Webinar: Schema Markup Essentials with Judith Lewis and Andrea Volpini

Schema, structured data, rich results… it all sounds impressive, but if it also sounds confusing, you’re not alone.

Whether you’re new or just looking for clarity, help has arrived. Judith Lewis and Andrea Volpini – both giants in the field – are here to clear the fog.

They reveal exactly what you need to know to give your site an edge with structured data.

Hosted by Nik Ranger and Peter Mead, this is your shortcut to Schema essentials.

Full Transcript for the Schema Markup Essentials with Judith Lewis and Andrea Volpini Webinar

Peter Mead: Welcome and Introductions

Peter Mead: It’s Peter Mead, and hello and welcome to the Australian Search Marketing Academy. Today we have a really fun and exciting topic, and an important topic: Schema Markup Essentials, with Judith Lewis and Andrea Volpini, and co-hosted by Nick Ranger. So we’re—it’s good to see people joining the webinar. We can see people from all over the world, from people who got up in the middle of the night like Jenny Hill, and many others. So that’s great. It makes it—it really makes it worthwhile us doing this, especially during these crazy times where I won’t mention the C word, but we’re all doing our best and we’re all diving straight into SEO. But today, we have some amazing SEO people with us, and I would love to introduce each person separately.

I’m going to start with Nick Ranger. Nick is an SEO specialist at Studio Hawk, overseeing digital strategy, data analysis, content, site architecture for large enterprise and local business, and uh, Nick focuses on data-driven results. I’ve worked with Nick myself, and I’ve seen she does a mean technical SEO audit. And uh, so welcome, Nick Ranger. How are you today?

Nick Ranger: Introduction and Thoughts on Schema

Nick Ranger: I am fantastic, thank you so much for having me. Really, really excited to be on this because, um, as I think we’re all here to kind of explore a little bit more—structured data is exceptionally important. It’s how we show authority around our websites and to web crawlers, and it can really, really make a huge impact in the long term. So excited to get stuck into it.

Peter Mead: Great. Thanks for co-hosting. And now, I’d like to introduce Judith. Judith Lewis is a renowned SEO and digital marketing consultant with over 20 years experience, pre-dating Google—yes, I was there too—and working with some of the world’s largest brands. She’s a regular speaker around the world on SEO and has been recognized by her peers as one of the most influential people in the UK digital industry. Judith also judges the MINA EU, US, UK, and Australian Search Awards, and uh, also helps with the London Girl Geek Dinners, and blogs about chocolate—how can I forget to mention that bit? Judith, how are you?

Judith Lewis: Introduction and Chocolate Chat

Judith Lewis: Do you know, strangely, I haven’t had any chocolate yet today, and that’s a—that’s a rare thing for me to say. Usually, you know, there’s a little bit of squares of something dark for breakfast just to get that little bit of a caffeine boost. So, shockingly, I haven’t had my chocolate.

Peter Mead: Well, that’s okay. We can have some later, and uh, we’ll have to hold off on that one. Can’t do it on camera. Uh, thank you so much for joining. It’s in the—it’s in the morning for you in the UK. Over here, it’s the uh, late afternoon. And same, uh, Andrea. Thank you for joining. I’m going to introduce you. Andrea Volpini is a highly successful internet entrepreneur and the CEO of WordLift and InsideOut10. Andrea also has 20-plus years of world-class experience in online strategies, digital media, and SEO. It’s also been a co-founder of another company, RedLink, and Andrea also has been—so, um, so it’s so important, the information Andrea has been giving us to do with schema, and appearing on lots of talks and contributing to the community. So, Andrea, thank you so much for joining us.

Andrea Volpini: Introduction and Australian Memories

Andrea Volpini: Thanks for having me. It’s, it’s really a pleasure. It reminds me when I went to Australia a few years ago, so I’m excited to have the Australian audience uh, attending this webinar. And yes, it’s an interesting topic, absolutely.

Peter Mead: We’d love to have you back, mate.

Andrea Volpini: Yeah, we’ll try, we’ll try to make something. I mean, as soon as the pandemic is over, I’ll get some—get some kangaroos ready for you.

Peter Mead: Yeah, take them out of storage. I—I should have some Vegemite now. You know, it’s early in the morning here, so I would start—I should start with yeah, oh, absolutely, that’s a good start. Quite all right. Yeah, terrific. So, look, we’re getting people joining, um, but I think that you know, there’s so much to talk about, and I’ve had a preview of these slides, and I hope you know, Nick will also help me to co-host here, because there is so much information regarding schema, and this is why when we talked about this uh, from two different perspectives—uh, Judith, yourself as a consultant, and Andrea as a tool provider—and so this is um, fantastic stuff. So, uh, without any further ado, um, Judith, are you are you ready to start showing us what you have for us?

