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In the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization (SEO), staying ahead of the curve is crucial for businesses looking to maximize their online visibility. One of the most powerful tools in an SEO professional's arsenal is structured data, implemented through schema markup. This article will delve into what structured data is, its history, and how it can be leveraged to influence how Google displays your website listings in search results.
Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content. It's a way of organizing and labeling content on websites so that search engines can better understand and interpret the information. By implementing structured data, you're essentially speaking the language of search engines, helping them to comprehend the context and meaning behind your web pages.
Schema markup is the code used to implement structured data. It's a collaborative effort between major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex to create a common vocabulary for structured data. This vocabulary, known as Schema.org, defines a set of standardized types and properties for describing various entities, actions, and relationships on the web.
The concept of structured data for the web isn't new, but its widespread adoption and importance in SEO have grown significantly over the past decade.
In the early 2000s, microformats emerged as one of the first attempts to add semantic markup to HTML. These were followed by RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes), which provided a more flexible way to embed metadata in web documents.
In 2011, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! jointly announced Schema.org, a collaborative project to create a common vocabulary for structured data markup. This marked a significant milestone in the evolution of structured data, as it provided a unified approach that was supported by major search engines.
While microdata and RDFa are still supported, JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) has become the preferred format for implementing schema markup. Introduced in 2014, JSON-LD offers a more flexible and less intrusive way to add structured data to web pages.
Implementing structured data through schema markup offers several benefits for your SEO strategy:
Schema.org provides a wide variety of schema types for different content. Some of the most commonly used types include:
While there are various ways to implement schema markup, JSON-LD has become the preferred method due to its simplicity and flexibility. Here's a basic example of JSON-LD markup for a local business:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "OCG Creative",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "6100 Plumas St., Suite 100",
"addressLocality": "Reno",
"addressRegion": “NV",
"postalCode": "89519",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"telephone": "(775) 324-1644",
"url": "https://ocgcreative.com"
}
</script>This code would typically be placed in the <head> section of your HTML document.
To maximize the benefits of structured data, follow these best practices:
While basic schema markup can significantly improve your search listings, there are advanced techniques that can further enhance how Google displays your content:
1. Nested Schemas
Nested schemas allow you to provide more detailed and interconnected information. For example, you could nest a Product schema within an Offer schema to provide comprehensive details about a product and its availability.
2. Aggregate Ratings
For businesses with multiple reviews, using the AggregateRating schema can display an overall rating in search results, potentially increasing click-through rates.
3. Breadcrumb Markup
Implementing breadcrumb markup can help Google understand your site structure and may display the breadcrumb path in search results, improving navigation for users.
4. Sitelinks Searchbox
For larger sites, implementing the Sitelinks Searchbox schema can enable a search box directly in your Google search listing, allowing users to search your site without visiting it first.
5. Speakable Schema
As voice search continues to grow, implementing Speakable schema can help identify sections of your content that are particularly suitable for text-to-speech applications.
As search engines continue to evolve, the importance of structured data in SEO is likely to grow. Here are some trends to watch:
Structured data and schema markup are powerful tools in the modern SEO toolkit. By providing explicit, machine-readable information about your website's content, you can significantly influence how Google and other search engines understand and display your listings. While implementing structured data requires some technical knowledge, the potential benefits in terms of improved visibility, click-through rates, and overall search performance make it a worthwhile investment for any business serious about its online presence.
At OCG Creative, we understand the nuances of structured data implementation and its impact on SEO. We don't just generate and paste code; we strategically implement structured data to maximize its benefits for your specific business needs. By staying ahead of the curve with advanced techniques and best practices, we ensure that your website takes full advantage of every opportunity to stand out in search results.
Remember, in the ever-changing landscape of SEO, structured data is not just a nice-to-have feature – it's becoming an essential element of a comprehensive and effective search engine optimization strategy. By embracing structured data and schema markup, you're not just optimizing for today's search engines, but also positioning your website for success in the evolving digital landscape of tomorrow.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as a critical element in the digital marketing landscape. With an ever-increasing number of websites competing for the attention of users, businesses are investing heavily in SEO to improve their visibility and drive organic traffic. However, achieving success in SEO is not an overnight process, and it can often be a long and challenging journey. This article delves into the various factors that make SEO challenging and explains why it requires time, patience, and consistent effort.
The algorithms that govern search engine rankings are constantly evolving. Search engines like Google continuously update their algorithms to provide the most relevant and high-quality search results to their users. These updates can have a significant impact on the SEO strategies that businesses employ. To stay on top of these changes, marketers need to monitor search engine announcements, industry trends, and best practices, and adapt their strategies accordingly. This requires a considerable investment of time and resources.
