With the explosion of generative AI and Large Language Models flooding the internet with subpar content, optimizing your website and providing real value is more important than ever.
You can use schema markup to show your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, not only with on-page content but also behind-the-scenes code.
Optimizing your ‘About’ page, having clear Terms and Conditions, and being transparent with your content contributors and location details gives you a definite competitive advantage that will help you rank and enrich your content.
Schema Markup and Why You Need It
Schema markup is the structured data vocabulary that helps search engines better understand the information on your website. It organizes your page content and improves your site’s appearance and user experience.
Having schema markup for your website pages helps search engines validate your experience and expertise as a trustworthy authority in your field.
Schema is usually used for review stars, FAQs, and product snippets. Google understands 32 types of schema, and by optimizing your website, search engines can include your web pages in rich results. In fact, schema markup increases your chance of getting a rich result on a SERP because it is a value-driven result for users.
When you have used a schema, users can see extra details about the page and make an informed decision before clicking. This reduces your bounce rate and can increase your view time.
Big search engines like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex have made schema markup easy by creating a website, schema.org, where all the schema types have been collected. Google endorses JSON-LD to encode schema markup. It is faster and cleaner to work with than other options and can be implemented directly in the page source code.
In short, schema markup is a valuable addition to your SEO strategy. It enriches your content, making your pages more visible in organic search and optimizing your site to increase your E-E-A-T proposition.
Optimize Your Website for E-E-A-T
Authentic and informative content has never been as important as it is now in the age of mass-produced content.
You can support your on-page content with structured data markup that will
- increase your Google map views,
- help with efficient indexing,
- prioritize your content to help you rank faster
Google values Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. If you aren’t using schema markup, you are missing out on a valuable SEO tool that will help you stand out in a sea of mediocrity.
Prioritize Your ‘About’ Page
The ‘About’ page on any website is often the most highly viewed as it helps build trust between a person, brand, and reader. People want to see who provides the information because it makes them feel safe.
Your ‘About’ page is the perfect place for schema markup that provides added value to your user and search engines. Experience, expertise, and authoritativeness are nothing without trust, so being upfront about cookie data, ads, and referrals is a simple way to build that bond.
About Page Schema Type
- Assign the AboutPage with a mainEntity.
- Use a person schema for individuals and an organization schema for brands.
- The mainEntity schema.org property lets search engines see the person behind the webpage.
Person Schema
- Add your name.
- Include your social links using the sameAs item property.
- Use the KnowsAbout item property to show your expertise and use a corresponding WikiData entry with an @id item property.
- Use the image item property to link to a photo, further building trust.
- Validate your expertise and authoritativeness using the AlumniOf item property for your qualifications.
Organization Schema
- Include your business and legal names.
- Establish schema type or link to URI using @id if it already exists on the homepage.
- Link to a parent company with the parentOrganization item property.
- Add your physical location and any customer-facing locations.
- Link to your Google Maps location and use the telephone property if you are a local service business.
- Declare the business FIN, CIF, or ACN using taxID and vatID.
You can see that all the schema details above provide comprehensive information about you or your business. The more details a search engine can discover while crawling your website, the more your E-E-A-T estimation increases.
Have Clear T&Cs
All the URLs on your website should be indexable, particularly your Terms, Conditions, and Policy pages.
Well-crafted, solid, and professional policy pages demonstrate E-E-A-T.
Specify the contributors and editors in the web page URL for legal documents drafted by licensed professionals. Use the sameAs property to link to their social profiles, like LinkedIn, to validate their identities. During a search engine crawl of your site, having validated experts crafting content is invaluable for your authority and trustworthiness.
You can also:
- Nest the hasMerchantReturnPolicy item property in the primary organization schema.
- Nest termsOfService schema.org item property within the service schema type.
Your schema markup must reflect the on-page content, and you can use multiple schemas on a page.
Build Trust with Location Detail
Who would you trust more, a business with a website or a company with a website, physical address, and contact details?
It’s a no-brainer that using your schema markup to provide location details and contact information builds trust with your audience.
- If you are a business that provides local services, include your telephone number and sync the schema markup with your Google business listing.
- In the primary organization schema, use the address schema.org property and nest it to each page using the publisher property, referencing the organization @id.
- If your business has multiple locations, use the department property to mention each physical location with the address property.
Prove Your Expertise Through Content Contributor Transparency
Gone are the days when an author bio was enough. To prove your authoritativeness and trustworthiness in your content, you need to show how your authors, contributors, editors, and reviewers have experience and expertise.
- Each contributor should have a profile page with their professional experience and qualifications. This is a good place for an internal link which we will look at further in the next section.
- Article and webpage schema accept author, reviewedBy, contributor, and editor properties.
- You can attach a person schema type based on the person’s role.
- If your contributors have their own profile URL, convert them to a URI and reference it with @id.
- Use the same attributes for your faq page.
Show Relevance with Internal Links
We all know the importance of internal links for SEO. They help with site indexing and establishing context between pages.
- Internal links show content relevance and build helpful information pillars that increase topical authority.
- Internal links should be strategic, and the anchor text should be descriptive and relevant to the target URL.
- You can also communicate important hyperlinks with mentions schema.org property.
Don’t Sleep on Schema Markup
Building E-E-A-T should be one of the main goals of your SEO strategy, and schema markup is an invaluable asset.
When you use the appropriate schema.org item properties for each schema type and nest them together, you form your own knowledge graph that search engines can easily verify.
Having great content is one thing, but you must help search engines identify your place as an authority with expert experience that people can trust.
Schema markup not only enriches your content but provides vital clues to search engines that you warrant a top spot on the SERPs.