Judith Lewis: Schema Essentials and Practical Advice

Judith Lewis: Absolutely, I’ll, I’ll pop these in and I will pray that everybody can see them, because you know what it’s like, you’re virtual and on a stage, it it shows up behind you, so you know what’s going on, but on a computer, you’re just like, well, I’ll throw them out there and let’s just hope for the best. So this is me hoping for the best. So, um, this is me—if you want to look me up on the search engine of your choice, please do, I do stuff online. There you go. Um, it’s been a long time for me, but schema is something that’s quite new. Um, what isn’t new about schema is the attempt that we all have of creating relationships between things—so understanding why something exists on a web page, what it means, and and search engines, back when I started, were crap at this. Now they’re amazing at it. I hope that’s okay, I hope I don’t have Anton getting angry at me and saying now I have to bloop you, um, but I’ll do it, I’ll do the beeps. It’s not just about understanding things, but it’s understanding their relationships, no matter how weird those relationships might be, because sometimes you’re like, I don’t understand why this is related to the other thing, but okay, Google, you know, whatever. But what we really want to be doing is planning and scheming with our schema. I have been waiting so long to say that. Well said. We want to scheme, um, with our schemas. What we want to do is we want to plan things out, and I’m a huge proponent of planning because if we don’t, if we if we fail to plan, we plan to fail, as my dad would say, um, so what we want to do is really map things out, because it’s too easy to get caught up in like looking at all the things online and looking at all the the stars and the prices and if it’s in stock and how many calories a salted caramel fudge truffle has—we all want one of those now except that they’re 239 calories. How big are these truffles? And so you want to mark up all the things, um, or at least, you know, some of us want to mark up all the things, and you go in and you’re like, oh my god, schema, this is amazing, it has all the markup I could possibly ever want. Don’t do that. Just, just don’t. I’m just telling you now, don’t mark up all the things. Mark up the most important things, but not all the things. And there are some really, really smart things that you can do, they’re really, really useful things that you could mark up, because you know, it’s not just about what is possible, but what is practical and reasonable. Everybody’s in love with FAQ schema right now, um, there’s a number of different things that you can put on your page, you don’t have to be restricted to just FAQ schema and like breadcrumbs. Uh, Schema.org itself gives you a hugely easy way to surf through. Now, I’ve put in here a search for product, because you know, e-commerce is one of the places that schema is often employed. It’s not just on blogs for recipes, it’s also products, um, and also a lot of other things. It’s it’s not just restricted to those areas, so there are lots of things that you could mark up with schema, but you want to be thinking about the why, because when you get into each thing, this is the FAQ properties that are available for schema, and one of the things that I work a lot in B2B, I always forget about it, speakable, because we don’t really have that many engineers going into their Alexa devices or Google devices and saying, “Okay, Google, um, where can I buy a three-quarter inch torque made of tungsten,” or whatever. You just don’t get those kinds of voice searches for speakable answers, but on FAQs, especially for product pages, it’s a great way to ensure that when somebody goes to Google or to Alexa, that you can hopefully get your answer spoken out, but just like we see here, sixty percent of the time works every time, because it doesn’t work every time, and this is why you have to be really strategic and tactical with your schema implementation. It’s not just about implementing it and thinking somehow magically it will work. First of all, it has to be implemented correctly, but second of all, it doesn’t always stay. So here in the UK, this is an example of somebody that I’m monitoring in the UK. The UK has lost all sorts of rich snippets on products in the run-up to Christmas. Thanks, Google. I’m sure that everybody in retail thought that that was a really nice Christmas gift. Yeah, I mean, look at this. Yeah, SEMrush doesn’t start explaining that. Yeah, it’s just like, I was looking at it because it’s one of the things I monitor just for, I say, uh, the S word and giggles—uh, see, I’m trying to, I’m trying to blooper myself—um, and I went and I was like, you what, uh, and it just, you’ve lost all of these featured snippets.