SEO is no longer solely about optimizing your website with the right keywords. Over the years, the number of ranking factors has grown substantially, making the task of SEO more complex. Some critical factors that impact search engine rankings include site speed, mobile-friendliness, content quality, user experience, and backlinks. To be successful in SEO, businesses need to optimize their websites holistically, addressing all these aspects. This multi-faceted approach demands time, expertise, and consistent effort.
Creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO. However, content creation can be time-consuming and requires ongoing effort. Moreover, the content must be optimized for search engines, incorporating relevant keywords and ensuring it is easily accessible to search engine crawlers. Additionally, with the growing importance of voice search and natural language processing, optimizing content for conversational queries is becoming increasingly important.
Backlinks, or links from other websites pointing to your site, are a key factor in determining search engine rankings. They signal trust and authority to search engines, which in turn improves your website's visibility. Acquiring high-quality, relevant backlinks is a challenging and lengthy process. It involves outreach, relationship building, and crafting valuable content that other sites would want to link to, which can take months or even years to achieve.
As more and more businesses recognize the importance of SEO, the competition for the top search engine rankings intensifies. Depending on your industry, you may be competing against established websites with strong domain authority, making it harder to outrank them. Analyzing your competition, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and developing a tailored SEO strategy to outperform them requires time, expertise, and persistence.
For sure, SEO plays a pivotal role in the realm of digital marketing. However, it is crucial to recognize that attaining success in SEO is a long-term endeavor rather than a quick win. The constant evolution of search algorithms, the increasing intricacy of SEO factors, the ongoing necessity for content creation and optimization, the significance of backlinks, and the highly competitive landscape all contribute to the challenges and time-consuming nature of SEO. By exercising patience, adopting a strategic approach, and maintaining consistent efforts, businesses can progressively enhance their search engine rankings and ultimately benefit from increased organic traffic and visibility.
Effective internet marketing for any business often starts with SEO, that is, Search Engine Optimization. Google is constantly updating its search algorithms in order to connect customers to the most relevant results. This can make it difficult for small, local businesses to stand out among the top pages. Local SEO services provide a way for physical businesses to improve their online website rankings. By branding your company to a specific location, you become visible and relevant to customers in your area. Targeted keywords and educational content help boost businesses among the top ranks.This roots you into a community and connects you to an ideal local customer. Local SEO services typically include the following:
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Safari use keywords to link potential customers with websites. Keyword research is one of the most valuable steps in your SEO process. In order to have effective keywords they need to:
Consistent content like blogs can be the key to a company’s success. Targeted content or blog posts can drive shares on social media as well as traffic to your website. Here are other ways that good content can boost your business:
Ultimately, your website is where you want leads to end up. It’s where their journey to conversion continues. If you aren’t getting traffic to your website, or are seeing a high level of bounces, your website may need to be optimized for local searches. These services will help increase your traffic and conversion rates:
OCG Creative is here to help with any of your SEO and Reno web design needs. Call us, we’ll answer your questions. 775.324.1644
For those unfamiliar with local SEO services (Search Engine Optimization) it is worth taking time to define and explain the diffe
rences between local and global SEO, especially within the context of Google My Business and its relationship to local searches.
Large scale search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo perform countless searches each day, but have you ever considered how these search engines prioritize and display this information back to users? Did you know that given the right information, your local or small business could consistently appear as one of these top positions? When a potential customer searches for goods or services, your name could be made to appear at the top of list through the use of targeted keywords and relevant content designed to educate.
Local SEO is just that - local. This is important for local or regional businesses that operate within a targeted and specific city or region. Local search engine optimization allows for the use of targeted and specific keywords that focus on increasing a webpage's relevance so as to better target local customers. By comparison, global SEO (also known as international SEO) refers to the optimization for search engines on a more global or international scale. Google stores and recalls information differently from its global index than it does for local searches. Here, business and companies compete for keywords targeted to specific audiences, but without specific emphasis on physical location. While local SEO efforts center around your Google My Business profile, global organic search efforts rely on content relevance and inbound linking (backlinks), social media activity and other cues. Both forms of SEO are important, but your business size and goals will determine what resources and how much energy should be put into each.
