You’ve likely seen references to structured data, semantic markup and schema. So what do these terms mean, exactly, and how do they apply to your site’s organic search performance? Often used interchangeably, these terms refer to a set of basic code–essentially, schematic instructions–that supplements the HTML (hyper text markup language) foundation of Web content. In and of itself, schema is not a language; rather, it is a “vocabulary” supported by HTML. Schema serves to define your site’s content so search engines “understand” it better (think schematics or diagrams). Its system of code creates a standard for conveying concepts, and instructs search engine robots (aka bots, crawlers, spiders) how to interpret your Web content and accurately display it on their search engine results pages (SERPs), such as those on Google or Bing.
By helping search engine bots properly crawl and interpret your site’s content, schema can further boost SEO performance by displaying your content with greater detail in the search results; referred to as “rich snippets,” content marked up with schema can render enticing SERP results that can include elements, such as “thumbnail” images and reviews. Like the “Sitemaps Protocol” of 2006, schema markup represents a collaborative initiative from Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on Web pages. As Google announced via its Webmaster Central blog in June of 2011, the purpose of schema is to make “the open Web richer and more useful” to all search users. Google shows an example of how using schema markup can transform what might have been another relatively mundane SERP listing of a recipe into a compelling rich snippet: 
Such details–in this case, a thumbnail image, reviews and cook time–clearly distinguish this site’s content from competing sites in the SERPs. Reviews and recipes are just two examples of how leveraging schema markup can boost SEO. To date, Google has not officially said schema impacts rankings, but the collective opinion of the SEO community is that implementing schema does help with click through from the SERPs. Let’s look at how to implement schema markup to boost SEO using an online article as an example.
Using schema article markup found here can help Google’s bots better understand an article’s or online post’s content and improve the chances it will appear in the search results. The U.S. major league baseball (MLB) World Series win by the San Francisco Giants generated a flurry of posts and articles. The prize, in terms of search ranking, goes to this Bleacher Report article by Scott Miller. As the screenshot below shows, his piece achieved the No. 1 Google SERP position for the keyword “sf giants.”
Savvy schema markup helped the article display in a richer manner in the SERPs. To demonstrate the schema for this page, I’ll share the code needed for content like this, with schema properties in bold: <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article"> <h1 itemprop="headline name">Your Headline</h1> <p itemprop="author">Author</p> <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2014-10-30"> October 30, 2014 at 02:18 PM PT</p> <p><img itemprop="image" src=" image-url" ></p> <p itemprop="description"> article description.</p> </div> The schema info added includes:
As a structured data system, schema has been developed through the collaboration of Google, Microsoft, Yandex, and Yahoo. The Schema.org site includes an exhaustive list of the different types of schemas available, with example code. There are 589 types, 860 properties, and 114 enumeration values. You will need to access the website to create the markup for the pages that you want to emphasize. For additional guidance, Google created the Structured Data Testing Tool, which helps developers ensure a proper schema implementation. Using the Google Webmaster Tools “structured data testing tool,” anyone can test to see that their schema markup elements fulfill the guidelines after implementing.
Simply entering the URL of Bleacher Report’s article in the tool returned the information in the screenshot above. The top third of the tool’s results, shown as “extracted structured data,” reflect those areas where webmasters can define schema instructions for displaying content via the backend code of their site. If it’s not implemented well, the testing tool will show: “No data detected. Learn more” under the “Extracted structured data” results.
You can also review if the schema code is working by simply viewing the content with your browser. The text that you see on the Web page should have no issues that indicate broken code (for example, the thumbnail image not rendering). Schema can help some organizations atomize their content, meaning break it down and repurpose it through various channels without manually reformatting it. There is also a rise in the use of AI and voice search, which may also impact the value of schema for brands moving forward. Artificial intelligence has been incorporated into Google through RankBrain. Voice search has also risen quickly as people adopt voice options on their smartphones and home devices as well as voice-controlled personal assistant devices. In this search atmosphere, the importance of minimizing mistakes in the interpretation of websites becomes enhanced. This will increase the importance of schema for the time being. In the future, we anticipate that artificial intelligence will become even more capable of interpreting websites and consequently minimize the need.
Google has created a knowledge graph section for job listings. This move follows a pattern similar to Local or Quick Answers, but the content still comes from the brands and the job sites, unlike tickets, sports scores, and weather, which Google provides unbranded. Best practices still create opportunities for appearing in GFJ, including relevance, detail, depth, and a new schema markup which will allow Google to crawl the listings more easily.
