How important is schema markup, and is it worthwhile for your business?
POV: Is Schema Markup Critical to SEO Success?
How important is schema markup, and is it worthwhile for your business?
How much value do schema tags actually provide? Are they an SEO essential that everyone should pulling out all the stops to implement across every page of their site, or is that time going to be better spent elsewhere?
Schema is a markup system that helps to further articulate to the search engines what your content contains. Although Google does a good job of accurately determining the type of content and connecting it with search queries, the search engine sometimes needs help identifying the purpose and intent of certain page elements. Makeups help to prevent any possible mistakes. Given the highly competitive nature of current SEO, no brands want to lose potential rankings because of errors.
SEOs often discuss schema and try to decide if they should implement it. Markups have been proven to help in a specific set of content areas. Before implementing, a first question to answer, however, is how much value does it actually offers the average company. Brands need to prioritize their time and where they spend their resources and efforts. We believe that organizations need to carefully consider the importance of schema in their specific goals and projects to make the decision that is right for them.
Take a deep dive into schema markup and why it's relevant to your site.
The fundamental building block of search marketing is content. In the realm of SEO, digital and content there is a proven workflow for planning, creating, and publishing content that leads to results. Watch this video to learn how BrightEdge supports users across every step of this workflow and how customers have leveraged the BrightEdge platform to attain greater levels of SEO success.
Orphan pages are website pages that are not linked to from any other page or section of your site. This means a user cannot access the page without knowing the direct URL. Additionally, these pages can’t be followed from another page by search engine crawlers, which means they are rarely indexed by search engines. In order for crawlers to find your pages, they need to be linked to other pages. Think of it like an actual web for a spider to crawl on. If parts of it are broken, the spider will have a difficult time getting from one place to another.
Most importantly, orphan pages represent missed opportunities to acquire and engage customers and can hurt your bounce rate. Fortunately, losing out on page traffic, retention, and revenue and hurting your SEO success because of orphan pages is something that can be easily remedied. Here is how you can use BrightEdge to cure your site of orphan pages.
How to find and resolve orphan site pages?
You can take an easy 5-step process to identify and address any orphan pages on your site:
Get a full list of your current website pages
Run a website crawl for pages with zero inbound internal links
Pointing your favorite website audit solution to your home page and expecting it to identify orphan site pages won't work because, by definition, orphan pages are not linked to from any domain page. The crawler will never find them. Instead, you need to specify the full list of site URLs that the crawler should examine. There are a few ways to get the URL list:
Use your sitemap file
The sitemap is a file that's typically placed at the root of your domain to help search engine bots understand the content of your site, how often you update it, and how to best surface your content on search engine results pages, or SERPs. When you add a new page or post in your Content Management System (CMS), your sitemap is dynamically updated, but make sure your sitemap contains the full list of your pages before using this technique.
If a sitemap is not an option - for example, if the sitemap does not contain the full page list - then you can generate the list from your CMS. On WordPress, for example, you can have install a lightweight plugin, such as List URLs to export a list of site URLs as a CSV file. You can also ask your IT to give you a copy of the CMS log that lists all the pages that were served to your visitors. Load the list into Excel and filter on unique URLs. Once you have the full list, paste it into your crawl configuration:
2) Run a website crawl for pages with zero inbound internal links
To identify orphan pages, set up the audit rule to catch pages that don't have at least one inbound internal link. While configuring the audit, set up a recurring crawl to catch any new unlinked pages in the future. Note that if you are relying on URL list then you'll want to get an update list from your CMS.
3) Analyze the audit results
Once the audit is complete, log back into ContentIQ and view the results of your audit. Identify the orphan pages and determine their objectives: Are they actively driving referral, paid or social campaign traffic? Do they have quality backlinks? Do site visitors access them extensively via onsite search?
