Sophie Gibson says, “I think it's going to be super important to have comprehensive, structured data across the website, especially with Google's new search experience. It's going to be super important to be able to have all your data marked up correctly. So it's a lot easier for Google to pass that information, understand your website and everything related to that, and build that knowledge graph of your business. So you're more likely to be included in these generative search results. So I think this is something that businesses should be focusing on.”

What does comprehensive, structured data mean? What structured data does our website generally include, and what structured data are missed opportunities?

“You've got quite a lot of businesses that have the standard stuff, you've got your standard organization schema, or if you're an E-commerce website, you'll have a product, which is marked up and potentially blog posts that are marked up. And within those key ones, people get, which is fine for generally getting the information across. But you can add so much more to the structured data and information that the generators people can find online don’t include. So I think a lot of people might check that or look at the schema recommendations, or when you're looking around the web, even competitors don't use extra information. For example, in organization schema, you can have your founders marked up as people. You can tell you who runs the business. When did it open? How long has it been running all the different members and organizations or governing bodies in which any business is included? So people are potentially missing these enhanced snippets that you wouldn't necessarily find in any generator or any tool that might be able to automatically mark that up, whether that's an app or WordPress plug-in, etc. I think there are a lot of missed opportunities there.”

And generally, is the ‘about us’ page the best place to have this schema?

“I think organization schema on the homepage is probably the best place because that's the home of the business. But when it comes to stuff like ‘about us,’ I think you could potentially mark up the stuff on there. But another thing that I think people miss is marking their people or meeting the team pages. Because you can add so much more information about the people that work for your business that not many businesses tend to include, so you can include the people who worked there, what their job title is, what accreditations they have, when did they start in this business blinked any areas that we've been quoted around the web, and highlighting that the people you've got what writing and working for you, are genuine experts. They are the ones that are writing the content. They’re the one that is contributing to the website. So I think that's a missed opportunity for businesses you don't necessarily see all the time.”

And a lot of businesses are concerned with spending too much time and effort showcasing individuals working within the business. They might move on in a year or two if they think well. What happens to those pages? Or what is the best practice for those pages if someone moves on from the company?

“I think keeping their profile up and running, so you can attribute their work to the blog articles. Because even if they have moved on, they might have gained more experience. You want to make sure that they have a historical footprint across the web because that will help show Google that you've employed people who have continued to be experts in whatever fields or continue to have relevant experiences. So I don't know why people want to remove that historical information. Because to me, it doesn't make sense. Like they still wrote it no matter where they've gone in the future.”

It's the same thing as moving web pages or taking out pages with a lot of traffic and then suddenly disappearing. So you don't want to be doing that.

“Yeah, exactly. And I love using these are like personally. Even though maybe other companies, I still link to my various profile pages. So across all of our businesses, I've worked at and written content for because it's useful. And when those kinds of pages are removed, it's also a detriment to showing your experience. So I think keeping those pages alive for the people you've had working for users’ benefit. And it's no good if one person has contributed hundreds of blog posts to your website, and you go on a blog post after they've gone, and their profile picture and all their details have been removed from the post. You don't know actually who wrote it when you click on it. Maybe it takes you to a broken link or a redirect. I don't think it's good for other websites to remove those pages because you will lose that kind of EEAT trust signals across your website as well.”

And I was just about to take a sidestep into EEAT. And it's worthwhile just diving into there in slightly greater depth. What are a few things that companies can encourage individuals to do to enhance their authority and to be able to utilize that authority further to enhance the company's reputation?

“I think reaching out to publications you want to write for if you've got really good ideas, and you've got a way to prove that in industry publications, websites, or across the web. So, for example, even if you work in very niche areas, there's always a publication looking for actual writers to demonstrate their expertise. There are a lot of trade magazines, obviously digital PRs, probably more well-known for using that with expert quotes. And so I think that is additionally a really good way to demonstrate that you are skilled by providing those commentaries around the web. If you're more of a writer, and as an individual, approaching businesses with ideas for posts, being able to write talks, podcasts, anything like that, to where you're talking about your subject areas. Again, you can link that all with structured data to your data, or if that's what you want to create around the web, especially if that's your main aim. You want to be viewed more as an expert in the field and your industry.”

And perhaps that means that organizations need to task individuals once a month, appearing on some of the publications via a blog post, as you mentioned previously, or perhaps a podcast episode or something like that to enhance the reputation and drive that authority back to the company.

“I think there's a lot of talk about personal branding. I don't think you need to highlight that. It's showing your interest and demonstrating the passion you have for the kind of industry that you are in.”

So going back to a schema, you said that for some schema elements that are typically missed, such as organizational schema. Finding information, perhaps accreditations, you need to consider that manually because not all automated schema tools will do that successfully. Is that a fair summary?

“Yeah, I’d say.”

Okay, and you can continue to use automated schema tools for other content on your website and blog posts.

“I think anything that's a very large template job, then use a plugging. Use something that will help you apply that at scale across the website. But for those places, those schema types where they're only going to appear once, or it's just one or one-off thing that you need to create, then you should create that manually and look at those extra details around that. Because yet, if you're spending loads of time manually creating stuff with 1000s of blog posts, that won’t be a good use of your time. But if you're writing it for one person, which needs to be individualized, you may as well spend that extra time making sure that it's comprehensive. And again, make sure you've got all the information and can demonstrate your experience, expertise, and details. You can verify that in one place, then I think that is worth the extra time spent.”

So, distinguishing between what needs to be checked manually and what you can give to automation because you've got so much volume there makes sense to automate that. And what about a search engine's use of the data it finds on your site from structured data? So are you advocating this primarily to assist search engines with understanding what your business is about and what your website is about? Or is it also to assist with mark-up and additional SERP feature opportunities that search engines offer?

“It's a bit of a mixed bag because Google doesn't give you rich snippets based on all of the different schema properties. They are two different things. It does use certain aspects for rich snippets. But it doesn't necessarily pull in the founder information we asked to use in this search. But I think it's going to be getting there. And I think it will absorb more features or information than it can get from structured data because Google's only got a certain amount of resources. So instead of having to find your page, render it, and get the information that way. Having that structured data is just a bit of a shortcut, and I think it will make it a little easier to be included in any of these search features or any future ones. I think it's a lot about future-proofing. Because we know Google has a knowledge graph, it can view your business in terms of how it relates to all the different aspects of you around the web and how it relates to different topics. So I think being prepared for that is going to be a competitive advantage.”

So how do you measure success? I can certainly understand the value of what you're sharing. But if you say to a client, there's a lot of opportunity here for schema on your site. And they say, ‘Okay, well, if we were to give you this budget, how do you measure the value of doing this?’ What's your answer to that?

“It's hard with anything related to future-proofing. It’s really hard to say, you will see the impact of this, but I think you can frame it in terms of competitors. Because if you can show that you will be giving so much more rich information and that it could be a competitive advantage for you in the future, it's something that you will need to bring up that way. Because it's impossible to say with structured data that you will see X, if you do Y also, you can potentially use the AI approach because you can't say for definite what you will think to be included within ChatGPT results when people ask questions about your business. But you can propose that as a potential upside of that. Because if you can see all of their structured data related to your business, it will help these large models understand and include you when it comes to people asking about related topics. So, especially if you've got working with companies who want to focus on that, depending on the industry, that could be a really good way to show how your work using structured data could have an impact. But again, it's all future-proofing. Are we going to be included in these? Again, you might not find out only about six months down the line that people are getting referrals from you from ChatGPT. I've seen it recently where a few businesses have gotten in touch to be like, ChatGPT recommended you. That could be a way of measuring that.”

Interesting. Well, you showed what SEOs should be doing in 2023, so let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So what's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“I think it related to a little bit of trust. It's not about what people are wasting time on. It thinks what people are not doing or giving a reason as to why they don't want to do it. So for me, it's linking out to relevant posts or articles around the web because they don't want people going off their website. I think this is a key element of the trust signals. You might be referencing, for example, you have an industry body affiliated with. Still, you don't want to include the link because you'll take them away from the page. They won't read the content, or you're talking about particular certification or a particular company, and you don't want to link out to them because people will get distracted and won't come back and read the post. But I think this is super important for actually being able to demonstrate that trust. So I think that's a thing people miss when it comes to what they're not trying to do for 2023. I still think it does pop up around places. And I think that's counterproductive. Again, for those trust signals, you want to show that you're affiliated with certain companies or businesses or have guidelines to follow.”

Sophie Gibson is the technical SEO director at Studio Hawk.