• Google Featured Snippets and Discover Feed webinar

Now, the the error there is Google, not not um, not Google removing feature snippets, but that’s an actual Google error, but you can see it’s gone from a huge number in the hundreds—I think it was over 300, um, at the beginning, and it’s just dropped straight off. So just because you mark stuff up doesn’t mean it’ll remain, but also just because it’s there today does not mean it’ll be there tomorrow. I don’t know why Google decided to punish all the retailers out there, but hey, merry Christmas, guys. You have to think of something else now. Let me think, oh, PPC maybe. I wonder. Yeah, that’s not all, but that’s not all that Google did to us, man, because you know they like to make things just a little bit more interesting for retailers. So what did they do? They introduced these fantastic, not just shopping results, you know, with your lovely stars and your prices and everything, they gave us a whole side panel where we can price comparison shop. Good luck to all those people who aren’t the cheapest, because now you’re uh, SOL, as we like to say. Also, you can’t click through to any of these reviews, so let’s say I wanted to go to Overstock or Zulily or any of these, I can’t, because those are not clickable. I have to actually copy and paste. I can’t go to Spy X Night Vision Mission, whatever night mission goggles on Overstock or Zulily, I have to actually go there and then search again. Thanks, Google, usability my butt. You can see I’m very opinionated about these things, but I think you know what, it’s all about the fact that we have to be thinking about—oh, hello, Mom? Yeah, no, I’m on TV. Um, so what can we do then, uh, because you know, you think about it, you’ve marked up all this stuff and then Google went and came along and went, hey, we’re just gonna take that away from you, make it more difficult. So what can you do? Um, you can actually look at what’s relevant for you to mark up. So go in and look at the competition, what’s going on, and oh, wait, that price is a lot higher than other people, and hmm, is two and a half stars out of five really helpful? I mean, do you really want to be showing that in search results? Are you really confident enough in your brand, BoardGameGeek.com, that you really want to be showing those two stars down there? Maybe not. And this is the risk, I think, is that you know, they they get 3.7 out of 10 out of 38 reviews. Congratulations, that’s a new low, at least for what’s pulled through to the search results. At a certain point, I believe it’s 3.4, they stop pulling it through because they’re just like, you know what, this is embarrassing. So we we do have to make choices about what we implement, because you know, if we don’t make better choices, then it’s just useful. So FAQ schema, right? Everybody’s hot on FAQ schema, everybody’s like in love with FAQ schema, I see gambling using it a lot, so we go through and I just, what I did the search from Google.co.uk in the UK on a UK IP, and what do I care about whether U.S. players can play real money on EU poker sites or if online poker is legal in the US? I’m in the UK, come on, people, think about this, and this is the exact reason why we have to be careful about our even our FAQ schema, because if we don’t, if we aren’t perceived as relevant, we’re not going to get the click, and and gambling, online gambling is hugely competitive, and you screw that up and you lose a click that’s well ranking, but we’ve just screwed up and lost the click. So it means that your click-through rate on a number one or number two position goes down because you’re not relevant. Oh, it’s a U.S. site, not relevant for the UK. So we can do better than this. We we don’t have to just stick with this kind of bad implementation, because you know, dev time costs money, and we really want to be adding value with schema. We don’t want to just do it because we can, because let me tell you, we can do it, you know, if you want us to implement schemas, devs, we can do it, there’s plugins, there’s all sorts, but should we? Because dev time costs money. So if you have to convince a boss or a CEO or a client about whether you should implement schema, because you know, dev time costs money, then actually, you can show the practical value. Oh, oh, very at the bottom there, oh, sorry, babes, did you forget your schema? Cause everybody else has it, lady, and oh, I’m sorry, but you look a little naked down there, but also, oops, out of stock, I’m not going to be clicking on that one. So this is an example of schema where it actually helps the user. So I know here that lookfantastic.com is not where I want to be going for my schema for my schema—oh my god, for my Sanctuary five-minute mask. Um, there are lots of plugins for schema and the steps that you can take to implement are super easy. I swear, very, really very dark, Cody K, please, it’s easy, pay attention now, now’s the time. Uh, so the first thing to do is don’t panic, because you know, you’re like, oh, dev time, oh dear, um, well, we’ve got to do something, so don’t panic about implementing stuff, just really focus on what’s possible. This is a really cute, um, cute—everything’s cute in my world, I’m old and I’m female, um, and I have nieces and nephews, um, so you can see here, this is a really easy way to build some JSON-LD, and all I’ve done here is like drop downs and I put a URL in, a picture image link, um, of a pint because you know, I was doing this in the evening, um, so you can see here, it is so easy. You know, that’s a nice fun tool as well from uh, yeah, yeah, don’t be don’t be intimidated, it’s… it’s not, time is money, people, so you know, think about it that one, don’t be intimidated, it is super easy to do, and you can actually get a plug-in as well, there’s lots of ways to generate your structured data, to check it with Google, so you can generate anything you want, but there is of course, there are no guarantees, right? So if you are, just because Google says that you can do a thing does not mean that they’re guaranteeing that it will show up in the search results. So there are no guarantees with this, like, like you know, Ron Jeremy says, 60% of the time it works every time, and we’ve lost schema in the UK, so like, don’t, don’t think that just because you’re marking something up guarantees it’ll be pulled through, it won’t necessarily be pulled through. We do use markup to get things like featured snippets, um, because we’re helping Google understand what it is on the page that they should be looking at, so we’ll use jump to links, we’ll use breadcrumb schema, we’ll use all sorts of things on a website to help guide Google and help it understand the relationship, and guide Bing and guide Yandex and all the others that have their own spiders, but there are never any guarantees that it’ll be pulled through. So, thank you very much, that’s me, um, and if you want to get me online afterwards, like if you’re too shy to ask now, you can get me afterwards, but thank you very much.

Peter Mead: Feedback and Q&A

Peter Mead: Thank you so much. That was uh, a load of information. Amazing. Yeah, you can go back and listen to it again. I love that, I love the gifts.

Judith Lewis: They were really, yeah, they really really tied into what you were saying. I do try. I am trying very trying—ask my husband, um, but that I found some that really expressed what I wanted to say, um, and and it made it just a little bit more interesting than a dry presentation about about scheme.

Peter Mead: Well, Judith, actually, which was just going to, um, I was just going to quickly before we go on to Andrea, uh, Janine, Jenny Hill, she actually had a comment about what you were saying about the FAQ and some some drops happening for the products, and uh, Judith, we are having success recovering FAQ product drops by removing embedded HTML.

Judith Lewis: Yeah, I mean, that don’t forget, the FAQ—not that, not FAQ, the schema drop was all over, so that that that’s a SEMrush tool, um, overview of the number of opportunities for a um, for an enhanced enriched search result and what happened to the number of search results that actually gave that, um, so it’s not that FAQ in it in and of itself disappeared, but uh, all of the opportunities to have an enriched search result disappeared, so that was removed by Google from the search results. It wasn’t just FAQ, it was everything. For me, FAQ is is challenging because Google is not choosing the most relevant FAQ questions and answers to display in the search results, they’re still relying on you, what you input, and hopefully that will change in the future, but as you saw with the best poker sites, it can actually result in you not um, getting the click. So one of the things I advise clients is you have to be very careful. I don’t normally put embedded HTML within an FAQ. I know that some people put links in there because they’re not clickable, unlike People Also Ask, those are not clickable question answers, so some people put embedded links in there to make it easier, but that was a loss of everyone in the search result, so nobody got anything, nobody got a featured snippet, nobody got anything. So that that’s that was what that was. The first your first three are critical, so try not to make them two countries specific like we saw on the poker site. Uh, Andrea, do you have anything to comment on uh, regards what Judith has been saying so far? So FAQ, yes, it’s very very relevant topic I believe because everyone has been playing because it’s so simple and.