Use your web analytics solution to assess traffic sources, visits and page views, entry, and exit behaviors. In the example below, we see an example of a campaign page that was helping acquire traffic for a given time. Once the campaign ended, the page no longer attracts traffic, and can be removed from the site:
4) Resolve any orphan page found
Once you understand what purpose the orphan page serves and how it aids in driving your website and marketing goals, you can determine what step if any to take with the page:
Link to it from other internal pages if it's imperative for site visitors to find it via browsing
Archive it if it's no longer needed
Leave it as-is if it's serving a business need that doesn't require internal linking to the page
5) Rerun the audit periodically to catch new orphan pages
Since pages can become orphaned over time - by adding new content and forgetting to link to it, or by accidentally removing links to pages nested deep in the site structure - it is important to check the site periodically for new issues. As noted earlier, you can configure ContentIQ to periodically rerun your audit by scheduling a crawl: That's the end of our Quick Win recipe for identifying and addressing orphan pages on sites.
New BrightEdge Innovations Help Customers Win the Moments That Matter
SAN MATEO, CA -- June 13, 2017 - BrightEdge, the global leader in enterprise organic search and content performance, today announced that 90% of its customers have adopted its ContentIQ and HyperLocal products. The next-generation products, which addresses unmet needs of SEO professionals, helps BrightEdge customers stay ahead of changes in consumer behavior across the mobile, local, and search experiences.
ContentIQ
ContentIQ helps brands resolve site errors before they impact business results. It places a priority on the resolution of issues and trends the impact of errors on organic traffic and conversion within a single platform.
As marketing organizations develop and publish digital content, content writers, editors, strategists, SEO managers, agencies, digital marketers, developers, administrators, and product managers all play a critical role in publishing and optimizing new content. But the involvement of more people increases the risk of errors such as these:
Page URLs are suddenly changed without setting proper redirects, leading to broken links.
Large, high-definition images are added, slowing page-load time.
Duplicate content is created, limiting the ability of search engines to serve content effectively.
ContentIQ prevents these problems. It enables brands to test content thoroughly via test servers before it is pushed to production environments.
“ContentIQ is a useful innovation to help analyze site performance, from a technical standpoint as well as overall content and page structure,” said Bobbi Tschumper, Internet SEO Specialist at Colony Brands. “It provides a snapshot to quickly identify issues and then gives us the ability to do a deep dive into more complex elements. This allows us to make sound, data-driven decisions to fix errors and optimize sites.”
Boaz Ronkin, Vice President of Product Marketing at BrightEdge, said the company’s customers have used ContentIQ to conduct 15,000 individual audits that inspected more than 30 million pages in the past two months alone.
“We are thrilled with the amazing 90% adoption of ContentIQ and even happier with the results that our customers achieved,” Ronkin said.
He noted nearly 200 BrightEdge customers have adopted its HyperLocal search engines since its introduction in February.
HyperLocal
HyperLocal provides brands with a sharp picture of the performance of topics and content in more than 68,000 search engines in the United States and around the world. HyperLocal, which tracks organic demand and performance in over 1,400 locations around the world, delivers the results that brands demand as Google contextualizes its SERPs to smaller and smaller locations.
Ronkin said BrightEdge has also taken additional steps to support its global customers and the need for a single enterprise SEO platform for all of their international SEO needs. BrightEdge launched a new trending search engine for Google Australia as part of its highly popular Data Cube offering. An industry-leading organic research solution with billions of records of rich media, content, global, local and performance data, Data Cube enables sophisticated topic and content research, integrated research-to-action workflow, and competitive benchmarking.
About BrightEdge
BrightEdge, the global leader in enterprise organic search and content performance, empowers marketers to transform online content into business results such as traffic, conversions and revenue. The BrightEdge S3 platform is powered by a sophisticated deep learning engine and is the only company capable of web-wide, real-time measurement of content engagement across all digital channels, including search, social and mobile. BrightEdge’s 1,500+ customers include global brands such as 3M, Microsoft and Nike, as well as 57 of the Fortune 100. The company has eight offices worldwide and is headquartered in Foster City, California.
ContentIQ