CMO Guide To Schema: How Your Organization Can Implement A Structured Data Strategy via @sejournal, @marthavanberkel

Putting together an actionable strategy to keep your organization relevant in the ever-changing search marketing landscape is harder than ever.

To help support your organization through this journey, this guide provides insights into why schema markup is essential and how you can implement a structured data markup strategy to support your organization’s goals this year.

What Is Schema (A.k.a. Structured Data)?

Schema, also used interchangeably with the term structured data, refers to machine-readable data that you can add to your website to describe your content.

Schema is actually the industry standard vocabulary that is used to markup structured data. This helps search engines understand the content on your website in the context of your brand, making your content more visible to your target audience.

Optimizing your website is like translating your content into the language of search engines and machines.

Enable Higher Visibility In Search

By implementing structured data markup, you unlock the potential for your content to appear as rich results in Google search listings.

These rich results – which showcase additional information such as product pricing, star ratings, job posting details, and video thumbnails – take up more real estate in search results, drawing more attention and leading to higher click-through rates (CTR) and more traffic to your website.

Image created by author, February 2025

Schema markup helps ensure your website can achieve rich results, supporting increased visibility and conversion from search engine results pages (SERPs), resulting in more traffic and leads.

Tip #1: Maximize Rich Results On Your Site

When implementing a structured data strategy, focus on maximizing the number of rich results you can achieve. These results can significantly improve your website’s visibility and conversion rate on the search engine result page

Top-performing rich results include Products, Reviews, Questions and Answers, and Job Postings.

Have your team review your current content to identify existing opportunities for rich results.

Google’s Guide provides examples to get your team started. Also, look for opportunities to update content to unlock new rich result opportunities.

For example, if you have a product page with pricing information, consider expanding it with additional recommended properties like availability, shipping details, ratings, and reviews. This could help you achieve a more detailed Merchant Listing in search results.

We recommend marking up more than just the minimum required fields.

Include Google’s recommended properties to increase your chances of achieving rich results, as well as other properties that showcase the uniqueness of your content or products. This helps inform search engines about your content and match them to specific queries.

While rich results have been around for some time, they remain a powerful tool in the age of zero-click searches to drive traffic to your site. Accelerating the optimization of your content with schema markup to achieve these rich results should be a priority.

Manage Your Brand With A Semantic Data Layer

With the introduction of AI Overviews in Google, as well as the rise of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, your target audience is increasingly interacting with your website data before they even visit a webpage on your site.

The data these AI models interact with is derived from the content on your site. While you have control over the content on your website, you have little control over how AI platforms interpret and understand the data.

When AI “hallucinates,” it can result in incorrect information showing up in search experiences, and these inaccuracies could harm your brand’s reputation.

While it’s not clear if these AI platforms are currently being trained on schema markup, adding semantic schema markup, which results in a semantic data layer, provides a resource to machines for how you want your content understood. This semantic data layer gives you a control point in how your brand is presented to these machines.

Large language models (LLMs) and AI tools are advancing and changing every day.

As the experiences powered by these models evolve, your web content will remain constant. You want to be sure your data is ready to be crawled and consumed – and structured data markup allows you to do that.

Tip #2: Shift Your Team From Keywords To Entities Using Structured Data Markup

To create a semantic data layer, your team needs to shift from thinking about keywords to thinking about entities. There is value in describing “things” on your website in context.

In this world of advanced search engines, think of keywords as being one-dimensional and entities being multi-dimensional.

For example, I, Martha van Berkel, am a person, and I can be defined as an entity on my author page.

The words on the page talk about things that people might want to know about me, and the schema markup structures this data to be understood by machines.

The schema markup on my author page explains who I am, my relationship to my organization, and information about my area of expertise.

Image created by author, February 2025

Doing so will translate your unstructured content into machine-readable data, enhancing your semantic data layer.

So, in addition to trying to achieve rich results, you should leverage the Schema.org vocabulary to its fullest to explain what your website content is about and create a semantic data layer.

Add schema markup to your entire site to identify and describe your entities – the key topics or “things” within your content.

Tip #3: Connect The Things On Your Website With Schema Markup

Identifying and describing the entities on your site is only the first step. Many entities on your site can also be defined by their relationship to other things on your site and across the web.

Therefore, it is important that your team uses structured data markup to define the entities and topics on your site and explain their relationships.

For example, I, Martha van Berkel, am the founder of the organization Schema App. I am also the author of a few blog articles on the Schema App website.

Schema App and these blog articles are all unique entities. We can use schema markup to articulate my relationship with these entities.

Image created by author, February 2025

Moreover, markup enables you to link entities across the web, providing greater context to search engines and AI.

This process, known as entity linking, helps to not only further define your entities, but also clarify their meaning.

