Use structured data to highlight the uniqueness and specificity of your content

Martha says: "It's time to get specific. You want to showcase your uniqueness and structured data allows you to articulate that. It's all about specificity."

Should every site be using structured data?

"Everyone needs to be doing it. Back in 2015, when I first started doing this, it was for innovators but it's still here and it's not going away. Google continues to lean into it. In the last year, 52% of the documentation updates were specific to structured data. Google has used structured data to communicate around COVID, for example. We're seeing the different types evolve, and seeing Google participate actively in the conversations around schema.org. Look at what you need to do with it on your site, even if its small. If you want to be understood, and you want the search engines to reward you with traffic, then you should be doing this."

How can you make your site look unique in the SERP?

"It's about who your business is, and what makes your business unique. Who are you? What do you sell? What services do you offer? Then you need to consider how those services or products are different from your competitors. It's not that the structured data needs to be unique, but that you are articulating the things about your business that are unique. You don't need to focus on what makes you different from others, but make sure you're really clear about what you are. You don't just sell blue T-shirts; you sell blue T-shirts made with linen that are manufactured in Canada and have Bugs Bunny on the front."

How would you advise businesses to write about themselves?

"The About Us page is an area where you can articulate deeper things. Where the homepage describes what type of company you are, the About Us page is where you can decide what else you want to talk about concerning your business. What's most important is that you are not just doing generic markup across everything. You need to know what the page is actually talking about. I always talk about the five key pages in your site: Company, Products and Services, Locations, Key Content, and Q&A.

There should be a tight marriage between the content and the process of writing it. The people writing content are so important because they should not just be thinking about how to attract and engage with the user. They need to consider the title, descriptions, and the actual content, but also how to stand out and make a great first impression - to attract the user in search.

You need to make sure that you capture your uniqueness in the content on your pages and articulate the specificity of what you're offering. However, you also need to architect your content and your pages with markup data, to stand out in that first impression. Utilise the visual real estate in the SERP. Content writers and page architects need to think about that and come together to make a splash in search."

Do SEOs tend to incorporate markup data in their Company, Products, and Locations pages, but neglect their Key Content and their Q&A?

"It's wherever they're not thinking strategically about it or planning for it. Bring it back to the business goal of the website. Often, you need to convert new customers and get new eyes on the site. If you're writing content, and doing webinars and things like that, to drive demand, why aren't you making sure that those are standing out?

The company, the location, and the products are in the consideration phase. Think about what you are doing higher up in the funnel. You should be using structured data to attract people across that journey. You need to think further than the basic pieces. Consider what is strategic for the business and where you are trying to get new eyes and clicks. Those are the things you should be doing structured data on. It's just as important to have structured data on an evergreen blog post that brings in lots of traffic, as it is to have it on a product page, or page about the company."

Where are some of the key places, besides the rich snippets, that Google uses structured data in their SERP?

"They are thinking about the whole experience, and there are many different areas that they're working on.

FAQ is an area that we've seen Google play a lot with across this year. It's great because it's literally answering the questions that people have, and that's often what's informing content when you're thinking about the buyer journey. I love that Google is providing FAQs on specific questions people are asking. This goes back to the idea of getting super specific. FAQs allow you to not just answer a specific question, with a title description or meta tags, but to also give context. You can identify, and measure, what the user's next question is and what they want to delve into. It's a tool that you can use across any type of content, and you can make sure it is about the super specific area that you're trying to show up for.

Google is also evolving the experience around eCommerce. It's not surprising because more and more people are buying online. In terms of specificity, Google's adding into schema.org things like size, weight, version, and colour."

Is there a way to markup your content to show that a specific piece of text is the answer to a specific question?

"Absolutely, that is where Question and Answer come in. Historically, Google had 'speakable' as a beta, and that hasn't really moved. In 2019, they brought out How To and FAQ, which we're seeing become more specific, and those are the types of rich results that Google is leaning into. They are using natural language processing to extract it. We're seeing that throughout this year, where they started highlighting certain passages of text.