Andrea Volpini: FAQ Schema, News, and Search Impact

Andrea Volpini: Uh, immediately, you know, appeared on SERP for for a few months, but um, reality is that FAQ tells the search engine this is an FAQ page, which kills you know what other any other intent that is news related, so my my uh, my thing here is that we notice that on on news and media specifically, when we add FAQ and we lose traffic from let’s say Discover, and we lose traffic from you know news carousels, top stories, so FAQ can be you know very valuable um, when you have like an evergreen type of content that has a high ranking and and and you believe that you can add some value on the SERP with that content, otherwise it’s a waste of time. So, so we have to be very careful in the way in which we use it, but but that has to do with the way in which Google interprets the schema, because because we shouldn’t use FAQ you know because FAQ it’s meant for FAQ pages, it’s not meant for an article, it’s been designed for a different purpose, but then Google has interpreted in a way that that the community got mislead and then everyone started to use it and then we got a lot of pixels, but then we lost clicks, and then and then things change again. So, so we have to kind of interpret the way in which the you know the vocabulary is designed and how Google plays with it, and and we saw I think you know the the the product panel, you know the knowledge graph product panel, this is the biggest thing on on SERP, you know Judy does show us, you know one of the biggest hit on the serve for for anyone doing e-commerce, so Google is is getting all the information in one place and that turns into you know a negative impact in terms of clicks for all the retailers, it’s it can be very beneficial for the manufacturers, but it can be very bad for the retailers, and I think that they’re still playing around um, currently they are not releasing an interview about these topics, so it’s still probably you know within within the testing phase, so we’ll see, let’s see what we get, um, yeah, that’s yeah that’s um, a lot to think about right there. Nick, what’s your take on this?

Nick Ranger: Crawlability, Authority, and Schema Types

Nick Ranger: Yeah, I kind of, I kind of think like, um, you made a really good point, Judith, like what you’re talking about there is really pertains to like just rich snippets, like but schemer in general, um, is a really really powerful way to be able to show web crawlers the authority of the sites. I mean, um, you know, we’ve got like organizational, we’ve got like local schema, we’ve got um, breadcrumbs, and now you know, now that um, uh, real nexum, real prev isn’t a thing anymore, like how do we show web crawlers like um, you know where we want them to look, how we want them to be able to like crawl through our sites, um, I’ve noticed that like, um, just simply just adding like, um, you know, breadcrumb schema, um, I’ve seen like webcaws be able to like have much much better crawl rates throughout throughout pages, I’ve been able to like make sure that users can be able to find things and toggle through pages a lot more, um, a lot more intuitively, and there’s like some really really great um, like little Chrome extension like the Google Analytics Chrome extension, and actually shows you how many people are clicking onto that without having to have like Hotjar or anything like that, but they really do use that as um, a bit of an anchor to be able to find things, so um, I think that’s that’s a important one to kind of note that yeah, while this is happening, um, not all schemer is relevant, just because you can does not mean you should, but it’s so much fun. General advice, like in life, just because you can’t eat the entire pint of ice cream does not mean you should, so you can apply it to anything, and just like that chocolate we’re holding out for, yeah, I think the whole bar does not, yeah, a little bit of discipline, yeah, and we um, highlight the important bits there, yeah, and that’s why planning is so important, save it the flavor, yeah, you want to sing the flavor and the schema, but yeah, I’ve seen a lot of points come through about recovering schema, just to be clear, that loss was not FAQ schema, that was not FAQ in in Google search results, so that that that loss that you’re seeing in in um, SEMrush, somebody one day will come down with a definitive decision on that and I won’t have to say it twice, um, although it’s a good branding thing, um, that was um, I think that was featured snippets or something similar in the search results, so it wasn’t just FAQ that I was looking at for that, I was looking at all of the enhancements, like ratings, which is the stars, um, stock levels, all of that sort of stuff, so product, all the product markups as well as the um, feature snippets and things like that that you’re getting into Google search results, those are disappearing, so for individual products, like I think one of them was the the night goggles, I looked at Horrible Histories, I looked at all sorts of things, so for individual products, you’ve got that panel at the side where you can comparison shop—sorry for the people who have high markups, um, but you’ve also got other other elements and other things, like you saw best poker site, you saw the FAQ being pulled through, it’s not it’s not just those things that are being lost, it’s that nobody gets them, not just somebody lost them, nobody gets them, so that was my point, yeah, around yeah, what was the time period around that, because I noticed like when um, you know, famously there was a little Google glitch, um, all of mine like yeah, a lot of the feature snippets that um, like one of my clients were ranking for just completely disappeared, so yeah, that was that was recently, so that that was just like that graph goes up to I think three days ago…

Judith Lewis: Okay, or something like that, it’s not that old, so that graph is not old, it goes from I think mid-August, um, until just the other day, so it’s only about 30 days worth of data, and it shows how it’s gone from really really high numbers of every, so that’s the the number of opportunities to get something enhanced in the search results, so SEMrush has a really great product where you can um, you can monitor things a campaign, so you can monitor a project and one of the things you can do is monitor your search results for certain keywords, I think that’s about 400 keywords and we were looking at about 400 or 600 keywords for that, and across all those 400 or 600 keywords, all of those search results, very few of them were still showing uh, any sort of enhancements that are related to schema, so ratings, um, featured snippets, which aren’t really schema, but all those enhancements that could be pulled through, like like links, site links, which are related to schema and that you mark up with breadcrumb, um, they were gone, so it wasn’t just FAQ, it was nobody was getting anything.