Continuing our example: I, Martha van Berkel, know about knowledge graphs. One could easily mistake the knowledge graph we’re talking about as Google’s knowledge graph.

To clarify what “knowledge graph” we’re referring to, we could link the term “knowledge graphs” to the corresponding entity in authoritative knowledge bases like Wikidata, where the term structured data is already defined and understood by the machines consuming the content.

Image created by author, February 2025

In addition to building the semantic data layer, at Schema App, we’ve seen an increase in related queries after adding entity linking.

For example, “near me” queries increased after we implemented place-based entity linking for location pages.

By connecting entities both within your site and across the web with structured data markup, you are effectively building a content knowledge graph.

This semantic data layer ensures that search engines, AI, and other data consumers understand the entities on your site and their relationships – far beyond just keywords.

Preparing For AI Within Your Organization

Many organizations have been tasked with developing AI strategies to prepare for the future. The good news is that the content knowledge graph you’ve built for search is equally valuable in enabling your internal AI innovations.

In February 2024, Gartner assessed 30 emerging technologies that companies need to invest in to stay relevant in this new AI world.

They named “knowledge graphs” as a critical enabler for generative AI. Knowledge graphs can support generative AI adoption by grounding the LLM in factual information, reducing hallucinations.

Furthermore, another research by Data.World showed that using knowledge graphs for responses in enterprises improves GPT-4’s accuracy from 16% to 54%.

The digital landscape is changing rapidly, and there are now many ways consumers and businesses can “search.” At the heart of these new experiences is your brand’s website content or your website data.

By investing in optimizing your website with schema markup and building a dynamic content knowledge graph, you are preparing your organization’s web data for internal AI initiatives.

When you do semantic schema markup, your web data is reusable and adaptable to future technologies.

Tip #4: Challenge SEO Professionals To Shift From Optimizing Pages To Optimizing Your Web Data

Just like content teams need to shift from thinking about keywords, SEO teams need to think about optimizing their web data vs. their webpages.

Challenge your SEO specialists to think about your entities and their relationships across your website using schema markup. This shift will require teams to think about how structured their web data is and how they can make it easily accessible to crawl and understand.

SEO professionals need to think like data architects to ensure your brand’s website data is future-proofed for what’s coming next in search and AI within and outside your organization.

Managing Your Web Data To Prepare For The Future

Implementing a structured data markup strategy is not just about optimizing for visibility in search. It is also about defining and connecting entities to build your brand’s semantic data layer.

The search landscape is ever-evolving, and AI technologies will come and go.

Therefore, SEO teams should take this opportunity to leverage schema markup for its semantic value and develop a content knowledge graph that prepares your brand for whatever comes next.

More Resources:

Featured Image: PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock

Why Search Rankings Are Driving Less Traffic

There’s a disturbing trend in organic search: Many web pages are losing traffic without a substantial change in rankings.

It’s not an abrupt loss and usually occurs for low-volume queries. Yet the aggregated traffic reduction across many pages adds up, becoming noticeable.

What can be done? A drop in traffic usually stems from lower rankings. But what if rankings are unchanged? This trend is widespread, affecting large and small sites.

Here are the causes.

Clicks to this web page decreased from April 2024 to February 2025, but its top ranking stayed the same. Click image to enlarge.

Zero Click Searches

Google’s search result pages no longer consist solely of 10 blue links with predictable click rates. Search results are much more diverse and dynamic. Many of the new features generate few, if any, clicks.

Certainly Google has infused more advertisements in search results, which compete with organic listings. Other factors include:

• Featured snippets that answer queries directly, removing the need to click.
• Sections for “People also ask” and “People also search for” prompt users to stay on-site, researching more.
• Videos play directly in search results.
• Images can take at least two clicks to reach the underlying web page.
• Other sections (social media, maps, forums) distract from the organic results.

A 2024 study by SparkToro found that, on average, 1,000 U.S.-based searches resulted in just 360 external clicks.

AI Overviews

Google’s launch of AI Overviews dramatically contributes to zero-click searches. A recent study by Seer Interactive revealed organic and paid click rates with and without AI overviews. The trend is obvious: AI Overviews decrease clicks to ranking pages.

Here are some of Seer’s findings.

Zero Click Discovery

Generative AI platforms — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, others — are upending shopping patterns. Consumers increasingly rely on those tools for brand and product recommendations, yet very few answers include external links.

The result is zero-click discoveries, forcing consumers to search, say, Google or Bing to locate the recommended sites. Hence branded search volume is growing for most businesses, especially the prominent names. Non-branded rankings may not change but clicks route through branded searches instead.

What to Do?

• Prioritize queries with transactional intent. AI Overviews appear mostly for informational searches. Continue providing helpful information but don’t waste resources monitoring those positions. Write for shoppers, not search engines.

