How to Scale Your Enterprise SEO with Schemas and FAQs

Drive value by enabling schemas and FAQs across your digital properties 

Schemas, FAQs, and entity search optimization strategies can significantly improve content visibility and enhance SEO by deploying techniques that enhance website content. They can drive the methodology behind marking up content or using automation and tools to efficiently scale initiatives for enterprise-class websites and successfully tracking KPIs to report to key stakeholders.

We see two major opportunities in this space: 

1. Understand and implement schema markup to tag your content and make it insightful for businesses to drive higher SERP visibility, impressions, and clicks 

2. Develop and deploy engaging FAQs around your content to improve the context, relevancy, and speed to answer your users most pressing questions 

Google is trying to improve the user experience by surfacing more relevancy into their search results by understanding intent and removing ambiguity in the content they discover – which is as important. We are seeing two major trends driving content visibility and customer acquisition​ around page experience signals of google algorithms, such as thin content, Smith algorithm and how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information. The second trend is to leverage conversational search and answer the user’s discovery questions as they indicate their search intent. 

Schemas and making your content better understood by search engines

We have found that structured data markup enables search engines to understand website content and entity optimization helps build and create knowledge graphs using schemas & entity attributes​. We have seen from our clients that drive 28% average increase in traffic from the organic channel. Scaling schema offers the fastest time to success in SEO. 

Typically, brands are unable to scale schema implementation and face the following challenges of deploying Schemas 

• Complexity of entity search algorithm and architecture optimization​ 
• Schema.org and Google often revise the schema attributes leading to errors. Search engines ignore pages with errors 
• Significant website IT resources and technical knowhow needed during the deployment and for ongoing maintenance​ 
• Ability to demonstrate and report on impact​​ 

The main reason for failure of schema projects is because the deployment is murky and is not set up to solve the challenges described above. Nonetheless the right way to scale schema projects is to deploy schemas with a nested architecture. The taxonomy of schema architecture​ means that you do the following: 

• Apply nested entity architecture for maximum impact​ 
• ​Know which schema types and which attributes to include​ 
• ​Applying the right schema and attributes to the content on right pages​ 
• Error-Free advanced schemas are key to winning​

Here is an example of a nested schema architecture in a retail industry use case the schema nested architecture captures the whole hierarchy of deploying schemas from website schema tagging to organization, local business, store level schema tags, tagging SKUs and then overlaying ratings and pricing schemas. As you can see, the nested architecture really makes it easy for Google to understand what this business is all about. 

Another challenge that we often encounter is around ongoing schema management and monitoring for errors​, we recommend that you do the following: 

• Measure the available opportunities​ by optimizing schema vocabulary and website content changes that can enhance the overall content visibility. 
• Monitor schema.org for new schema types and find new schema types that can be added to your content in a nested structure. 
• Error check & proactive monitoring​ your schemas on a weekly basis by auditing the deployed schema. 
• Use tools like Schema scorecard​ to stay on top of schema health. 

While schema management can be done via a tag manager or manually, Milestone has made it easy by creating a schema cloud implementation process using Schema Manager Platform​.

The benefit of the schema platform is that it helps in maintaining error-free schemas, which is particularly challenging – errors come up every few weeks as you keep making changes to your website with frequent updates. We recommend the following approach: 

• Errors can happen due to changes in Google guidelines, schema attributes, technical issues, etc. ​ 
• Extensive R&D and trial and error testing can be necessary to correct errors as there are no published guidelines on schemas.​ 
• We recommend that you identify errors in Schema that block search engines from understanding your content. Schema warnings present opportunities to enhance the search engine’s understanding of your on-page entities. Test your schema health for free 

Case study for a retail chain 

After initial deployment of schemas, the site experienced some broken product schema and breadcrumbs error caused a drop of 35% in impressions and clicks​. After we fixed the schema errors there was a 95% increase in impressions and 168% increase in clicks. Errors can happen due to changes in Google guidelines, schema attributes, technical issues, etc. ​Extensive R&D and trial and error testing can be necessary to correct errors as there are no published guidelines on schemas. 

Lastly, monitoring core KPIs​ is important to track the benefits of schemas, this would mean tracking the following KPIs, we make it easy by using the schema platform and track for you.

• Impressions​ 
• Clicks​ 
• Total visibility across rich results​ 
• Per page visibility​ 

Scaling FAQ content​ to capture the SERP real estate

Customers seek answers in search engines, on your website, and from their network, and you want to be the source of those answers to maintain engagement across the journey. Investing in answers will pay off attractively but doing so successfully means you have to understand what they are asking and their intent. Search results page elements to prioritize website content and asset type​ and FAQs help saturate the SERPS​. 

Research shows that relevant answers and FAQs do that better than any other SERP construct or element, so they drive the highest CTR of all types. By aggregating the CTR of a large set of keywords across the top 15 positions, we can measure the total click potential. Your audience is asking questions across multiple touchpoints and locations​. Answering questions improves search visibility to improve CTR, get ranked better on SERPs, and prove impressions and clicks to your digital properties. Milestone research found that: 

• 42% better CTR in mobile devices​ 
• 70% more likely to show up in People Also Ask​ 
• FAQs with schemas achieve an average of 5.5 position better rank​ 
• 11.5% increase in impressions​ 

Download our research

Further multiple locations and channels make tracking and responding to FAQs a challenge​. You can demonstrate the effectiveness of your FAQ strategy through reports around:​ 

• FAQ powered search traffic​ 
• Rich results visibility​ 
• Featured snippets visibility​ 
• Voice search queries​ 
• Answer/response rate​ 

Milestone FAQ Manager lets businesses manage questions spread across multiple locations, channels, and devices. With Milestone FAQ Manager, businesses can curate questions and provide consistent and correct answers in a matter of seconds. In a single click, publish your master questions and responses across up to thousands of locations.

Putting it all together, in this case study, you notice the powerful combination of FAQ content and schemas for a B2B technology company, here the net effect captured long tail search queries, provided answers to users and cross-linked the content across pages to drive increases in non-branded queries and branded queries.

Superior quality content is king! FAQs that enhance your customer experience are superior quality content. Schemas help search engines discover and understand your content. Deploying advanced schemas and maintaining them error-free helps communicate more in-depth information about your content​. Done right Schemas and FAQ is the quickest and most effective SEO strategy for gaining organic traffic.​ Automation will help scale Schemas and FAQs and to provide impact reporting to stakeholders.​​ 

To know more about how Milestone can assist with your schema and FAQ needs, contact us at sales@milestoneinternet.com or call us at 408-200-2211.

Helpful links and resources:

• Schema Validator – https://schemavalidator.milestoneinternet.com/
• FAQ Schemas and FAQ Rich Results Correlate with Increased Organic Rank – Read More
• Learn about Schema Vocabulary at https://schema.org/ 

Author: Anil Aggarwal

Anil Aggarwal is an experienced Chief Executive Officer with a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Skilled in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), E-commerce, Entrepreneurship, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Strategic Partnerships.