Why now is the time to embrace outline markup

There’s no better time for organizations to prioritize schema markup.

Why is that, you may ask?

First, schema markup (also known as structured data) is not new.

Google has been rewarding sites that implement structured data with rich results. If you haven’t taken advantage of it rich search resultsit’s time to get a higher click-through rate from these visual features in search.

Second, now that search is primarily driven by AI, helping search engines understand your content is more important than ever.

Schema markup allows your organization to clearly articulate what your content means and how it relates to other things on your website.

The final reason to adopt Schema Markup is that, when done right, you can create a content knowledge graph, which is a critical enabler in the age of generative AI. let’s dig

Outline markup for rich results

Schema.org has been around since 2011. Back then, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex worked together to create the Schema.org standardized vocabulary to allow website owners to translate their content so search engines understand it.

Since then, Google has incentivized websites to implement Schema Markup by awarding rich results to websites with certain types of marks and eligible content.

Websites that achieve these rich results typically see higher click-through rates on the search engine results page.

In fact, Schema markup is one of the most well documented SEO Tactics Google Tells You To Do. With so many things in SEO being designed backwards, this one is simple and highly recommended.

You may have delayed implementing schema markup due to the lack of rich results applicable to your website. That might have been true at one point, but I’ve been doing the branding scheme since 2013 and the number of rich results available is growing.

Although in August 2023, Google stopped using rich results and changed the eligibility of FAQ rich results, in the following months it introduced six new rich results – the most new rich results introduced in a year.

These rich results include vehicle listing, course information, profile page, discussion forum, organization, vacation rental and product variants.

There are now 35 rich results you can use to stand out in search, and they apply to a wide range of industries such as healthcare, finance and technology.

Here are some rich results of broad application that you should consider using:

Breadcrumbs. product reviews Job posting. video Profile page. organization

With so many opportunities to take control of how you appear in search, it’s surprising that more websites haven’t adopted it.

A statistic from Web Data Commons October 2023 Extraction Report showed just that 50% of pages had structured data.

Of the pages with JSON-LD markup, these were the top entity types found.

(2,341,592,788 Entities) (1,429,942,067 Entities) (907,701,098 Entities) (817,464,472 Entities) (712,198,821 Entities) (691,208,528 Entities) (691,208,528,91,918) 2,152 Entities (582,460,344 Entities) (502,883,892 Entities)

(Source: Web Data Commons Report October 2023)

Most of the types in the list are related to the rich results mentioned above.

For example, ListItem and BreadcrumbList are required for the rich navigation path result, SearchAction is required for the sitelink search box, and Offer is required for the product rich result.

This tells us that most websites use schema markup to get rich results.

While these Schema.org types can help your site get rich results and stand out in search, they don’t necessarily tell search engines what each page is about in detail and help make your site more semantic.

Help AI search engines understand your content

Have you ever seen your competitor’s sites using specific Schema.org types that are not found in Google’s structured data documentation (i.e. Medical Clinic, Individual Doctor, serviceetc)?

The Vocabulary Schema.org has over 800 types and properties to help websites explain what the page is about. However, Google’s structured data features only require a small subset of these properties for websites to be eligible for a rich result.

Many websites that only implement schema markup for rich results tend to be less descriptive with their schema markup.

AI search engines now look at the meaning and intent behind your content to provide users with more relevant search results.

Therefore, organizations that want to stay ahead should use more specific Schema.org types and leverage the right properties to help search engines better understand and contextualize their content. You can be descriptive with your content while achieving rich results.

For example, each type (eg, article, person, etc.) in the Schema.org vocabulary has 40 or more properties to describe the entity.

Properties are there to help you fully describe what the page is about and how it relates to other things on your website and the web. In essence, it asks you to describe the entity or topic of the page semantically.

The word “semantics” is about understanding the meaning of language.

Note that the word “understanding” is part of the definition. Interestingly, in October 2023, John Mueller of Google published a Search update video In this six-minute video, he leads with an update on Markup Outline.

Mueller first described Schema Markup as “code that you can add to your web pages, which search engines can use to better understand your content.”

While Mueller has historically talked a lot about Schema Markup, he usually talked about it in the context of rich result eligibility. So why the change?

This shift in thinking about schema markup for better search engine understanding makes sense. With the growing role and influence of AI in search, we need to make it easier for search engines to consume and understand content.

Take control of AI by shaping your data with schema markup

Now, if being understood and standing out in search isn’t a good enough reason to get started, then doing it to help your business take control of your content and prepare it for AI is.

In February 2024, Gartner published a report on “30 emerging technologies that will guide your business decisions”, highlighting generative artificial intelligence and knowledge graphs as critical emerging technologies that companies should invest in in the next 0-1 years.

Knowledge graphs are collections of relationships between entities defined using a standardized vocabulary that allow new knowledge to be obtained through inference.

On his LinkedIn postsaid Tony Seale, UK Knowledge Graph Architect at UBS,

“AI doesn’t need to happen to you; organizations can shape AI by shaping their data.

It’s a choice: We can either allow all the data to be absorbed into huge ‘data gravity wells’ or we can create a network of networks, each of us connecting and consolidating our data.”

The “networks of networks” Seale refers to is the concept of knowledge graphs: the same knowledge graph that can be built from your web data by tagging semantic schemas.

The AI ​​revolution is just beginning, and there’s no better time than now to shape your data, starting with your web content by implementing Markup Schema.

Use schema markup as a catalyst for AI

In today’s digital landscape, organizations must invest in new technologies to keep pace with the evolution of AI and search.

Whether your goal is to stand out in the SERP or to ensure that your content is understood as intended by Google and other search engines, now is the time to implement Schema Markup.

With Schema Markup, SEO professionals can become heroes, enabling the adoption of generative AI through content-aware graphs while delivering tangible benefits such as increased click-through rates and better visibility of the search

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