide meanings to to the things in the world that we care about to semanticize and that's exactly the point here and that goes a little to the content that you published and to the data that you published because we are in the in the era of artificial intelligence and data it's it's really an important asset in in your strategy so so when you do when you do approach like schema markup and there are plenty of solutions so i'm not gonna recommend you just to go to wordlift but there are you know so many different ways in which you can embrace these vocabularies you should focus on you know creating the semantic capital creating the value in the data that you published and that this value can be can be looked at in so many different ways so in this presentation i just wanted to look at a little bit at the different layers of of of the return of the investment so how can you measure the return of the investment on on applying structured data because of course as we heard from from judith's presentation you don't have to mark up everything so where where should you start and so as as we have been working on these since uh well basically 2011 2012 we came up with the first uh um prototype of word left and so we started to use the schema vocabulary as as the vocabulary was was really being created um the arrow i at that time was very hard to measure and now there are so many different ways in which you can you know find the value in schema so here we have like you know six layers you know six ways that you can experiment with in order to understand you know what is the value so rich results can i um can i ask just just for a minute uh since we had one of our questions that was submitted to us by sam penny who's a senior seo specialist at optimizing and he asked this question specifically so i'm so glad you're you're going to explain this uh in such a structured way here six different areas for um figuring out your roi for schema i just wanted to interject there so i'm that's good please please go ahead andrea thank you yeah because because of course i mean when when we talk about a local business we might you know focus on on one aspect only when we talk about uh you know a large publisher we might look at you know different aspects so each one should take you know the best for his own online business and and of course you know content findability digital branding they might see you know things that you know have a kind of a hard to measure impact but in reality it's not so hard you know and so i will walk you through some examples and then of course you can stop me and we can discuss specifically about uh you know something that uh that shows up rich results yeah that's that's what we've been talking about till now uh so now we have you know enough data in the search console that you can filter the clicks and understand you know what what has happened since you know i i had a structured data markup and so here we see a travel brand in canada and you know the improvement it was measured from you know in terms of rankings in terms of click-through rate increase in comparison to the you know to the um average clicks of the site and so it's an easy way you know plug-in looking at rich results it's an easy way to measure your your return of investment because at the end of the day you know you want to understand the business value of of this implementation so you know it's a client that is booking a villa it's it's a it's a service subscription so what is the business value you're working for it's a new client that it's ringing at the door uh you know it's it's it's a booking and then what is the conversion rate that you have on the site because that allows you to kind of scope and say hey okay that's the amount of money that that we can generate if we bring you know more qualified traffic to it and then of course you know you have to analyze what would it take and you know would it take a few hours in front of a web page to create a json ld that i had on the page or or should i get you know a framework like uh i don't know word lift or or others a solution in order to get a more you know comprehensive solution it really depends it really depends on the type of target but then you can do the math and and get the roi and so you will understand that you can focus on on specific areas of your site where there is an actual business value and then well that's a basic formula so you take the total number of clicks and then you you you multiply by the conversion rates and then you multiply by the business value and then you can subtract the cost you know whether it's the seo that you engage with for implementing the schema or it's the tool that you're buying or you know whatever costs you have but but that's that's the calculation that you can use for understanding you know what's the business value so here we see like for instance you know the impact on news article and of course so we are in in this case in the context of a news publisher um and this is in europe and you can see that as soon as we plugged in you know the the proper markup for a news article which is it's not just about you know adding the markup of news article but it's a lot of other uh small parameters that that world refuses for providing for instance you know the images in the right formats and dimensions of the entities that are you know um detected in the text of the article but we could immediately see you know an uptake in terms of click that was pretty pretty um interesting in this case and this is uh how long does it take you know if if the site is large you know like in this case you know it takes less less you know a couple of weeks and you start seeing the results you can take you know you know maybe four weeks uh sometimes it can take more depending on you know the traffic volume and the search volume that uh that you're dealing with this is a very small photo blog this is a guy that i met a conference and that started to use word lift and then he showed me this graph and he said you know when i plugged the solution i started to have a lot more keywords i'm ranking for and that's that's another impact because of course we we mark up a lot of content uh with with our tool and then these makes the content more visible and so we generally see an uptake on the impressions which doesn't you know means that we're bringing you know directly more clicks but we get more visibility there are more keywords that we can work on so we are kind of making the content more more open for google to understand it and to to to bring it to the to the end user um this is a travel business this is a an ota uh in in the netherlands we've been working for now almost two years so this is like a kind of data from 2018 and 2019 and and and we can see the impact on the business here uh though you know the number of keyword that we are adding it's it's you know kind of limited but uh but the the audience that is landing on the site is more qualified and so the click-through rates and the conversion rate is improving because google is capable of understanding on the long tail type of queries that that that this is the good side for for that user and so it's driving more traffic and there's no rich results here i mean then of course we plugged also some rich results but in the beginning it was really about you know expressing the things that that that psy talks about and of course in in in the travel industry it's super important to connect you know the the lodging business with the intent of the user making the search there is a lot of a lot more than actually schema enables and um so this is a quote by by piece lasky um on on augmentation of query so this is uh like the way the mechanism that google uses for providing results that uh take into account um multiple keywords for that same intent um and and these in these patent structured data is mentioned as a way for google to expand the query to understand the query and to trigger a synthetic query that better answer the user request so let me show you an example when i ask for a ceo of word lift google is capable of understanding that ceo of world lift is under able penis myself and so it plugs in you know content about ceo of web live but it it also immediately gets content about andrea wilpini and that's you know this this disambiguation of the intent from you know ceo of a company into the person and rebel peony he makes you know a better serve but it also creates a better branding for for the person or for the organization so structured data it's not only a way for getting you know the stars or the clicks or a better click to rate it's a way for creating data that ai like google can use for talking about or interacting about your brand or your person and then of course here you know we start to see that you know these knowledge panels are composed no longer only by wikipedia but but from the open web and so we become you know a source of information for for for google and for other semantic search engine with our own websites and that's probably jason barner that a lot of is a lot of these examples where he can you know trigger a panel in a few in a few minutes now having said so is schema ranking factor no it's not um it's not a renting factor but it does improve you know the way in which the information is presented to the user and and that can start that yeah so um so that can stabilize your rankings um so you can see that in this example when we when we plug structured data we are able to you know makes the rankings more the position more stable um and and of course improve the click-through rates voice search this is another area completely different area of rai i mean there are a lot of companies that want to you know make the first move into into voice search well structured data is is a simple and easy way for you to get into the google assistant whether you're publishing news articles or recipes or how to's or faq as we discussed um in in the previous presentation you can immediately get into the into the the voice search results of the google assistant um speakable structured data this is very limited u.s only content has to be written in english but it works because it provides a way for for for search engines like google to understand this content is what i expect to be speakable from this specific article there is a cabal here it's very hard to measure voice today it's very hard to monetize voice for that matter and uh and and there is a big issue in discoverability in general so i have created several uh voice app on for the google assistant but it's very hard to bring the user to these apps and instructure data is actually one of the way in which you can trigger the voice response from google in a super simple way but yeah again i mean it does require investment in so if you want to use it just just so you know that uh you know you might get your entrance into the assistant but it's it's it's it's going to be hard to measure and do to prove results um and uh and yeah and that back to us it means that we have to focus on the content that you know can can really uh make a difference in your business so you don't have to mark up everything you have to mark up you know what what makes a difference um content structuring this is more for like you know the the mid-size businesses and you know people that have a lot of content we can use schema as a base for a content model and that means that we can use the same language that google uses for understanding the content we write about to organize and structure the content and therefore improve the reuse of this content and so here you see for instance this is a um a flyjet uh uh website that has been working for for uh many years now with wedlift and and here we have at the center the event for side by southwest and uh and then you see that the connection with the airports in the connection with the things to do in in austin and then the reason why you should fly with us and and so this creates kind of a topical cluster around the specific intent which is i to get to side by side west with my private charter and and it can be wrapped up by by by creating content using schema as a content model and these of course creates a lot more pages and so this is an example of a design blog that uh that has been uh adding a new index to all the entity pages that have been created by by word lift and then all of a sudden updated the plugin and removed the no index and so it got a lot of traffic because of course there is a lot of content when we start organizing and structuring stuff around schema this is another example we can plug schema markup into your google analytics so you can go out and say trends by semantic seo so what are the trends on on the world side for semantic seo and uh and and that means that we start looking at content not in terms of pages but in terms of entities and that is a tremendous advantage for instance if you are you know selling advertising because you can start saying hey i have this amount of traffic for semantic seo and this amount of traffic for artificial intelligence much like a social network would do and and then with these same data that you are creating