As Google described in their blog post announcing this new feature: Today, we’re taking the next step in the Google for Jobs initiative by putting the convenience and power of Search into the hands of job seekers. With this new experience, we aim to connect Americans to job opportunities across the U.S., so no matter who you are or what kind of job you’re looking for, you can find job postings that match your needs. With Google for Jobs, it will be easier for users to search for opportunities through Google and then receive information from across the web displayed in a standard SERP. For many jobs, candidates will be able to see reviews and employer ratings right alongside the job description. Users signed into Google will also receive valuable personal information, including projected commute times. Learn more about how to implement schema for Google for Jobs in our POV.
Google for Jobs gives all brands a reason to take a look at implementing schema. Additionally, if you have review assets, ratings, are an ecommerce, events, reviews, or recipe site or have a significant local effort to markup you should use schema. Other companies should also keep an eye on schema and look for mapping evolutions that apply to and would help specific content efforts. Over time, Google and the other search engines will get better at understanding the meaning of websites and additional microdata explanations may become less important. For now, however, schema markup is required to be part of the enhanced experiences in search results. We recommend that brands hold developers accountable to maintaining proper schema, but make sure general on-page search optimization and page load speed are first. In conclusion, while schema may seem like a complicated thing, it’s not so bad once you understand the basics of implementing it. And with so many options to make your content more readable by the search engines, it can get addicting! For more information about schema markup, visit the schema.org website, or Google’s schema.org FAQ page. Of course, you’re always welcome to ask us via the comments below.
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The Rise of Sofa Sunday and Mobile Friday BrightEdge Research Uncovers the New Holiday Shopping Journey with Sofa Sunday and Mobile (Black) Friday Overshadowing Cyber Monday
The Christmas and holiday shopping season from November through December is a critical time to observe shoppers’ online behavior. With several holidays and the most important shopping days of the year, this eight-week period in the United States is filled with ubiquitous marketing messaging, massive discounting, and general shopping euphoria. For retailers, it is a make or break time of the year.
Following on from BrightEdge’s Holiday Shopping Report based on 2016 data, fresh new research notes changing trends of 2016 and 2017 audience digital traffic in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving weekend, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. This new research provides clues for marketers on how to prepare for the holiday shopping season. The report confirms holiday shopping is happening sooner and consumers are more and more comfortable making purchases on their mobile phone or tablet. Additionally, data findings point to Black Friday surpassing Cyber Monday in digital importance.
The holidays provide plenty of opportunities to create more personalized content and provide intelligent experiences both at the store and online. As online retail spending increases over the holiday season, marketers need to focus on creating smart content and shopping experiences to attract, engage, and convert customers at the right time.
Sofa Sunday - the Sunday before Black Friday, is THE major online research day The Sunday before Thanksgiving and Black Friday was a day of high traffic, especially mobile traffic. BrightEdge dubs this Sofa Sunday because it was the highest mobile traffic day until that point, but it shows relatively modest transaction volume. This suggests that consumers use Sofa Sunday to research and prepare their holiday shopping lists ahead of Black Friday. Mobile traffic on Sofa Sunday is 21% higher than a typical Sunday in the holiday season.
Black Friday mobile traffic outperformed Desktop by 75% Brands are aware that Mobile traffic exceeds Desktop traffic by 10% to 40% most days, but may be surprised to find Mobile exceeds Desktop by 75% on Mobile Black Friday but only 5% on Cyber Monday. Mobile is dominant and simply a way of life for consumers.
Mobile Black Friday sales exceeded Mobile Cyber Monday sales by 9% Black Friday mobile purchase activity was so strong that BrightEdge has dubbed it Mobile Black Friday. Mobile purchase revenue on Black Friday exceeded mobile purchase revenue on Cyber Monday by 9%. Deals that were previously available only in stores are now available anywhere and on any device. BrightEdge research suggests that Mobile Black Friday will continue to gain momentum as shoppers replace store visits with mobile visits and purchases.
Download the full report for all of 2017’s holiday shopping trends.
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Search results have become more personalized and dynamic over the years, creating a more challenging SERP environment for search and content marketers. But columnist Jim Yu shows how these changes can create opportunities for those willing to do the work.