Nick Ranger: Yeah, fair enough. Okay, that’s, I mean, that’s the power of Google, right here, you go giveth with one hand, take away with the other, so this is this is uh, this is part of our bread and butter, this is what we do, we want to be found in Google, so we play Google’s game, and this is this is part of life, but I, but I want to keep moving because I want to get onto Andreia’s presentation now. First though, I thought there’s a question here which may be a good lead-in, because uh, one of our viewers has asked, “Which plugins would you recommend?” Well, of course, there’s so many plugins, I mean just just jump online and start uh, googling uh, for for plugins for a schema, but of course we have with us uh, Andreia who’s the CEO of WordLift, which is a fantastic plug-in, so I would say, Rudo, definitely give that one a go, um, so but anyway, that was a nice little plug for your tool, um, and but you know, there’s so much you can do using SEMrush, there are so many uh, that helps you with your scheme so much, there’s so many tools available, uh, but let’s please, Andrea, I, I’m so interested in what you have to say, I’ve had a sneak peek at your slides, and Nick, Nick Ranger, I hope you can help me here, uh, co-hosting along with Andrea, because please take it away, slides, let’s um, let’s find out what people need to know.

Andrea Volpini: Semantic Capital and ROI of Schema

Andrea Volpini: Yeah, uh, these are way more boring than Juliet, so I will try to be fast, but uh, okay, so my name is Andrea, uh, I’ve been playing on the web for many many years, and I focused on SEO and automation of SEO, but here I want to start with a completely different perspective, so I want to talk a little bit about why we do this, why we why we decided to invest in metadata in the first place, and there is this very beautiful concept by by a philosopher that works at the Oxford University that described the semantic capital, which is uh, what we do to provide meanings to to the things in the world that we care about, to semanticize, and that’s exactly the point here, and that goes a little to the content that you published and to the data that you published, because we are in the in the era of artificial intelligence and data, it’s it’s really an important asset in in your strategy. So, so when you do when you do approach like schema markup and there are plenty of solutions, so I’m not gonna recommend you just to go to WordLift, but there are you know so many different ways in which you can embrace these vocabularies, you should focus on you know creating the semantic capital, creating the value in the data that you published, and that this value can be can be looked at in so many different ways. So in this presentation, I just wanted to look at a little bit at the different layers of of of the return of the investment, so how can you measure the return of the investment on on applying structured data, because of course, as we heard from from Judith’s presentation, you don’t have to mark up everything, so where where should you start? And so as as we have been working on these since uh, well basically 2011, 2012, we came up with the first uh, um, prototype of WordLift, and so we started to use the schema vocabulary as as the vocabulary was was really being created, um, the ROI at that time was very hard to measure, and now there are so many different ways in which you can you know find the value in schema. So here we have like you know six layers, you know six ways that you can experiment with in order to understand you know what is the value, so rich results.

Peter Mead: Can I, um, can I ask just just for a minute, uh, since we had one of our questions that was submitted to us by Sam Penny, who’s a senior SEO specialist at Optimizing, and he asked this question specifically, so I’m so glad you’re you’re going to explain this uh, in such a structured way here, six different areas for um, figuring out your ROI for schema, I just wanted to interject there, so I’m that’s good, please please go ahead, Andrea, thank you.