you know we are starting to use also widgets in content recommendation so on the side we can recommend better content because schema is also used by our plugin for creating content recommendation these it's you know it just tells you that schema is not just for google schema is a way for creating you know this semantic capital that you can reuse for improve your business and that's pretty much all i have to say these are you know a few things that pitfalls and errors and and stuff like that that uh you might want to step in [Laughter] yeah that was fantastic thank you so much yeah what have you got nick yeah i'm just i'm just kind of blown away a little bit about um like basically just showing the data like how the change over time and the ctr and the difference and and what that could actually mean because um of course like you know we do this with um you know we add structure data with our clients and things like that but the some of that is just like i would really really like to like kind of accelerate their potential for that because i think at the end of the day like yeah in a lot of instances um you know what jesus was saying like people don't add structured data because it's like it's a resource issue and that's a huge one or um it's a like they're not technical seos and they don't really understand what it does or how it sort of works and i always kind of um what you were saying like it's almost like a philosopher trying to talk to you know an everyday layman about like how it works and what it means to mark it up as an entity and how those entities are categorized and um how they will relate to each other rather than just like but the contents on the page so therefore google should understand it um but it goes a little bit further than that um i yeah i i have one question um maybe just about word left as um as a plug-in or as um as its own um thing because it's also incorporating ai and a lot of ml um it's really really cool um i think one of the one of the pitfalls that i had was that like um it's a custom cms and so therefore um the challenge was like well we have to have a developer to be able to like build this out the code and things like that um so again it's a reasonable issue is there something that um what that does um or could do to be able to bridge that gap yeah yeah currently we have a javascript library so you you just ask the developer to add one line of code uh super simple and then and then you can build your graph using wordpress so we have a backend for editing the knowledge graph that wordle creates for injecting the structured data on whatever cms you have using wordpress so that's that's a very simple way that allows anyone to plug you know super advanced structured data on any website just using you know the the simplicity of a wordpress ui which i think for a lot of people would still be like what do you mean [Laughter] sorry but that's yeah yeah but that's that's really really interesting because then basically you can use um wordpress almost like your front end to be able to um mark up all of your entities to be able to build the associations um yeah that's really really cool and sorry i'm already buzzing about a client i want to test that with but um you like let's go back a little bit um sorry i'm kind of hijacking this because i have so many questions and i'm sure everyone else does too but um in terms of like with empty categorization um like what a lot of word left does is associating like with who the what the where and and who um um you know to be able to create um organized databases of those entities um you know obviously to try and like help the user experience like how um how how easy is that being able to um be able to see that as an seo to kind of help inform what to do and maybe what even to do next with content yeah i think that as an seo i mean if if i would if i would work with judit i would immediately ask student support for building you know the knowledge graph because you need the expertise of a content uh uh a domain expert in order to understand okay this is gonna be turned into an entity whether it's a product whether it's uh you know a local business so you need the content expertise to make the the decision that are required for saying hey this is an entity of this class and that's the beginning what do you think judith yeah absolutely it's you need the expertise of the subject in order to be able to establish what the relationships are otherwise you're you could make spurious associations that then break everything um and i have already seen one person asking a question saying oh i've tried to implement this but this is this doesn't relate to any to this product you know what what do i do so it it can be very confusing for people when they're first implementing schema as well so take it slow and easy don't start with faq maybe that's possibly a little bit more complex maybe just tackle something like breadcrumbs you know get your word from that breadcrumbs yeah breadcrumbs is a good example because you you get an immediate impact on the serve but you have to think content you have to think user you have to think about the navigation of your site because again i mean let's not look at schema as a way to get on the serp because that's that's what we are here for but the reality is that schema is a way for organizing your website and breadcrumbs is a great example for that but you've got um so breadcrumbs that's great look at there's a question that we got submitted earlier on from a person on linkedin and i believe you've already started answering this question andrea uh it's from veron mattel and he asks google search console showing errors either offers review or aggregate ratings should be specified uh so it's product schema okay and we see this we see this we see this quite a lot with these kind of errors coming through um and of course i'm sort of elaborating on the question a little bit here because everybody wants product schema they want the the reviews you know um but how how are we going to handle these kind of errors what's your take is there a quick and easy way to worry about these kind of errors yeah i think i think in in on linkedin i provided a json ld snippet for fixing the errors that's the quick that's the quick question that's the quick answer the the real answer is that uh is that uh you don't need to fake data you don't need to you know well first of all there is one important um things to be said google relies on the guides so the guides are way more important than the way that the tools are reacting so so you want to make sure that you