Search Rediscovered: Adapting to the New World of Structured Data and Schema

Search Rediscovered
Adapting to the New World of
Structured Data and Schema

Schema Can Be
Information Overload

Be Like Megan
• Content marketer at heart
• New to advanced SEO techniques
• Does not know how to code
• Makes a mean pumpkin bread
• Teaches yoga classes at night
• Implements Schema like a boss
Copyright © 2019 Web Savvy Marketing ● Twitter @RebeccaGill

Structured vs. Unstructured Content
• Google has reviewed over 130 trillion web pages. Let’s look at that with actual zeros and ones
– over 130,000,000,000,000 web pages.
• That is a lot of content to crawl, digest, index, and rank for the search engine results pages.
• When a search engine crawler goes to a traditional web page it will find unstructured content,
images, and links.
• In many cases, this is just standard HTML, PHP, and CSS code that is used for displaying
content.
• This regular HTML code creates visible content, but it is completely unstructured.
• When real structure is applied to content, a search engine crawler doesn’t just see text and
code. The search engine now discovers data sets, entities, types, properties, values, and
actions.
• The search engine sees a colorful world full of details that help it digest this content, relate it
to the real world, and position in search to perfectly match up to a human’s search queries.

Schema 101
Schema.org
Collaborative
community that
provides a collection of
shared vocabularies.
Vocabulary
Vocabularies cover
entities and
relationships between
entities and actions.
Structured Data
Standardized format
for providing
information about a
web page.

Core Schema Vocabulary
614 Types 905 Properties 114 Values

In Google’s Own Words
Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page.
You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning
of a page to Google by including structured data on the page.
Structured data is a standardized format for providing
information about a page and classifying the page content.
Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to
understand the content of the page, as well as to gather
information about the web and the world in general.
Google Search also uses structured data to enable special
search result features and enhancements.
“

Google’s Promotes These Options
• Articles
• Books
• Breadcrumbs
• Corporate contacts
• Courses
• Datasets
• Events
• Fact checks
• FAQs
• How-tos
• Job postings
• Livestreams
• Local businesses
• Logos
• Media
• Music
• Occupation
• Podcasts
• Products
• Q&A pages
• Recipes
• Reviews
• Sitelinks searchbox
• Software app
• Subscription and paywall
content
• Top places list
• Video
• Voice search (speakable
text)

In Bing’s Own Words
As a content publisher, you can contribute to – and stand out –
by annotating your structured content.
Annotating your data doesn’t actually change the visible
content, but it does gives Bing valuable information on the
type of content you’re hosting on your site.
On our side, we put your annotations to good use, for example
by using them to increase the visual appeal of your search
results, or to supplement and validate our data sources.
“

Bing Promotes These Options
•Breadcrumbs
•Organizations
•Events
•People
•Products
•Offers
•Recipes
•Reviews
•Fact checking

Extensions for Schema
auto.schema.org bib.schema.org
Health-lifesci.schema.orgiot.schema.org

Examples of Healthcare & Lifesciences
Types
•Medical Condition
•Drug
•Medical Guideline
•Medical Web Page
•Medical Scholarly Article
Entities
•Signs and Symptoms
•Causes
•Risk Factors
•Tests
•Studies & Trials

Options for Implementing Schema
JSON-LD
JavaScript notation
embedded in a
<script> tag in the page
head or body.
Microdata
An open-community
HTML specification
used to nest structured
data within HTML.
RDFa
An HTML5 extension
that supports linked
data by introducing
HTML tag attributes.

Without Structured Data
Google Bot:
Text.
Images.
Links.

With Structured Data
Google Bot:
I totally understand this content.
I know exactly who needs it.
And I’ll give it enhanced results.
Place >
Hotel Room
Place > LocalBusiness >
FoodEstablishment >
BarOrPub
Event >
TheaterEvent

Structured Data = Beauty

A Lodging Business
Essentially the place that houses the actual units of the establishment (e.g. hotel rooms).
The lodging business can encompass multiple buildings or a simple place.
An accommodation
These are the actual objects (hotel rooms) that are offered for rental.
An offer
To let a hotel room (or other forms of accommodations) for a particular amount of money
and for a given type of usage (e.g. occupancy), typically further constrained by advance
booking requirements and other terms and conditions.
Moving Hotel Data from Chaos to Order

Microdata
RDFa
JSON-LD
Moving Hotel Data from Chaos to Order

Structured Data is About Relationships

Manually Created and Apply Schema
https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/header-and-footer-scripts/
Plugin Driven Schema
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ and https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/local-seo/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/seamless-schema/
https://schema.press/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-structuring-markup/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/schema/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/schema-app-structured-data-for-schemaorg/
Some Tools & WordPress Plugins

• One WordPress plugin will not manage all schema.
• You have to know what schema you need before you can search
and load a WordPress plugin.
• Examples of schema specific plugins are: local businesses,
recipes, products for sale, reviews, podcasts, videos, or authors.
• Plugins will most likely require configuration and data
population by you to work properly.
But Don’t Rely Just on Plugins

Always Validate Data with Google
1. Review data in the new
GSC in Overview ->
Enhancements
2. Look at specific error
messages to understand
what is wrong
3. Review website and fix
4. Retest live site with
Google’s Structured Data
Testing Tool
5. Validate fix via GSC with
URL Inspection

Let me share a
secret with you…

Be Like Megan
• Content marketer at heart
• New to advanced SEO techniques
• Does not know how to code
• Makes a mean pumpkin bread
• Teaches yoga classes at night
• Implements Schema like a boss
• Manually creates and implements
her own structured data

Megan’s Structured Data

I whipped this up
over the weekend…

Google Structured Data
Testing Tool
Genesis
Header
Footer
Scripts
Google
Developer
Docs
Merkle
Markup
Generator

My Structured Data

Let’s Try Schema
for a Local Business

General Information
http://schema.org/docs/documents.html
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
https://developers.google.com/search/reference/overview
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/marking-up-your-site-with-structured-data-3a93e731
Generators
https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/
https://hallanalysis.com/json-ld-generator/
Testing Tools
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/rich-cards
Additional Resources

Rebecca Gill
Digital marketing executive with 15 years
of practical SEO experience.
Also an alpaca farmer, but that’s a
presentation for a different day.
• RebeccaGill.com
• Web-Savvy-Marketing.com
• SEObits.fm
• diySEOcourses.com

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