• Monitor and optimize branded search.

There’s no single fix to zero-click searches and discovery. Adjust optimization tactics and start adapting to a lower-traffic future.

Customer-Centric SEO: How To Enhance Customer Experiences via @sejournal, @jasonhennessey

We’ve all heard the phrase, “The customer’s always right.” It’s a common mantra in customer service and hospitality – and, I’d argue, should carry over into the world of SEO as well!

After all, we SEO pros are in the business of not only pleasing Google but also appealing to the needs and interests of prospective consumers.

Customers do the searching, navigate your website, and ultimately decide whether your brand is worth buying from.

While many SEO tactics focus on rankings and clicks, customer-centric SEO asserts that the user experience on-site should be the top priority.

So, if you’re looking to enhance customer experiences and build brand loyalty, consider these customer-first SEO strategies.

What Is Customer-Centric SEO?

Customer-centric SEO prioritizes the user’s online experience, from navigating your website to the content that appeals to their needs and interests.

Instead of implementing SEO improvements for the sake of performance metrics or rankings, customer-centric SEO combines optimization best practices with a deeper, purposeful understanding of user behavior and customer goals.

The importance of user experience (UX) in SEO has grown, in no small part, due to the rollout of a page experience report in Google Search Console analytics (April 2021, now depreciated) and Google’s Page Experience Update in May 2021.

SEO Improvements To Enhance Customer Experience, Behavior

Designing a great website UX and providing valuable content are two important aspects of customer-centric SEO, but many other factors can affect user behavior, trust, and brand loyalty.

Here are a few ways to enhance the user experience, increase conversions, and build a loyal customer base.

1. Make Information Easy To Find With User-Friendly Navigation

One of the best ways to facilitate a friendly user experience is through simple, organized site navigation.

A website’s structure should not be convoluted; rather, it should make it easy for users to find information, navigate to related pages, learn about your products or services, and proceed with their inquiry or purchase.

An example of poor site navigation might include a cluttered menu with too many drop-down options, broken links resulting in 404 pages, a lack of clear categories or topical hierarchy, or the absence of a search bar to assist users in finding specific information.

On the other hand, user-friendly site navigation will have an intuitive menu with clear page categories (e.g., Services, Products, About Us, etc.), breadcrumbs that indicate where users are within the site, and a search function that helps people find results quickly.

It will also maintain a shallow page depth, keeping the number of clicks required for users to access important pages at a minimum.

Optimized site navigation will not only help enable faster search engine crawling and indexation, but also reduce friction in website visitors’ path to purchase.

2. Reduce Visual Bloat And Page Speed Issues

It’s no secret that page speed is an important factor in user experience and search engine rankings.

Today’s consumers expect a fast and easy-to-use website, and search engines tend to prioritize sites that have a fast loading speed.

PageSpeed Insights is the go-to test to assess a website’s loading speed and experience across desktop and mobile devices.

If a website yields a low score (any less than 60/100), this indicates a slow loading time, which can deter prospective customers.

Some factors that may contribute to slow loading speed include unoptimized page code (CSS, unnecessary JavaScript, etc.), visual bloat through large images and video files, hosting your website on a slow hosting server, and the presence of other render-blocking scripts/stylesheets that delay loading of your main page content.

That said, there are many more elements that may be hindering your site’s speed and rendering, so be sure to assess your specific site and review the items outlined in the PageSpeed Insights report.

Data from a page speed report reveals that nearly 70% of online shoppers factor in loading time before making a purchase.

Customer-centric SEO prioritizes loading speed as a matter of user experience, knowing that a slow website can be a huge deterrent to new site visitors.

3. Audit Content For Timeliness And Relevance

In the SEO space, there’s a strong draw toward evergreen content due to its promise of long-running organic traffic.

While evergreen content has its place, it sometimes does a disservice to new website visitors if it is not regularly updated and maintained.

For example, a previously published “Social Media Marketing Best Practices” page might have included relevant statistics from 2023, but new visitors are likely looking for more timely information, up-to-date examples, and current sources.

Thus, auditing and updating existing content should be an ongoing practice in customer-centric SEO. This allows one to identify outdated information, link to more recent sources, add information as relevant, and provide more value to prospective customers.

Here are a few things to look for when refreshing old content:

• Is the information still accurate and relevant to today’s audience?
• Are there outdated statistics, articles, or references that need updating?
• Do all internal and external links still work? Are they pointing to the best sources?
• Has search intent changed? Does the content still align with user expectations?
• Are there new insights, case studies, or examples that could enhance the content?
• Are there opportunities to improve formatting and readability (e.g., adding images, videos, or bullet points)?
• Does the content reflect the latest industry guidelines and/or technology updates?
• Are there opportunities to expand or consolidate content for better clarity?
• Is the metadata still optimized to drive clicks in the search results?