Search engines accommodate a myriad of "near me" mobile or desktop searches. As an example, when out searching for a restaurant "near me", or similar local modifier, Google and other search engines often display convenient, mobile-optimized views of search results based not only on proximity to a given restaurant, but on its keyword and content relevance to the query. Google My Business is essentially a compact, public profile that displays your business' relevant information and is often optimized for mobile platforms. It is then incredibly important that your business interface local SEO with Google My Business to properly optimize and display information pertaining to your business's location, hours, description and relevant information. Local SEO is the process of optimizing your business' Google My Business profile, potentially drawing in more customers and simultaneously providing them with all of the relevant information they need to make an immediate buying decision. So before you do any SEO on your website, have a specific plan and strategy. Know what mix of SEO you need: global and local, what location you are targeting, who your target audience is, what your keywords and relevant information is and how all of this might be properly displayed through Google My Business. If you have further questions about local and global search engine optimization or you are unsure where to begin; we can help. OCG offers local SEO services for all types of organizations. Call us. We'd love to help. (775) 324-1644.
Local SEO services provides local businesses opportunities to reach local customers using internet marketing. Local SEO aims to provide search engine visibility close to to the time of purchase. A good example might be a mobile search for "pizza." Being mobile, we know the searcher is probably on the move and hungry. As a business owner, top rankings for local searches can provide a huge boost in business. Local searches are almost always very closely aligned with user intent. In our example, the searcher wants pizza now. If you are nearby and happen to sell pizza, you'll almost certainly win the business. Local differs from global, organic SEO. Google ranks local results separately. Preference is given to websites that provide the best experience for mobile users. The foundation of your local SEO plan should be your Google My Business listing. More on that in a minute. Local SEO also includes managing online directories like Yelp, Superpages and TouchLocal. Keeping tabs on these helps you reinforce your presence in online search. It is also critical for managing your online reputation.
The first step in establishing a local plan is to make sure your Google My Business page is complete. Start with the following list:
Online reviews impact your business. While not as dire as bad reviews, having no reviews at all sends the message that your business isn't very active. The number and quantity of online reviews is generally considered a ranking factor as well. You should never create fake reviews, but your should definitely encourage happy customers to share their experiences. Most often, they'll be glad to talk about you, but aren't likely to think of it on their own.
Going through these steps will go a long way toward boosting your local search engine rankings. In reality, these local SEO tips only scratch the surface, but are nevertheless essential. If you are too busy, unsure where to begin, or are in a very competitive market, it might be time to bring in the pros. OCG offers local SEO services for all types of organizations. Call us. We'd love to help. (775) 324-1644
This article is heard toward small to medium sized businesses in moderately competitive markets. However, the fundamentals of evaluating online marketing efforts are largely the same for any business. It is important to recognize that an effective internet marketing plan must take the competitive landscape into account. The following questions should help get you thinking about what you need to know as your online marketing efforts evolve.
The first two questions are perhaps the most important. Marketing sophistication and the level of effort devoted to effective Internet marketing will level the playing field in spite of virtually everything else.
I’ll begin with what I call the primary metrics. These are the data shown on the first page when you log into Google Analytics. Here’s what they are and what mean.
All of this information is historical in nature, and only provides totals and averages. It is helpful for identifying trends, but to understand what’s happening on your website, you need to dig deeper.
From the beginning you need to know the information you rely on is valid. The vast majority of websites I work with for the first time take everything fed to Google Analytics as legitimate. The truth is it’s probably not even close. Here are a few things that screw up your data.
Spambots: These are computer programs, often called robots, spiders, crawlers or some other name. Not all robots are bad, but spambots scour the web looking for any online form to fill out with bogus information. Their goal is to create links to crappy websites by them into the comments section of your blog or other publicly visible content.
They do this in a nefarious attempt build the number of inbound links (backlinks) to some website. Entire companies, mostly in Eastern Europe and China, are devoted to selling backlinks this way. It’s obnoxious and doesn’t work, but comment spam is everywhere.
Tip: You should always moderate blog comments before allowing them to be published on your website. At the very least moderate those that include links.
What sucks is each attempt is reflected as as a visit. Usually, visits from spambots will have a bounce rate of 100% and a session duration of 00:00. They badly skew your data, and will often overwhelm legitimate traffic. As an example, a typical website with 1000 legitimate visits might have a bounce rate of 35%.
Add 500 visits from scumbag spambots and your traffic will be reflected as 1500 sessions with a bounce rate of 56.6%. Without the phony data from the spambots, the top level data looks pretty good. But, if you believe the numbers that include the spambot data, you’re likely to try to correct a problem that doesn’t exist.
Referral Spam: These are jerks who bombard your website from a URL they want you to visit. The idea is that if you see a sharp spike in traffic, you’ll want to investigate the source. Once you know where the traffic is coming from, it is very natural to want to check it out.