The SERP is changing. Only focusing on ranking #1 on organic search results is no longer effective to succeed in website traffic acquisition. Keyword prioritization must account for whether this keyword has any chance to be shown above the fold organically. BrightEdge visual parsing technology is the solution to this problem.
According to recent BrightEdge research, more than 51% of website traffic is driven by the organic channel, a figure that has remained steady since 2014. However, many search marketers have reported a decline in YoY (year-over-year) organic website traffic, despite holding their organic search ranking positions steady. Ask any search marketer and they probably have an example of a top-ranking keyword that has a steady ranking position but is not generating the same amount of organic traffic as it did a few years ago. Why is this happening? Welcome to the world of the ever-changing SERPs. It’s no secret that Google search has been personalized on many fronts over the years. We all have seen it. Type in a keyword like “lifecycle of a butterfly,” you’ll see mostly informational content, led by a Quick Answer box. Once you interact with that Quick Answer box, there are two more Quick Answer links shown at the bottom of the Quick Answer box. Page 1 of the SERP, essentially, expands indefinitely. What’s the cure for SEO marketers? Search has fundamentally changed with no turning back, making it critical for SEO practitioners to leverage visual parsing technology to stay competitive.
What used to work for SEO strategy is not sufficient anymore. We used to focus on creating a landing page for one primary keyword and a few related keywords, but the format of our content is simply a web page with graphics and text. Sure, we have videos for some of the pages now. But is that enough? No. New SEO now requires us to think about content with a few more variations.
SERPs are getting increasingly complex. Below is an example of 21 permutations of a SERP, where one of your content elements could be shown.
Yes. There is. Instead of just referring to SERPs like a restaurant menu with mainly plain text, think of the Google SERP like an interactive billboard - the new homepage of the internet for any topic that you can fathom, and that homepage intelligently changes depending on the topic. For marketers, the SERP is the new top-of-funnel. What you need is a headless browser that can be launched to meticulously scan the SERP, inspect it just like human eyes would, and then synthesize the common themes of content types and ranking results by device types for each keyword in the search universe. And, that data better be trended. That sounds like a lot of work! Luckily, BrightEdge has developed a technology that does just that: the visual parsing technology.
BrightEdge visual parsing technology analyzes the dynamic SERP through the eyes of a human. Instead of just inspecting the backend codes, visual parsing technology looks at the visual layout of each SERP in relationship with each keyword to help you determine what content type is more likely to win the top spots on SERP. For instance, “insurance” will likely have many PPC ads above the fold before the organic web listings; while “kids ballet class" will have local 3-pack dominating the top spots on the SERP.
One of the first applications of visual parsing technology is the BrightEdge Intent Signal dashboard. By analyzing the visual ranking position of every content element on SERP, Intent Signal informs marketers whether a keyword has any organic web listing shown above the fold on SERP. Meanwhile, it tells marketers if their web content page is ranking above the fold or not for that keyword. You can read more about Intent Signal here.
Leverage Intent Signal to refine your SEO keyword target list, today. Intent Signal helps to refine your SEO target list into four sensible workgroups.
Some keywords do have organic web listings above the fold on the SERP. Depending on the performance of your current content, you have one of three optimization options.
Some keywords are so commercial in nature that there are too many ads competing above the fold, pushing organic web listings below the fold. These are the keywords on which you can invite your PPC team to collaborate with the SEO team. A quick way to get started is to schedule a weekly report to have this group of keywords emailed to the PPC lead.
If you haven’t refreshed your SEO target keyword list. Now is a great time to review and redo it. This time, your SEO target list will be even better, thanks to the insights from Intent Signal. Let’s revisit the typical process to develop our SEO keyword list.
With Intent Signal, you can further refine your keyword list so that the resources spent on content optimization, content creation, and PPC campaigns are laser-focused on the keywords that will give you the biggest payout in quality website traffic. The BrightEdge platform can help you run this entire process within a few clicks. For instance, you can start the initial research using Data Cube. Then, leveraging key insights from Share of Voice and Keyword Reporting, you can identify high-value keywords quickly. Lastly, you can run Intent Signal to refine the keywords into four sensible groups and rally troops around the most impactful projects.
Visual parsing and its many applications will soon become mainstream for digital marketers. Start today to leverage its first application - Intent Signal - to see how easy it is to leverage visual parsing technology and improve your website’s overall traffic acquisition. Watch this video to learn more about Visual Parsing technology here.