I highly recommend running through these questions like a checklist, at least every quarter.

Not only will this allow you to catch missed SEO opportunities (in terms of content length, metadata updates, etc.), but it also will ensure that your content is still relevant and valuable to incoming visitors.

4. Implement A Mobile-First Website Design

In 2024, mobile devices generated the majority (64.54%) of all global website traffic.

With so many users searching for information via mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.), having a mobile-friendly website is absolutely essential.

In addition to ensuring a fast load speed, your website should be responsive (load correctly, be easy to navigate, etc.) on all types of devices.

Best practices for mobile-friendliness include disabling intrusive pop-ups and display ads, formatting the mobile version of your site to adapt to various screen sizes, and using large and easily “clickable” buttons so users can navigate your site.

One significant component that often changes between a site’s desktop and mobile versions is the navigation.

The menu bar on the mobile version of your site may be larger; include a more compressed hamburger menu, and perhaps larger text. This makes it easier for users to click on the menu items even when using a smaller screen.

Mobile-friendliness is not a “nice to have.” In this fast-paced world, users expect a positive experience no matter where they search. This makes mobile optimization an essential aspect of customer-centric SEO.

5. Put Trust Factors At The Forefront

In keeping with the theme of making information easy to find, your site’s case studies, reviews, and testimonials should also be at the forefront.

Avoid nesting this important info – what I call “trust factors” – deep in your website (as many do, at the bottom of a webpage).

Instead, embed testimonials strategically in your content. Accompany these testimonials with product or service examples, customer names, and even videos to add to the visual appeal.

Build out robust case studies that explain how your products/services work and the benefits they’ve provided to your customers.

By making this information highly visible, you’ll build trust with prospective customers more quickly, eliminating the need for them to search through your site to find proof of your credibility.

6. Make Content Skimmable And Well-Organized

When it comes to webpage and blog post content, customer-centric SEO makes the body content easier to scan and digest.

This means adding strategic headings that establish a hierarchy between sections and adding bulleted or numbered lists to better organize the text.

Few people want to read a wall of text that reads more like an essay than an informative guide.

Formatting gives readers “breathing room” as they skim the information, contemplate the value provided, and search for references within your content.

Ideally, your content should be formatted in such a way that readers can:

• Immediately know what the content is about (i.e., a clear title).
• Easily scan the most important sections, clearly labeled with specific headers.
• Readily find sources cited and internal links to related content.

7. CRO Your CTAs

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are often a driving force in getting users to take action on your site – whether that’s calling your business, signing up for your newsletter, or making a purchase.

With customer-centric SEO, you make sure these CTAs are prominent, concise, and easy to navigate.

First, there’s the design aspect of your CTAs. Are they visually appealing? Is the color contrast such that users can easily find them? Do they stand out from other parts of your content?

Then, there’s the text itself. Is the CTA clear in what action you want users to take? Does the text imply where the user will be directed next? Does it use action verbs to compel clicks?

Some examples of poor CTAs can include:

• “See here.”
• “More.”
• “Read.”

However, some more compelling CTAs may include:

• “Browse products.”
• “Book a free demo.”
• “Schedule a consultation.”
• “Read related articles.”

Both the visual design and the text are important in appealing to users and driving the desired action.

8. Break Up Text With Media Elements And Eye-Catching Graphics

Add intrigue to your content by breaking up walls of text with custom graphics, videos, downloadables, GIFs, and other types of media.

Many studies have pointed to the value of images in content, indicating that engagement rates improve when high-quality visuals are used.

Media adds to the visual appeal of your content, but it can also bring SEO benefits as well.

For instance, pre-recorded videos embedded on your website and uploaded to YouTube can drive additional traffic via search engines, YouTube Search, and similar methods.

There’s an accessibility component as well.

Media optimized with descriptive alt text is more readily accessible by e-readers, devices used by visually impaired individuals to understand content on the web. This is an SEO best practice and a user experience best practice.

A Confident Future In Customer-Centric SEO

Chances are, many of the SEO best practices you’ve been implementing to date were designed with user experience in mind.

Search engines have a long history of considering the user experience, from algorithm changes to emerging technologies in analytics tools.

But there are up-and-coming practices as well – ones that SEO pros would be remiss to neglect in future forward strategies.

Customer-centric SEO is a philosophy that puts the customer first.

Outside of optimization, for optimization’s sake, it involves purposeful changes to make a user’s experience more enjoyable.

This can bring tangible benefits for the brand – in terms of traffic and sales – and meaningful benefits to the user, in terms of ease of use, accessibility, and trust.

More Resources:

Featured Image: PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock