Schemas to Increase Engagement & Freshen Content

Benu Aggarwal (@benuaggarwal) is our solo presenter on this session about schema and the semantic web. She ISN’T talking about algorithms or tools. She’ll be talking about leveraging semantic search on a day-to-day basis. How SEO and design and strategies change when leveraging semantic search. The precursor question to that is will it have high ROI?

Google has been adding semantic search features. Freebase and Knowledge Graph is a result of the semantic web. There are 4 types of data: structured, linked, semantic and linked open data. Schema is structured data deployed on a website. Linked data is the website that has a lot of open info available. Semantic web is like a cloud of websites connected. Linked open data is a cloud of linked data sites that promote open standards.

How do I find freely available data? http://pointblankseo.com lists Freebase sources of data. Before you think of creating brand new content, see if it already exists on Freebase. Pull the data from there and work on the package and delivery, data curation.

If you have image libraries or other libraries of data, deploy open graph tags like <meta property=”og:image” content=”…> or og:type or og:video. Open Graph is a piece of code that enables title and description of a page on Facebook.

Search engine with semantic web: Knowledge Graph. A lot of the info on KG is Wikipedia, which in turn is sourced from DBpedia.

Different types of Schemas a local business can use:

• address
• user generated review
• things to do
• events
• images
• specials
• accomodations
• video
• breadcrumbs

1. Go to Schemas.org and find 10-15 schemas valid for your vertical.
2. Figure out 3 or 4 fields for each schema. When choosing which pages to crawl, a search engine will give preference to the most structured data – it’s like data on steroids.

Use a microdata generator at microdatagenerator.org. Then validate the markup at the rich snippets testing tool from Google Webmaster Tools.

On-site Review Functionality with Schemas

Crucial info needed is: name, email, comment and ratings

Do the research of what people are already looking for and provide that information in your content. The only thing your content writer needs to do is give the name of the attraction, address and lat and long.

Specials and Packages

You need the name, description and price. Some people hesitate to put a price in hard code but you can do starting rate which means your deal price can still fluctuate.

Schema is like talking to search engines in their own language. That also improves the search experience making searchers happier. In a case study the results saw increased visitors and decreased bounce rate. They saw their overall keyword conversion rise. It was a 56% increase in revenue since the new site went live.

Key takeaways:

• Mark up your site.
• Identify right Schema’s for your vertical.
• Think about site architecture and content changes to deploy Schema at a CMS level.
• Communicate to your developer, designer and content writer important data fields you need.
• Explain changes in site architecture.
• Don’t tell the creative folks that they are writing Schemas. ;)
• Improve freshness and trust signals. Ask customers to leave reviews.
• Don’t forget Open Graph for Facebook implementation.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.