When In Your Digital Marketing Journey Should You Start Doing Schema Markup via @sejournal, @marthavanberkel

Schema Markup is a key SEO strategy for brands that want to stay competitive in this new world of search.

Implementing robust Schema Markup can enable brands to improve their SEO performance by:

That said, implementing a proper strategy can be tedious and time-consuming. In addition, cross-functional coordination between content, IT, and SEO teams is required for this strategy to be done right.

In this article, we’ll help you figure out if your organization is ready to do this strategy and the right timing for you to kickstart your journey.

Is Your Website Ready For Schema Markup?

Let’s start by talking about the foundational elements you need to have on your website to get a positive ROI from doing it.

Before doing it, your website must have a solid technical SEO foundation. This includes (but is not limited to) pages on your site being indexable by Google and other search engines, your website having a fast load speed, and your website being mobile-friendly.

These technical SEO factors contribute to your visibility on the search engine results page (SERP). Without them, you may not yield the desired outcome from your investments.

In addition to these technical SEO factors, your website should have sufficient content for you to translate into Schema Markup.

Over the years, Google has emphasized the importance of helpful, people-first content and even made it part of its core ranking systems. This approach also requires robust, helpful, people-first content.

Is Your Content Ready For Schema Markup?

Content To Achieve Rich Results

Historically, the improved click-through rate from applying the structured data stemmed from pages achieving rich results on Google.

A rich result is an enhanced search result that includes additional visualizations like stars, pricing, or images in the search result.

As of today, there are over 30 rich results available, each with its own required Schema.org properties and content guidelines to adhere to. Since you can only markup content visible on your page, you must have the content available on your site to use the required Schema.org properties.

For example, to achieve a review snippet for your physician page, you need content on the rating count, rating value, review count, and the physician being reviewed.

Content To Describe Your Entities In Detail

Rich results aside, your website content should also describe the key “things” or entities related to your organization.

Entities are the most important things your customers need to know about your organization so they can engage or buy from you.

Your website is where you provide all the details about these entities, and this technique is what you can use to ensure search engines clearly understand the details about them and how they are related to other things on the internet.

When search engines can understand and contextualize your content with greater accuracy, they can present it to more relevant search queries.

When you have the content to achieve a rich result and semantic understanding, an even higher click-through rate can be achieved.

Content Formatted For Scale

For larger websites, your page layout is also a crucial content factor to consider before doing markup. We recommend having a consistent page layout for each pageset if you want to do it at scale.

For example, if you are using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), you should use the same AEM components on your product pages.

This enables vendors or your IT team to implement this approach at scale, with consistency and accuracy.

In summary, this is what you need to have before you start doing the markup:

Good news: If you have these done, you will be ready to start your journey.

Key Events That Indicate It’s Time To Start Doing Schema Markup

There is arguably no better time to start doing this strategy than the present.

However, there are certain key events and sensible moments that can indicate that it’s time for your organization to start doing implementation.

Your Organization Is Looking For Incremental Growth Of Leads From Organic Search

The prime time to start doing it can come as a natural course of your marketing journey.

Say, your SEO team has built a strong foundation for your website, your content team is consistently producing quality content, your website is performing decently well, and your website is one of your key conversion channels.

If your marketing is at this mature stage, investing in structured data can bring that extra lift you want to see from your website.

It can drive more qualified traffic to your site, increase click-through rates, and grow conversions – which ultimately results in more revenue. Furthermore, it can be a competitive advantage that sets you apart from your competitors on the SERP.

At Schema App, our enterprise customers have seen an increase of 10-30% in traffic after implementing this strategy. This number is even higher for pages that have achieved a rich result.

If you can track your conversions, it is a measurable way for you to show your leaders how your team is moving the needle.

Your Organization Needs To Prepare For AI Search

The world of search is changing with the introduction of AI and large language models. Many marketing leaders have been pressured to answer how they plan on preparing for this change.

Schema Markup could be the answer to this. As mentioned earlier, when you implement this, you are translating the content on your website into a machine-readable format for search engines and AI bots to consume.

When you do proper markup, you also define the relationship between things on your website, creating a content knowledge graph of your web content.

Knowledge graphs can ground large language models and give your organization control over how AI search engines understand your content. It is also a reusable data layer supporting internal AI innovations and content optimization.

If your organization is looking for ways to prepare for AI search, it is time to start doing this method.

You Are Building A New Website, Undergoing Website Consolidation, Or Rebranding

Many marketing teams undergo website rebranding projects and consolidate their websites to ensure a consistent, thoughtful user experience.

However, these projects run the risk of loss in organic traffic due to search engines not understanding the change in company name or website URLs.

Thankfully, you can overcome this by utilizing Schema Markup to communicate this change to search engines.

During the rebranding process, you can notify search engines of the new name using the ‘alternateName’ property and use the ‘sameAs’ property to communicate that the old and new brands are the same.

After transitioning to the new brand, you can leverage the ‘legalName’ property to reference the new brand name and update the ‘alternateName’ and ‘sameAs’ property to reference the old name.

Part of a rebranding project might also involve you migrating to a new content management system. In that case, the case for implementing this technique is even more compelling.

You Are Migrating To A New Content Management System

Migrating to a new content management system often involves reviewing your existing content and how it is presented on a page.

This makes it a great time to start implementing it. Why? Because the content on your page informs you of the rich results you can achieve and what you can optimize with it.

As you build your new website, plan to have the SEO foundation, robust content, and scaleable templated content. As soon as it goes live, you can start your journey and maximize the value.

Are You Ready To Start Doing Schema Markup?

Doing it might be a natural course in your digital marketing journey, especially in the age of generative AI.

It could also be a way to mitigate traffic losses during your rebranding or CMS migration projects.

Whatever your reason, your website should have a strong technical SEO foundation and good-quality content before investing in a Schema Markup solution.

That way, you’ll be able to achieve rich results and create a robust content knowledge graph, reaping the full benefits of this strategy.

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Featured Image: Gracia Chua/Schema App