Andrea Volpini: Yeah, because because of course, I mean, when when we talk about a local business, we might you know focus on on one aspect only, when we talk about uh, you know a large publisher, we might look at you know different aspects, so each one should take you know the best for his own online business, and and of course you know, content findability, digital branding, they might see you know things that you know have a kind of a hard to measure impact, but in reality it’s not so hard you know, and so I will walk you through some examples, and then of course you can stop me, and we can discuss specifically about uh, you know something that uh, that shows up rich results, yeah, that’s that’s what we’ve been talking about till now, uh, so now we have you know enough data in the Search Console that you can filter the clicks and understand you know what what has happened since you know I I had a structured data markup, and so here we see a travel brand in Canada, and you know the improvement it was measured from you know in terms of rankings, in terms of click-through rate increase in comparison to the you know to the um, average clicks of the site, and so it’s an easy way you know plug-in looking at rich results, it’s an easy way to measure your your return of investment, because at the end of the day you know you want to understand the business value of of this implementation, so you know it’s a client that is booking a villa, it’s it’s a it’s a service subscription, so what is the business value you’re working for? It’s a new client that it’s ringing at the door, uh, you know it’s it’s it’s a booking, and then what is the conversion rate that you have on the site, because that allows you to kind of scope and say hey, okay, that’s the amount of money that that we can generate if we bring you know more qualified traffic to it, and then of course you know you have to analyze what would it take, and you know would it take a few hours in front of a web page to create a JSON-LD that I had on the page, or or should I get you know a framework like uh, I don’t know, WordLift or or others, a solution in order to get a more you know comprehensive solution, it really depends, it really depends on the type of target, but then you can do the math and and get the ROI, and so you will understand that you can focus on on specific areas of your site where there is an actual business value, and then well, that’s a basic formula, so you take the total number of clicks and then you you you multiply by the conversion rates, and then you multiply by the business value, and then you can subtract the cost you know whether it’s the SEO that you engage with for implementing the schema, or it’s the tool that you’re buying, or you know whatever costs you have, but but that’s that’s the calculation that you can use for understanding you know what’s the business value. So here we see like for instance you know the impact on news article, and of course so we are in in this case in the context of a news publisher, um, and this is in Europe, and you can see that as soon as we plugged in you know the the proper markup for a news article, which is it’s not just about you know adding the markup of news article, but it’s a lot of other uh, small parameters that that world refuses for providing, for instance you know the images in the right formats and dimensions of the entities that are you know um, detected in the text of the article, but we could immediately see you know an uptake in terms of click that was pretty pretty um, interesting in this case, and this is uh, how long does it take you know if if the site is large you know like in this case you know it takes less, less you know a couple of weeks and you start seeing the results, you can take you know you know maybe four weeks, uh, sometimes it can take more depending on you know the traffic volume and the search volume that uh, that you’re dealing with. This is a very small photo blog, this is a guy that I met a conference and that started to use WordLift, and then he showed me this graph and he said you know when I plugged the solution I started to have a lot more keywords I’m ranking for, and that’s that’s another impact, because of course we we mark up a lot of content uh, with with our tool, and then these makes the content more visible, and so we generally see an uptake on the impressions, which doesn’t you know means that we’re bringing you know directly more clicks, but we get more visibility, there are more keywords that we can work on, so we are kind of making the content more more open for Google to understand it and to to to bring it to the to the end user. Um, this is a travel business, this is a an OTA uh, in in the Netherlands, we’ve been working for now almost two years, so this is like a kind of data from 2018 and 2019, and and and we can see the impact on the business here, uh, though you know the number of keyword that we are adding it’s it’s you know kind of limited, but uh, but the the audience that is landing on the site is more qualified, and so the click-through rates and the conversion rate is improving, because Google is capable of understanding on the long tail type of queries that that that this is the good side for for that user, and so it’s driving more traffic, and there’s no rich results here, I mean then of course we plugged also some rich results, but in the beginning it was really about you know expressing the things that that that Psy talks about, and of course in in in the travel industry it’s super important to connect you know the the lodging business with the intent of the user making the search, there is a lot of a lot more than actually schema enables, and um, so this is a quote by by Piece Lasky, um, on on augmentation of query, so this is uh, like the way the mechanism that Google uses for providing results that uh, take into account um, multiple keywords for that same intent, um, and and these in these patent, structured data is mentioned as a way for Google to expand the query to understand the query and to trigger a synthetic query that better answer the user request, so let me show you an example, when I ask for a CEO of WordLift, Google is capable of understanding that CEO of WordLift is under able penis myself, and so it plugs in you know content about CEO of WebLive, but it it also immediately gets content about Andrea Volpini, and that’s you know this this disambiguation of the intent from you know CEO of a company into the person, and rebel peony he makes you know a better serve, but it also creates a better branding for for the person or for the organization, so structured data it’s not only a way for getting you know the stars or the clicks or a better click to rate, it’s a way for creating data that AI like Google can use for talking about or interacting about your brand or your person, and then of course here you know we start to see that you know these knowledge panels are composed no longer only by Wikipedia but but from the open web, and so we become you know a source of information for for for Google and for other semantic search engine with our own websites, and that’s probably Jason Barnard that a lot of is a lot of these examples where he can you know trigger a panel in a few in a few minutes. Now having said so, is schema ranking factor? No, it’s not, um, it’s not a renting factor, but it does improve you know the way in which the information is presented to the user, and and that can start that yeah, so um, so that can stabilize your rankings, um, so you can see that in this example when we when we plug structured data we are able to you know makes the rankings more the position more stable, um, and and of course improve the click-through rates. Voice search, this is another area, completely different area of ROI, I mean there are a lot of companies that want to you know make the first move into into voice search, well structured data is is a simple and easy way for you to get into the Google Assistant, whether you’re publishing news articles or recipes or how-to’s or FAQ as we discussed, um, in in the previous presentation, you can immediately get into the into the the voice search results of the Google Assistant, um, speakable structured data, this is very limited, U.S. only, content has to be written in English, but it works because it provides a way for for for search engines like Google to understand this content is what I expect to be speakable from this specific article, there is a cabal here, it’s very hard to measure voice today, it’s very hard to monetize voice for that matter, and uh, and and there is a big issue in discoverability in general, so I have created several uh, voice app on for the Google Assistant, but it’s very hard to bring the user to these apps, and in-structure data is actually one of the way in which you can trigger the voice response from Google in a super simple way, but yeah again, I mean it does require investment in so if you want to use it just just so you know that uh, you know you might get your entrance into the assistant, but it’s it’s it’s it’s going to be hard to measure and do to prove results, um, and uh, and yeah, and that back to us, it means that we have to focus on the content that you know can can really uh, make a difference in your business, so you don’t have to mark up everything, you have to mark up you know what what makes a difference, um, content structuring, this is more for like you know the the mid-size businesses and you know people that have a lot of content, we can use schema as a base for a content model, and that means that we can use the same language that Google uses for understanding the content we write about to organize and structure the content, and therefore improve the reuse of this content, and so here you see for instance this is a um, a FlyJet uh, uh, website that has been working for for uh, many years now with WordLift, and and here we have at the center the event for Side by Southwest, and uh, and then you see that the connection with the airports in the connection with the things to do in in Austin, and then the reason why you should fly with us, and and so this creates kind of a topical cluster around the specific intent which is I to get to Side by Side West with my private charter, and and it can be wrapped up by by by creating content using schema as a content model, and these of course creates a lot more pages, and so this is an example of a design blog that uh, that has been uh, adding a new index to all the entity pages that have been created by by WordLift, and then all of a sudden updated the plugin and removed the no index and so it got a lot of traffic, because of course there is a lot of content when we start organizing and structuring stuff around schema, this is another example, we can plug schema markup into your Google Analytics, so you can go out and say trends by semantic SEO, so what are the trends on on the world side for semantic SEO, and uh, and and that means that we start looking at content not in terms of pages but in terms of entities, and that is a tremendous advantage for instance if you are you know selling advertising, because you can start saying hey, I have this amount of traffic for semantic SEO, and this amount of traffic for artificial intelligence, much like a social network would do, and and then with these same data that you are creating you know we are starting to use also widgets in content recommendation, so on the side we can recommend better content because schema is also used by our plugin for creating content recommendation, these it’s you know it just tells you that schema is not just for Google, schema is a way for creating you know this semantic capital that you can reuse for improve your business, and that’s pretty much all I have to say, these are you know a few things that pitfalls and errors and and stuff like that that uh, you might want to step in.

Nick Ranger: Feedback on Andrea’s Presentation

Nick Ranger: Yeah, I’m just, I’m just kind of blown away a little bit about, um, like basically just showing the data, like how the change over time and the CTR and the difference and and what that could actually mean, because, um, of course like you know we do this with, um, you know, we add structure data with our clients and things like that, but the some of that is just like, I would really really like to like kind of accelerate their potential for that, because I think at the end of the day like yeah, in a lot of instances, um, you know what Jesus was saying like people don’t add structured data because it’s like it’s a resource issue and that’s a huge one, or, um, it’s a like they’re not technical SEOs and they don’t really understand what it does or how it sort of works, and I always kind of, um, what you were saying like it’s almost like a philosopher trying to talk to you know an everyday layman about like how it works and what it means to mark it up as an entity and how those entities are categorized and, um, how they will relate to each other rather than just like but the contents on the page so therefore Google should understand it, um, but it goes a little bit further than that, um, I, yeah, I, I have one question, um, maybe just about WordLift as, um, as a plug-in or as, um, as its own, um, thing, because it’s also incorporating AI and a lot of ML, um, it’s really really cool, um, I think one of the one of the pitfalls that I had was that like, um, it’s a custom CMS and so therefore, um, the challenge was like well we have to have a developer to be able to like build this out the code and things like that, um, so again it’s a reasonable issue, is there something that, um, what that does, um, or could do to be able to bridge that gap?

• Use AI prompts to empower your SEO

Andrea Volpini: WordLift and CMS Integration

Andrea Volpini: Yeah, yeah, currently we have a JavaScript library, so you, you just ask the developer to add one line of code, uh, super simple, and then and then you can build your graph using WordPress, so we have a backend for editing the knowledge graph that WordLift creates for injecting the structured data on whatever CMS you have using WordPress, so that’s that’s a very simple way that allows anyone to plug you know super advanced structured data on any website, just using you know the the simplicity of a WordPress UI, which I think for a lot of people would still be like what do you mean, sorry, but that’s.

Nick Ranger: Yeah, yeah, but that’s that’s really really interesting, because then basically you can use, um, WordPress almost like your front end to be able to, um, mark up all of your entities to be able to build the associations, um, yeah, that’s really really cool, and sorry, I’m already buzzing about a client I want to test that with, but, um, you, like, let’s go back a little bit, um, sorry, I’m kind of hijacking this because I have so many questions and I’m sure everyone else does too, but, um, in terms of like with empty categorization, um, like what a lot of WordLift does is associating like with who the what the where and and who, um, um, you know, to be able to create, um, organized databases of those entities, um, you know, obviously to try and like help the user experience, like how, um, how, how easy is that being able to, um, be able to see that as an SEO to kind of help inform what to do and maybe what even to do next with content?

Andrea Volpini: Yeah, I think that as an SEO, I mean, if if I would if I would work with Judith, I would immediately ask student support for building you know the knowledge graph, because you need the expertise of a content, uh, uh, a domain expert in order to understand okay this is gonna be turned into an entity, whether it’s a product, whether it’s, uh, you know, a local business, so you need the content expertise to make the the decision that are required for saying hey this is an entity of this class, and that’s the beginning.

Judith Lewis: Expertise and Schema Implementation

Judith Lewis: What do you think, Judith? Yeah, absolutely, it’s you need the expertise of the subject in order to be able to establish what the relationships are, otherwise you’re you could make spurious associations that then break everything, um, and I have already seen one person asking a question saying oh I’ve tried to implement this but this is this doesn’t relate to any to this product, you know what what do I do, so it it can be very confusing for people when they’re first implementing schema as well, so take it slow and easy, don’t start with FAQ, maybe that’s possibly a little bit more complex, maybe just tackle something like breadcrumbs, you know, get your word from that breadcrumbs, yeah, breadcrumbs is a good example because you you get an immediate impact on the serve, but you have to think content, you have to think user, you have to think about the navigation of your site, because again, I mean, let’s not look at schema as a way to get on the SERP because that’s that’s what we are here for, but the reality is that schema is a way for organizing your website, and breadcrumbs is a great example for that.

Peter Mead: But you’ve got, um, so breadcrumbs, that’s great. Look at there’s a question that we got submitted earlier on from a person on LinkedIn, and I believe you’ve already started answering this question, Andrea, uh, it’s from Veron Mattel, and he asks, “Google Search Console showing errors either offers review or aggregate ratings should be specified,” uh, so it’s product schema, okay, and we see this, we see this, we see this quite a lot with these kind of errors coming through, um, and of course, I’m sort of elaborating on the question a little bit here because everybody wants product schema, they want the the reviews, you know, um, but how, how are we going to handle these kind of errors, what’s your take, is there a quick and easy way to worry about these kind of errors?

Andrea Volpini: Handling Schema Errors and Fake Data

Andrea Volpini: Yeah, I think, I think in in on LinkedIn I provided a JSON-LD snippet for fixing the errors, that’s the quick, that’s the quick question, that’s the quick answer, the the real answer is that, uh, is that uh, you don’t need to fake data, you don’t need to, you know, well, first of all, there is one important, um, things to be said, Google relies on the guides, so the guides are way more important than the way that the tools are reacting, so so you want to make sure that you you read Google guides before testing errors on on the reach, uh, result testing tool or the the the good old, uh, structured data testing tool, uh, and a warning might be okay, because I mean we don’t want to provide data which is not qualified, that that I totally, you know, would discourage you to do it, uh, so you don’t want to fake data, you don’t want to create fake data just to remove the errors, because it’s not going to work.

