An Intro to How Schema Can Improve Your SEO [Q&A]

Schema is a formatted, specifically structured set of data that should be backing up every topic, landing and conversion page on your website. Managed by a tireless community team at https://schema.org/, the list of things you can signal to search engines in the background of your great content is growing all the time. SilverServers has built schema into our Paradigm CMS, allowing service topics and locations to easily be embedded into every page on your website. Let’s go over four of the great ways you can use this to your SEO, and quality of life, advantage.

Why Are My Business Hours Or Location Wrong On Google?

Especially when searching for a local business on a mobile device, it can be extremely frustrating to drive somewhere due to Google’s business hours information being incorrect. With Schema, you can define the operating hours of every department of your business. Holidays, set closed hours, renovations, all of them can be signaled to Google SERP results through Schema’s structure data markup. This can also be used as a source of information for Google’s MyBusiness API to update your business hours there by making sure they are correct in your website’s Schema.

Address and other contact information can be supplied through the same means. Rich search results can have updated events and other information applied to them based on the information your schema provides. Various listing and directory websites provide the ability to review schema and update their information based on your authoritative data. When setup properly, your many profiles around the internet should be easy to keep collected when contact information changes.

Differing contact, address and business operating hours can be a signal to Google that something isn’t quite right with your online presence. Having all of this information matching in all possible areas cements Google’s understanding of the exact front door of your local retail business without a doubt. You’re likely to see rankings for local searches and nearby customers improve if you can show Google your business information is reliable and available.

Can Schema Be Used To Define My Services To Search Engines?

Schema is extremely useful for highlighting and providing extra information about the services your business offers. Not only can you provide a tree of background category and related topic info, you can specify individual service areas, costs, audiences and even your aggregate (provable!) ratings from various sources. It’s not just used by search engines! Large e-commerce, programming platforms and Google apps often have their own built in plugins (Shopify, Drupal, Chrome Browser etc) that can read the product or service schema that your website provides. Inventory management and other plugins a-like could possibly used your Schema as source for its information on a regular basis just by visiting your website.

While visitors get to read your great content and engage with your message/imagery, Schema is in the background providing a wealth of encyclopedic information about every product or service you provide and where you offer it. Schema can be extremely individualized as well, letting you target your landing pages/meta and topics extremely efficiently.

How Can I Control Artist, Author And Publishing Information On My Website?

With Schema on your news articles, recipes and blog posts you can broadcast definitive, original artist/author and publisher information in a range of formats. Various levels of credit/proof can be supplied and dates get a wide range of management possibilities. Original publishing, draft updates, modified dates and ‘rewritten’ or ‘refresh’ style dates can all be supplied and linked through Schema. Need to re-write that old article because your take on a topic has changed drastically? Leave that old one, write an update and link them up as a follow up or topic continuance. Updating old content can be a great way to boost topic authority/direction as well, and being able to quickly review your entire news listing’s ‘last modified’ date can really help a content team focus on pieces that need the most help.

For paintings, drawings, music and other artistic contributions Schema can still be used to define authors/producers/ownership and publication dates. Even copyright holders and contact for licensing/fair use requirements can be applied to every posting you make, providing you have a way to set them!

Can I Condense Third Party Reviews Or Make My Own With Schema?

There are many third-party review systems around the web, providing the ability for your customers to leave ratings in various ways for your products or services. Separate from Google or Facebook ratings, these firms help manage your online reputation with more windows into one of the most effective marketing tools there is: satisfied customers. Many of these firms provide a bunch of great tools and info, but what about if you’ve been taking your own rankings on serving cards for years. Many SilverServers clients make customer testimonials a focus of their content creation process already, but if you can add your own branded ‘rating’ and get your customers to leave one, you can provide topical individual ratings and aggregate totals for all the services you offer through Schema.

As long as you have the receipts, so to speak, of these ratings you’re free to use them to represent yourself through your website. If they’re attached to a written testimonial all the better, but you can list customer info and ratings on service or product pages and deliver that exact info to Google and other search engines for rich SERP results as well. Ratings should appear beside your result, and if done properly can apply to many topics and content structures around your website. Reviews of a recipe itself can be separate from reviews of your video that accompanied it. At the end of the day, the more real information you have to tell Google about how customers like your product, the more reason Google has to believe that its the truth. Typically, long term archives of easy-accessible reviews can have a positive effect on rankings and providing this information through search results will also likely improve your click-through rates.

Just The Schema Beginning

Schema has much more beneath the surface that this short look has provided. Making sure a website’s schema is in order can be a pretty big job and can result in large lists of elements on each page. It can influence rankings, user experience and accessibility to your brand and website and should be an important part of what your website does for you. Combined with the lightning fast load times and technical flexibility of Paradigm CMS, Schema can go a long way to helping improve your rankings and conversions. If you need help getting Schema setup on your site of 5 to 5000 URLs, contact SilverServers’ structured data experts today.

For more related content and tips, check out the SEO Tips section of our blog!