In this talk, Beth will give an introduction of what schema is, where it sits within a structured data framework, and its use cases. Then she’ll move on to the types that can be used or are no longer recognised by search engines. This will be followed by a hands-on discussion of how to audit a website, how to write the relevant code, and ways to implement and test.
36. Knowing the best schema for your website
• Search trends in your niche
• Competitor activity
• Creativity
• Cool & interesting content
@bethbarnham
70. Using JavaScript we were able to create IF statement’s to
specify when a set of circumstances appeared on page, i.e. a
product page with description, price, sku
Using the most common product identifiers
Using Shopify’s ‘open graph’ tags
Hey everyone!
My name is Beth Barnham, a Technical SEO Specialist at Liberty Marketing, Wales’ largest dedicated digital marketing agency. I’ve been in the world of digital marketing for around five years and found my love of SEO just over four years ago. I now specialise in technical SEO, and will be talking to you about schema, one of my favourite topics.
What exactly is schema? Schema refers to a framework that helps organise and interpret information, it’s also referred to as structured data.
It can take the form of a featured snippet to show more relevant, rich results for the specific search intent.
It’s a framework to convert unstructured data to something easier to understand for search engines. It connects the dots between what it thinks you mean and what you actually mean as a searcher. Search engines are intuitive and intelligent and are made up of millions of algorithms and machine learning practices, so making it easier to decipher specific code on your website speeds up the process.
Can be in various coding forms RDFa, microdata or JSON-LD
Tells search engines the context of what you’re talking about
Simply write, check, implement and leave to work its magic.
Ping emails from search gallery for new versions
Continuous improvements in
Google Search Gallery Beta
Helps to set targets within your strategy
Schema is adaptable and customisable.
It doesn’t matter what your niche is, there’s a type that will suit your audience
Whatever is going on in the industry or economy you can signal to Google what’s happening with a piece of structured data
As an SEO or digital marketer you don’t have to be technical and know lots of code.
There’s loads of learning resources to aid whilst you write your own, and you can implement using a custom tag in GTM – of which we’ll explore further on
What do you want to achieve?
If it’s visibility you want to achieve then the blogPosting, Article, HowTo, Recipe types are all areas for content strategies which will increase visibility and feed into your keyword strategy
If it’s conversions, then using types such as Event, JobPosting, Product to all meet the latest Google search gallery guidelines would be the most important element.
If it’s for authority and trust, using Organization, LocalBusiness and linking your entity to other entities on the web is important to signal to search engines that your business is the same as other places on the web.
These all help with natural language processing and showing Google the context of your page and how you want it to be categorized as.
You’re essentially telling Google, oh hey, that’s me, yeah that’s me too, oh yeah I own that one as well. Google connects all the dots and increases your authority.
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2017/04/18/the-state-of-schema-org-what-are-the-biggest-challenges-surrounding-schema-markup/
But, as a marketer, why should you care? You’re busy, you have other targets, why does this need to affect me?
It’s both reactive and proactive because you can react to news and use Article posting on there for example or proactive by using Product schema on new product pages.
According to Search Engine Watch’s 2018 study, there is a 3x CTR increase when using structured data on your website
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2017/04/18/the-state-of-schema-org-what-are-the-biggest-challenges-surrounding-schema-markup/
There’s a massive potential here with a major gap in the market for structured data on the SERPs, so this really is why you should care.
How can we position the business differently to other businesses?
Supports your E-A-T and content strategy, relates your website to other entities on the web
Preparing for volatility or changes in the SERPs with a widely researched strategy is important
Accessible
Used in tandem with properties within the "Thing"
Properties are within a “Thing”, nested within one another, with arrays and nests of JS properties
Anything to describe an event such as theatreEvent, BusinessEvent, hackathon, live event, online event
Anything to describe where a place is located, physical extension, address, covidtestingfacility was added during the pandemic when non-medical facilities turned medical
Can also appear as jobLocation, serviceLocation
Any person, fictional, non-fictional, useful for blogs featuring people, book reviews, mentions of the person to signal to Google you’re talking about the specific ‘character’
Schema hierarchy and how things sit within the properties
Using event as an example to showcase the hierarchy and nested values within the event type
They occur as textual property values
Nested within is the businessEvent
Or foodEvent
Or PublicationEvent
Then nested within that is the broadcast event describing how the event is shown
Same applies to the OnDemandEvent
For the PPC job at Liberty, it shows like this in Google Jobs portal
Events show up
How creative can your campaigns be?