Judith Lewis: Oh, you’re spoiling all of our fun. I don’t know, nobody probably remembers these things, I’m old, I’ve been around in this industry since ’96, um, so I remember, not in ’96 we didn’t have schema in ’96, but there was a time when a lot of SEOs were faking the ratings, so they would have fake or false ratings, fake or false reviews. Now that in the UK and in the EU is an issue because it’s an advertising issue because you’re purporting something on behalf of a consumer and it’s a lie, and in 2008 the UK brought in a law that you know results in a big fine or you know jail time, um, so don’t do that, kids, uh, but we used to, and we used to abuse, and one of the points on your your slide was you could get a manual penalty for abusing schema, now I’m not saying this to frighten people into not using it, but you know, if you don’t have do it, if you don’t have an aggregate rating, if you don’t have legitimate, genuine reviews, do not mark them up, don’t, don’t fake it in order to pass a test, it’s it’s a lie, it’s a criminal offense in the UK, I think it also is in the EU, so, um, you know, maybe if you’re in America you’re safe, but, um, yeah, over here, don’t, don’t fake that stuff up just to pass a Google test.

Andrea Volpini: Yeah, it’s also a criminal offense for for all the AI that that can use your data besides Google, don’t do that, be respectful of the AI, yeah, the poor machines are still learning, GPT-3 everybody’s so thrilled about, but it’s still not, not healthy. I love Jupyter, it was crazy, it was kind of like a guy on acid that you asked what time is it and he said the sky is purple and it’s melting.

Judith Lewis: Well, you know, you know, I use it, I use GPT-2 for commenting on Google Core Update because it was so you know illuminating.

Nick Ranger: Yeah, that’s a good segue, um, because like the webmaster blog actually came out last year with, um, basically to say like, um, you you can’t be, you can’t have any, um, like reviews that you basically own, so if we see that, we’re not gonna consider it, um, don’t do it, and I think, I think like when they they add that, I think they’re just wanting to have a little bit more clarity for, um, any you know webmasters, SEOs, site owners out there, um, about what they should do and what they should add, yeah, yeah.

Peter Mead: Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Peter Mead: Yes, well, we’ve just got five minutes left, so, so perhaps, um, what I might do is go around and just ask for an impromptu, off the cuff, you know, one thing that you would do, Nick Ranger, one thing that you would do with with schemer, just a one-minute grab, one thing, one thing.

Nick Ranger: Oh my gosh, well, I think I’ve already said it, um, breadcrumbs is like incredibly important, I think, um, just from being able to implement that, um, again, it’s really really helps with, um, like crawl crawlers going through your website, being able to pass and understand it, um, and it’s a really really good way of being able to show authority around your site, um, plus it also really really helps users to be able to go back, click around, and be able to toggle through category pages, product pages, and the likes, so, um, again, that’s that’s really really important.

Peter Mead: Great. Judith, do you have, do you have the one thing that you that our viewers can go away and do with schema besides don’t fake it?

Judith Lewis: The, so for me, it’s planning. So as Nick said, it’s breadcrumbs are so important because they help you understand your website. If your website isn’t actually organized in a way that you can mark up for schema your breadcrumbs, then you’re in trouble. So plan everything, sit down, and don’t be overwhelmed by Schema.org. The world is your oyster, but sit down and look at your website and look at the competition and see what they’ve got and what is possible for you first, and plan on only those elements first. If they don’t, if no one in the SERPs have FAQ, don’t do that first, do ratings, do reviews, do something else, calories in your in your recipe if you’re a big recipe blogger, um, look at what everybody else is doing first, and then go the next step, hmm.

Peter Mead: Great advice, yeah, so planning, that’s important, um, don’t overreach to begin with, um, on Andrea, what would be your one thing that you would say to people to to do with schema right now?

Andrea Volpini: So, think of schema as the your site map on steroids. It’s a new, it’s a new way for for creating a sitemap for for search engine and machines, but also, also don’t, don’t stop experimenting and because be be your own Google, be your own Google, you know, think, think about using this data yourself in the first place.

Peter Mead: Great, and, um, Nick Ranger, best place for people to connect with you and ask you further questions after this webinar?

Nick Ranger: Yep, Twitter, easily, Twitter, I’m always on Twitter, um, and if I’m not on it, it’s probably because I’m working or sleeping, so yeah, Nick Ranger SEO on Twitter, or in LinkedIn, or, um, um, dot com, to the unfortunate stuff. What size Nick, I had to look at that today, so that’s why I know the euro off by heart.

Peter Mead: Thanks so much for co-hosting. Judith, um, is Twitter the best place for people to ask you quick questions about schema, or what’s your best channel?

Judith Lewis: Absolutely, so Twitter, as you can see there, I put my Twitter handle at Judith Lewis, woohoo, branding for the win, um, you can you can contact me there or on LinkedIn if it’s a longer question, or if it’s a longer question on Twitter, just ask and I’ll I’ll follow you so that you can DM me, but ask away, especially because we haven’t even spoken about entity relationships that much, right? We haven’t spoken about relationships, and but there’s not enough time, there’s two, yeah, there’s too much, you could do a whole hour on just that sort of stuff, absolutely, wow.

Peter Mead: And Cyber Andy, I can see your Twitter handle right there, and uh, terrific, and and I’m assuming that, um, uh, that you’re happy to keep the conversation going that type of thing on Twitter, yeah?

Andrea Volpini: Yeah.

Peter Mead: So, I thank you all once again, what a great, uh, webinar, I think this is uh, really great information for everyone, and uh, without further ado, I will hand over to the next bit of information on the web that’s not us. Thank you all, and goodbye. Have a good night, guys. Thank you so much.