you read google guides before testing errors on on the reach uh result testing tool or the the the good old uh structured data testing tool uh and a warning might be okay because i mean we don't want to provide data which is not qualified that that i totally you know would discourage you to do it uh so you don't want to fake data you don't want to create fake data just to remove the errors because it's not going to work oh you're spoiling all of our fun [Laughter] i don't know nobody probably remembers these things i'm old i've been around in this industry since 96. um so i remember not in 96 we didn't have schema in 96 but there was a time when a lot of seos were faking the ratings so they would have fake or false ratings fake or false reviews now that in the uk and in the eu is an issue because it's an advertising issue because you're purporting something on behalf of a consumer and it's a lie and in 2008 the uk brought in a law that you know results in a big fine or you know jail time um so don't do that kids uh but we used to and we used to abuse and one of the points on your your slide was you could get a manual penalty for abusing schema now i'm not saying this to frighten people into not using it but you know if you don't have do it if you don't have an aggregate rating if you don't have legitimate genuine reviews do not mark them up don't don't fake it in order to pass a test it's it's a lie it's a criminal offense in the uk i think it also is in the eu so um you know maybe if you're in america you're safe but um yeah over here don't don't fake that stuff up just to pass a google test yeah it's also a criminal offense for for all the ai that that can use your data besides google [Laughter] don't do that be respectful of the eye yeah the poor machines are still learning gpt-3 everybody's so thrilled about but it's still not not healthy i love jupiter it was crazy it was kind of like a guy on acid that you asked what time is it and he said the sky is purple and it's melting well you know you know i use it i use gpt2 for commenting on google core update because it was so you know illuminating yeah that's a good segue um because like the webmaster blog actually came out last year with um basically to say like um you you can't be you can't have any um like reviews that you basically own so if we see that we're not gonna consider it um don't do it and i think i think like when they they add that i think they're just wanting to have a little bit more clarity for um any you know webmasters seos site owners out there um about what they should do and what they should add yeah yeah yes well we've just got five minutes left so so perhaps um what i might do is go around and just ask for an impromptu off the cuff you know one thing that you would do nick ranger one thing that you would do with with schemer just a one minute grab one thing one thing oh my gosh well i think i've already said it um breadcrumbs is like incredibly important i think um just from being able to implement that um again it's really really helps with um like crawl crawlers going through your website being able to pass and understand it um and it's a really really good way of being able to show authority around your site um plus it also really really helps users to be able to go back click around and be able to toggle through category pages product pages and the likes so um again that's that's really really important great judith do you have do you have the one thing that you that our viewers can go away and do with schema besides don't fake it the so for me it's planning so as nick said it's breadcrumbs are so important because they help you understand your website if your website isn't actually organized in a way that you can mark up for schema your breadcrumbs then you're in trouble so plan everything sit down and don't be overwhelmed by schema.org the world is your oyster but sit down and look at your website and look at the competition and see what they've got and what is possible for you first and plan on only those elements first if they don't if no one in the serps have faq don't do that first do ratings do reviews do something else calories in your in your recipe if you're a big recipe blogger um look at what everybody else is doing first and then go the next step hmm great advice yeah so planning that's important um don't overreach to begin with um on andrea what would be your one thing that you would say to people to to do with schema right now so think of schema as the your site map on steroids it's a new it's a new way for for creating a sitemap for for search engine and machines but also also don't don't stop experimenting and because be be your own google be your own google you know think think about using this data yourself in the first place great and um nick ranger best place for people to connect with you and ask you further questions after this webinar yep twitter easily twitter i'm always on twitter um and if i'm not on it it's probably because i'm working or sleeping so yeah nick ranger seo on twitter or in linkedin or um um dot com to the unfortunate stuff what size nick i had to look at that today so that's why i know the euro off by heart thanks so much for co-hosting judith um is twitter the best place for people to ask you quick questions about schema or what's your best channel absolutely so twitter as you can see there i put my twitter handle at judith lewis woohoo branding for the win um you can you can contact me there or on linkedin if it's a longer question or if it's a longer question on twitter just ask and i'll i'll follow you so that you can dm me but ask away especially because we haven't even spoken about entity relationships that much right we haven't spoken about relationships and but there's not enough time there's two yeah there's too much you could do a whole hour on just that sort of stuff absolutely wow and cyber andy i can see your twitter handle right there and uh terrific and and i'm assuming that um uh that you're happy to keep the conversation going that type of thing on twitter yeah so i thank you all once again what a great uh webinar i think this is uh really great information for everyone and uh without further ado i will hand over to the next bit of information on the web that's not us thank you all and goodbye have a good night guys thank you so much

Channel: Semrush Live

Views: 1,723

Keywords: semrush, seo, structured data, schema markup, judith lewis, peter mead, nik ranger, andrea volpini

Id: RORK-d4Icko

Length: 60min 15sec (3615 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020