Google is also leaning into NLP for video. John Mueller specifically highlighted this in his Google I/O update. They are looking for clips, as being like a segment of text in a video. They're now saying that you can either highlight interesting clips within your video, or you can tell them how your video URLs are structured. They will then do natural language processing to identify important clips. This is another interesting area where they're using structured data, to allow you to inform their natural language processing.

It's not the first time where structured data has been used to provide guidance or instruction. With logos or images, you can use the structured data to state whether they are licensable. That came out in beta around 2019. Last year it started to include full pieces, where structured data can provide licencing guidance. You can see how Google's connecting their different services together. They're using structured data to instruct their bots. It's about more than just getting a rich result. You can give a broader understanding, make sure that Google understands the specificity, and tie-in to other technologies that Google is offering."

Is it better to always have a video answer as well as a text answer to a question, and if someone finds your answer in a video on YouTube or in the SERP, instead of on your website, is that not as effective for your brand?

"YouTube SEOs would tell you that you can help that by having things in the description that link to your website. With regards to structured data and content, John Mueller talked this year about how you can link things together, but he said that you'll usually only get one rich result. Personally, I've seen evidence that says otherwise - I've seen people get mixes of different rich results. We love that at Schema App because it's something that we can test, measure and be agile with.

Video is the example that Google used in their documentation. If you have recipe markup, and you nest and connect a specific video as being for a specific recipe, they will give you the video rich result, or the recipe rich result, for a search around that recipe. To mix these together, you should have a written answer as well as a video answer. Think about the different ways of engaging your audience. Someone might be looking for a video when looking for a recipe or they might be wanting to read it. Set yourself up, and future-proof yourself, for those different experiences.

This is a landscape where Google's changing very often. We're seeing lots of algorithm changes and lots of testing. You can use structured data to prepare your content to show up for these different types of rich results. Try to combine both video and text where you can and mark it up so that you can be very specific as to what the page is about, and how those elements come together."

What are a few resources for finding what structured data to use and how to implement that structured data?

"There's a gallery in the structured data documentation from Google. The documentation is a bit scary, but the gallery is a way for you to visually start understanding how you want to show up. That's a great place to start. In terms of figuring out your strategy, we have a webinar at Shema App with a step-by-step process on 'How to Develop a Schema Markup Strategy for a Website'. That will help you build your plan. It gives detailed examples for eCommerce, plugins, and WordPress, to help you understand how to start out. At Schema App we're passionate about educating the market about what's possible.

If you're a local business, we have a huge 'How-to Guide for Local Business Schema' that walks you through what's important there, and how to do that. If you're looking for broader, more enterprise case studies, under 'resources' on SchemaApp.com, we have a tonne of case studies that get into more detail on how to be really specific and how to connect your markup etc.

For implementation there are lots of different options. I'm a big proponent of plugins. You just want to understand which plugins do what for you and look for a way to automate the process. Schema App has something for WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce and Drupal. Yoast has options and there are other options as well. For doing it page-by-page, measuring, and copy-pasting the JSON-LD, look for some different generators. The Schema Markup Generator by Merkle is one that I recommend. They have a great way for you to fill in a form and put it in.

If you're looking at doing it at scale, with nested complexity, and making sure it's done in a robust and manageable way across any platform, checkout SchemaApp.com. That's what we do and what we're passionate about."

What something that an SEO should stop doing to spend more time focusing on schema?

"Stop creating generic pages, like category pages. Don't spend time replicating a certain page with the same content for lots of regions, or just changing a couple of keywords. You need to get more specific. You need to be creating the sort of curated content that's going to answer your users' questions. Look at the big picture. You don't need to be doing generic, basic curation at a category level. Instead, focus your time on using structured data to make that great first impression in search."

You can find Martha van Berkel over at a SchemaApp.com.