What is Schema Mark Up
A Brief Practical Guide for Understanding Schema Markup
Schema Markup is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML “your sites core” to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs. This is therefore a SEO User Experience factor. It is the result of collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible at the time. One possible outcome is that by adding Schema markup to your HTML you improve the way your page displays in SERPs by enhancing the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title. See screen shot.
Strangely enough we have found many Marketing Agencies are way behind on this most powerful of SEO methods. The #1 thing we see brands miss out on is so simply implemented we just cant wrap our heads around why this hasn’t become standard protocol for a lot of agencies. The method is called Service Type Schema, but can also be accomplished with a couple of other types. What this particular markup does is allows your Google review stars and count to appear in the Search Engine Results page. To verify what we say is fact here, go ahead and start Googling and having a look at the organic results. You will rarely see a web site link return with the star count also showing. Here’s a perfect example and think about it; which would you click on?
As you can see even his 2 top competitors do not have Schema Markup deployed. Isn’t it an obvious advantage? Would you not 1st check at the company with 200+ reviews showing before clicking on any other result? Of course. This however, is just a small taste of the power of Schema. You can do so much more with it to help better rank, set yourself a part from competitors, and help search engines better understand each and every page on your site as an individual page. You can also develop some of the more advanced Schema and get what is called a position Zero result which is the king of all SEO results because it is literally the 1st result on the page and the reason why they call it Position Zero is because it shows well above the normal organic ranking section which would be what you see in the screen shot above. Now let us show you the all powerful position zero!
There it is the almighty Position Zero in a list type Schema format. It’s pretty obvious why this is so powerful, it’s the 1st thing on the page and well answers popular search queries and in this atracts a lot of very relevant traffic to the site which is a huge SEO advantage!
In Conclusion
Schema Markup blends into many other marketing and site optimization disciplines and is one of the most misunderstood factors therein. We would highly advice using this is a way to qualify the marketing agency you choose. We encourage people to simply ask the question, “Do you know what Position Zero is and how to get one for me?” You will likely suddenly be talking to a panicking salesman as he stumbles around trying to come up with a good answer to this surprising question, and in that know that you have got the wrong agency. You should ask about FAQ and PPA Schema as well, another couple of Schema results that are very powerful. You can also ask them if they can get your star count in the organic sections of the SERP’s. You will likely know right away whether your talking to a qualified real professional agency or not this way.