What’s actually happening is your are being tricked into visiting websites you wouldn’t know about otherwise. Beyond that, these referral spammers screw up your data much like the spambots do. Your traffic will be artificially high, and your bounce rate, time on site and pages per visit will all be wrong.
I’ll touch on filtering Google Analytics in a minute, so here’s a short list of URLs I filter out always.
There are more, but these eight routinely account for 60% to 70% of website visits. Many times I’ve seen referral spam account for virtually all of a website’s traffic.
My clients often think they have high bounce rates and low session durations, but plenty of traffic. So, they pull their hair out tweaking pages and moving content, but it makes no difference. Here’s a real-world example of what’s happening:
Unfiltered Website Traffic Data:
Sessions: 1127
Avg. Session Duration: 00:00:06
Bounce Rate: 88.14%
Filtered Website Traffic Data:
Sessions: 188
Avg. Session Duration: 00:01:54
Bounce Rate: 39.38%
In this example, the client came to me to solve a bounce rate / session duration problem, when in fact, he suffered from weak traffic volume. It was the exact opposite of what he believed. It’s maddening and disheartening, but once we were able to deal with real numbers, we could work on the right things.
Hacking Attempts: Depending on the type of attack, hacking attempts will also skew your data. It should be obvious by now that bogus visits tend to push sessions up and session durations down.
Brute force attacks sometimes result in legitimate traffic not even getting through. What’s happening is the hacker has a network of corrupted computers trying to guess passwords or take advantage of a known exploit.
In some cases, they’ll just hammer your website with thousands of visits a second so no legitimate traffic can get through. I won’t bother with the details right now, but recognize that hacking attempts screw up your data.
It should be obvious, but you can’t ignore hacking attempts. Data and traffic issues aside, given time, a hacker will get through. That never ends well, so if you suspect you are being attacked, call or email us and we’ll help you deal with it.
Internal Traffic: A website that is being actively worked on will skew your number in the opposite direction. Web designers and content curators often spend hours on pages and hop through the website testing user interface changes.
Early on, that may be your only traffic. It might warm your heart to think people are visiting every page on your website an hour and a half at a time, but it’s not really real. Again, filtering is the answer. In this case, you would filter the IP addresses of anyone that actively works on your website.
Also, if your website is WordPress, you can use a plugin to disable Google Analytics tracking code for certain types of users when they’re logged in. If they aren’t logged in, it’ll still mess with your data though, so it is best to filter by IP.
Job Searches: Obviously, legitimate visitors to your careers page are desirable. I mention them here because job searchers are most likely not buying anything. It really depends on your business and the nature of the visit.
It may be that the website visitor arrived as a genuine potential customer. Then, decided to explore career opportunities. In this case, the visit certainly has conversion potential. In our agency, that’s unlikely, so unless we want to assess our recruiting efforts, we filter those visits into another view.
Next, I'll provide details about keyword tracking and tools you can use to evaluate whether or not you are executing an effective Internet marketing strategy. Drop me an email, and I'll be sure to let you know when "Effective Internet Marketing: Part II" is published.
Last month I conducted an email survey asking one simple question: Given the choice, which of the following is more important for your business website? There were only two possible answers: Your website's design, or search engine rankings. Here are the results:
Although the survey was unscientific, the results show that website owners clearly understand the importance of search engine rankings. With few exceptions, I believe search engine rankings are the most urgent factor contributing to business website success. Simply put, if people can't find you, it really doesn't matter how great your website looks. That's not to say website design isn't important. It's vital. However, it is easy to get wrapped up in design and put everything else on hold. Here, we design around search. By that, I mean literally putting ranking factors above design elements and publishing content around specific search terms. We predict visitor volume based on specific keyword rankings and known search volumes. Our goals for design are to provide an elegant, polished, branded experience for users that is lightening fast on any device. That happens to be Google's goal too, so favor is being given to sites that meet these criteria. In many ways, I think it's time to rethink design. In the old days, the goal was to keep the total weight of a webpage under 100K. Even better, under 65K. As broadband became widespread, that kind of went out the window, although I personally never bought into the idea that a page could be as big as you want. With something like 2/3 of Internet searches being conducted on mobile devices, that 100K limit makes a lot of sense. So, while web design is critical, it is important to keep things in perspective. Rankings and user experience are what drive sales. Design complexity is fun, but frequently stands in the way of other critical goals.
Local search engine optimization, lovingly referred to as local SEO, is an integral part of any businesses local marketing initiatives. When a business has a great search engine optimization strategy, its search ranking can be expected to be higher. The higher a search rank, the greater propensity for potential customers to visit your website and ultimately purchase your product or service. (more…)
