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Andrew Thorn of DigitalMaas

Andrew Thorn

Founder and CEO of DigitalMaas

Andrew is the founder of DigitalMaas, a Digital Marketing Platform that helps business owners grow online. Their platform is used by thousands of businesses. He manages 27 Million impressions and 3 million clicks per month. The average business on his platform doubles their organic traffic in the first 12 months. The platform helps simplify and make digital marketing easy and effective.

Article

How To Get Better Search Rankings With Schema Markup

Hi everyone, I’m Andrew Thorn and I want to talk to you today about an exciting new marketing concept known as Schemas.

Schemas are a way to markup the content on your website that allows your site to communicate with Google.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Andrew’s success

 Using a Schema markup for better rankings

Result if you follow the steps in Andrew’s session

Better search ranking and better information available to the consumer through the use of Schemas 

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Most websites have a relevant schema. And I’m going to go through the types in a moment, but you’ll see that there’s even, from the sort of most basic, which is a website schema. So, you can actually mark your website up with a website schema, that’s a pretty generic one.

There is another one called local business schema, which is probably very relevant for your listeners today. A local business schema allows me to update things like my address, my phone number, any awards that I’ve won customer service details, my social media properties. So those ones are very relevant for most business owners.

And then you’ve got some really niche specific ones like recipe schema, which is, you know, if you’re in the food and beverage space, you can mark up your recipes that are on your website with the recipe schema. If you’re in the recruitment space, you have a job posting schema, which will actually show your job results in the search results.

So, there’s some very generic ones, and then there’s some very industry specific ones.

Okay, cool.

So, the other thing to know is, you may notice another part of the schema that did doing here is this URL for Jimmy here. It has the full URL. So jimmy.com, forward slash, restaurant, so you can see here, but for URL, but this one, he actually has dot, dot, dot and then you can see it’s got the word Sydney.

And then it’s got the word city restaurants. So that’s not the actual URL. That’s what called breadcrumb schema. So, it actually categorized the URL into a breadcrumb. And it just simplifies that.

So, once again, it’s just showing Google the way the data is structured on that website. So, it’s saying, we’ve got pages that are grouped under Sydney. And then we’ve got pages that are grouped on the CD restaurants. And that’s this type of schema, quote breadcrumb schema. So, as I said, there are different types of schema triggering different things in the search results.

Here’s another example. This is probably one of my most favorite examples. This is a thing called event schema, and event schema is for anyone who hosts who’s hosting events. They can actually put the event schema on to their events pages.

And they can see, they can put things like what is the date of the event, what is the venue that the events going to be at, if it’s a physical event, any information about the event, so the stop date, the time, things like that, this is really, really underutilized.

And as you can see, this was for a musical called Mamma Mia, which is in Sydney. And you can see there on the left hand side, the actual listings of the places where it is. So, the search results for this some search term, Google shows you what’s up coming, including a clickable link to the venue.

But if you haven’t, within the right hand side here, this is actually the theater that it’s actually at. And you can see underneath the Google My Business Page of that theater, it’s actually listed the events. So, this particular event is obviously off the days one, so it’s not showing up yet. But what will happen is when it gets to February, those events will actually be listed on the Google My Business Page.

So, it’s a great way of, even if you’re, you know, if you’re hosting an event at a particular venue, by putting event schema on there, you will actually unlock that events panel on your venues Google My Business Page. So, you don’t need to add anything to the Google My Business Page. Google automatically just connects the two when you put it. That is the venue of your hosting your event.

Does the venue need to verify that these events are actually taking place there? Or it’s just Google that just assumes?

No, it doesn’t. The venue doesn’t need to do that. So, one of the things that I was actually going to do was to test this theory. I was going to put the digital mask platform launch party on the steps of the Opera House in Sydney.

And I was going to use schema to mock up the page and we literally did it. It popped up on the page and then we took it back down. So now there’s nothing they can do to stop it. That’s an interesting thing with schema, that the search engines are relying upon you to be sort of accurate with your information.

Because they are literally going to read it and publish it without any sort of checks. So, it is open to abuse in the wrong hands. But in the right hands, you can just use it to obviously create a better experience for your customers on Google.

Yeah, and as soon as Google finds out, and they always do. Don’t they? They’re pretty smart. Yeah, they’re just put yourself into trouble and it’s going to hurt your overall ranking. So, probably not.

Exactly. Yeah. There’s big advantages if you are hosting events, and lots of people aren’t doing it. What’s interesting is Ticketmaster does use event schema, but ticket tech, who’s their biggest competitor doesn’t use schema. So, they’re literally missing out on this massive part. It’s probably just because they haven’t thought to implement it. So interesting that Ticketmaster is quite ahead of the game in terms of implementing this schema.

Here is another example of rich snippets. And this is an example of recipe schema. So, as you can see, it’s taking up a really large portion, they actually call this listing position zero, because position one is actually below this.

So, this whole section that’s coming up here underneath the search result, for these bonaffi recipe has taken an image from this page, it’s actually taken the steps that it takes to actually make this pie. So, you can see it taking up a really large part of the, of the search results.

So, if you’re a business that has any sort of steps to using your products and services, or you know, you publish guides, different things, putting a recipe in there is actually really valuable. And especially, if you’re marking it up with recipe schema.

So, that’s an example of what can happen. It’s very similar when you have a thing called blog posting schema. So, you can mark up your blog posts with your featured image and that will actually put the image there, and you know, an excerpt from your blog post here as well.

So, I can see, you’ve got like, if you’ve got any type of how to page or how do I do something page, it looks like you should be using this schema.

You definitely should be. So, this game is perfect for how to, how do I, what are the steps for, any of those sort of pages that you have on your website. Really, important.

The second, the last point there I was just going to write is that we actually did a bit of market research. We looked at 2 million dot com, Au domains, and only 1% of them were using it in australia.com.

I used the Australian sort of preferred domain extension. And we had a look at 2 million of the domains and only 1% were using schema. So, it’s an incredibly underutilized sort of technique to be able to help you get more rankings and more clicks.

The people that are using it, are generally the big aggregators, you know. People like Taste, which is a big magazine. The real estate portals are using schema that you know, the largest type of businesses have been using it for a little while.

But if you go down to the small business, not a lot of people are implementing this. And it’s actually really easy to implement, depending on what CMS you have.

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