What FAQ pages do you have or can you create?
What are the search trends?
Keeping up to date with the news and trends, what can you use in your industry?
You’ve probably all had enough of banana bread after 2020, but go with me, using this phrase
There’s an average 17,000 monthly searches
Looking at trends, we see a spike in March, April time of 2020
That’s when the spike turned into 111,000 average searches, reactive if you’re a recipe site
We know that people look at inspiration for their gardens on a seasonal basis. This usually starts around spring time, March, April so we can plan for blogs and HowTo content to support this
Are there ‘evergreen’ topics that occur consistently in the news? What longtail phrases can be adapted for FAQs or QAs?
Are there ‘evergreen’ topics that occur consistently in the news? What longtail phrases can be adapted for FAQs or QAs?
For example how to make rice generally tend to stick to the same trend, no spikes, this is the bread and butter content for your site
Initial checks
Like any audit, we need to check what the current situation is with whats currently on the site
This is great if you want to do page-by-page or if you only have a few pages to do
But its suuuuuuuuuuuper slow to do it manually
Bring out the Frog
Configuration > spider
Go to SF
Configuration
Extraction and ensure structured data checkboxes are all ticked
Then run the crawl with those areas ticked
Export the file via file export
Save as all seo spider crawl types
Then go to file > scheduling
Click Add
Create a task, in general tab select a ‘task name’, describe what the task is in description, schedule what day and time you want it to be, and how often, weekly, monthly etc.
On tab 2, start options
Select crawler mode as spider,
Set the seed to the URL of the website
And then select the crawl config of where you want the scheduled report to save
Finally, in export, check Headless (this is essential to export via Gsheets)
Select a local output folder, and select the Gdrive account
You can opt to overdrive new files but I tend to keep them as new, timestamped
Then ‘export for data studio’ custom crawl overview, this will allow the data to be manipulated in DS
Then, go to DS and set up a new report, and select your crawl as your data source, and you can customise what you want to set up, for example, if you know the site only has JSON-LD URLs, you can ignore the RDFa tab.
You can highlight or customise the errors tab if there are some here
In the spreadsheet I’ve linked in the notes, we can paste in the HTML URLs from the crawl we just did, and the errors will auto populate, as well as the types (depending on how many there are) we can distinguish how many different types are on the page)
The second tab includes a live list of all the available types directly from the search gallery
You can then go through your URLs and decide whether they’re applicable or they meet the guidelines
This is best done in correlation with the Rich Snippets Testing Tool and schema.org validator
Writing using a text or code editor or use a generator such as JSON-LD playground
ALWAYS test, at every single stage
Validator,
Rich snippets testing tool
Search gallery
What we see here is the og_price variable which is set to pull the open graph title in Shopify. As this is usually set up to pull the variable of description, amount, currency, URL
We are able to pull all of these areas using this bit of JavaScript automatically to populate the page
When we run this, we always specify how we want the JSON to appear and in what format, this is a typical Product template
And this is what we get back, all of those variables we wanted to be extracted from the previous page, we get a nicely populated piece of Product schema with the image, description, product name, image, price, currency, SKU
To implement the Shopify example we can set up a Custom HTML tag in GTM, paste in the code from the following slides
Set a trigger on page view on page URLs containing products
Then for other, pre-written versions of schema we can create custom HTML tags in GTM to avoid using a developer
The trigger for this localBusiness is on page view when the DOM is ready (because that’s when the page has finished loading) on the specific contact URL
And this is how you get your audited site
![<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Beth Barnham",
"description": "Likes to adventure in the countryside, swim, and on a
rainy day, often found with a book in hand",
"jobTitle": "Technical SEO Specialist",
"knowsAbout": "Schema",
"worksFor": "Liberty Marketing",
"email": "beth.barnham@libertymarketing.co.uk",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"addressLocality": "Cardiff",
"addressRegion": "South Wales",
"postalCode": "CF14 5GJ",
"streetAddress": "Purbeck House, Lambourne Crescent"
},
"sameAs" : [ "https://linkedin.com/in/bethbarnham/",
"https://twitter.com/bethbarnham"]
}
</script>](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)