Structured data dos and don'ts

Mordy Oberstein:

SERPS Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining this SERP podcast. We're pushing some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. I'm joined by the very structured, organized, well-put-together, easy-to-read, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

I do my best. I'm not sure if I would say I was ever organized or think like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or easy to read. I'll be honest with you.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I've got a lot of things, a lot of what have yous, things that I like to categorize.

I like to compartmentalize. That's something. I will say that I like to compartmentalize. I'm doing this over here, I'm doing that over there. I'm fine.

I also am somebody who likes, when you put the food in a tray, if the food comes in a tray, I eat things out of each tray. I don't blend them together. I don't like that. I like that structure.

Mordy Oberstein:

I eat one thing, then I move to the next thing, and then move to the next thing. When I was dating my wife, she made this dish, whatever it was, and she's like, "Why aren't you eating it? Do you not like it?" I'm like, "No, I liked it the most. I'm saving it for last." I eat the one thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing.

Crystal Carter:

You don't move them together. People are like, "Oh, yeah." I'm like, no, no, no. I don't like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, that makes no sense. Why would you do that?

Crystal Carter:

No, no. You want your food to be structured.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Ziploc.

No, the SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get downloadable resources, one pager checklist templates that can do things like help you audit your website on our new resource section of the SEO hub. Which by the way includes structured data markup materials, as this week, we're talking about Ziploc bags.

No, structured data markup, which is the Ziploc bag of SEO. Yep, we're talking about what to do and what not to do for the markup you add to your websites. What do you need to know and what do you need to do or don't do with your structured data markup? From structured data markup best practices to the mistakes that can cost you, we're looking at structured data markup like we've never done before because we've never done it on this particular podcast.

I'm not saying as a marketing. We've literally never done it. Anyway, back to the intro.

If structured data markup is an elusive topic for you or a non-existent topic for you, then listen up as Schema App founder Martha Van Burkel herself will be joining us in just a jiffy to get into the nitty-gritty of structured data markup and SEO. Plus, we'll peek into Crystal's crystal ball as we see what the future holds for structured data markup.

And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Join us as we cook up a good scheme to help you understand where structured data markup fits into the grand scheme of things, as episode 72 of the SERPS Up podcast is here to help you with your schema markup as often the best-laid schemes go astray.

Hi, Martha. Welcome to our show.

Martha Van Burkel:

How's it going? Oh my goodness, I am just loving all the scheming going on as we intro schema markup. Rocking and rolling.

By the way, I do eat things just all together. I'm not like that.

Crystal Carter:

Are you an all-together person?

Martha Van Burkel:

I'm an all-together person. No order, no structure,

Crystal Carter:

It's all going in the same place. That's what my dad says.

Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think also it's a good way to think about structured data. People always say what is structured data? When SEO, we think about it as one thing, but anytime you order a range data, you're structuring your data and stuff. If you arrange all your Lego into colors, then that's structuring your data for instance, if you're thinking about Lego as data and things.

You must get this question a lot, Martha. We haven't given Martha the intro that she deserves, but Martha is-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, not at all. We were too busy talking about schemes.

Crystal Carter:

Schemes. But Martha is a schema champion, a schema hero if you will, and has been flying the flag to get more people to use a structured data markup for years now. I'm so glad that people are paying a lot more attention to it given that there's been so much encouragement from Google and so many things from Google.

We're absolutely so pleased to have Martha in our podcast right now. Thank you so much for joining us.

Martha Van Burkel:

Oh, it's exciting.

Well, we started on this journey in 2013, so we were just too early. I think what was so fun is times back then when I was like, semantic search marketing is a thing and it helps you be understood by all machines. I was pitching that, and people were looking at me like I had eight heads. Now that's the cool thing, right? Everything has its time.

Around the definition of structured data, I love that clarity. Schema markup and structured data is about disambiguating or bringing clarity. And so that's actually why at Schema App we call it schema markup and we don't call it structured data. Because it seems really funny that we would use a term that's not clear for something that's supposed to bring clarity, right? It doesn't make much sense.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Because I think people forget your headers on your website when you write the H ones and H twos, that's structuring your data. A numbered list is structured data technically.

Martha Van Burkel:

Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

But that's different from schema markup, and it's really important for us to think about.

I wanted to give glue in our podcast listeners to why we started having this conversation. I met Martha finally at brightonSEO in San Diego after basically contacting her down, flagging her down, Martha, and fully fangirling at her. We got into a little discussion about a few things, and we started thinking about schema and don'ts and thinking about bugbears as it were.

Here's the first one. What's your opinion on a website webpage schema? Some people think that it should be on every page, and some people think that maybe that's not the case. Do you think that is a schema do or a schema don't?

Martha Van Burkel:

It's a don't. But I like to explain why, and especially for those that are new to schema markup.

When you're using schema markup, you're basically translating your web content to be understood by the search engines, right? That's how I explain what I do to my mom, right? I'm like, I'm a translator, right? This is machine language. If you're thinking about then, so you're talking about your homepage and you're like, "I need to translate what my homepage is, what the content on my homepage is," is it a webpage? No, of course it's a webpage, right?

On one hand we're talking about large language models and AI and the inferencing that's being done by search engines, and so we're choosing to explain that it's a webpage. Of course it's a webpage. It's on the web.

Now, I do see sometimes where webpage, I was just looking at someone schema markup this morning, and they've nested breadcrumb and organization under it. I do think that nesting is good. I just don't think it's necessary to have a webpage. I think you can say this is an organization, and then breadcrumbs are a separate thing, right? Breadcrumbs are a separate thing on that page.

I am of the mindset of, no, I don't think you need to do webpage. I think you can be more specific about what the page is actually about. That's when we think about if you're new to this or you're thinking about your schema markup strategy, that should be the first question. It's the philosophical question of what is this page about and how are you making sure that that's being really clear. And so we always want to be as specific as possible with that.

Crystal Carter:

I think that for people who are getting into schema markup and the idea of schema markup, essentially one of my favorite places on the web, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time here too, Martha, is schema.org. That's the literal webpage. There, they have all of the different schema there. I check it fairly regularly. Currently, they say they have 803 types of information that include 1,466 properties across 14 different databases and a bunch of other things like that.

Basically, all of these are different ways for you to categorize and to itemize the different parts of your webpage. Martha mentioned organization for instance. You can specify what kind of organization you are, and it even drills down to that. You can specify whether you're a restaurant or a theme park or a corporation or an NGO or a library or all of these different things.

I think it's important that people that when we talk about being specific, it's literally finding something that's the most specific thing to what you're looking at. I think that when people are trying to do that, in terms of schema do's and don'ts, what if you find something that's fuzzy? Sometimes not every single thing is covered. How do people decide which one is the closest one? Do you think that catchalls work best for that, or do you think that there's other things that people should try to specify within that?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll add onto that because I've seen this question a bunch of times. People are like, "Okay, I have services. Can I add product markup to my services?"

Martha Van Burkel:

All right, that's a separate question, Mordy, let's address the first one first.  But no, it's a good one. It's one of my favorites, especially for organizations that do services markup.

I think there's not something that's really specific, and local business is a great example, right? There's a ton of local businesses. You're better to go up one level to the more generic one. There's a home and construction business, I think one, or organization is very generic. And then you can use properties to be more specific about it.

We were actually having a chuckle because in my local business schema markup best practices document, we've talked about additional type as a really cool way to add specificity. It showed up in the documentation for the first time from Google. It's like, oh, welcome. 10 years later adopting our best practice. This is great. I think you should just pick whatever is best.

Again, it is fuzzy. Sometimes it is confusing what you should use, but just go up. What's cool around if you're new to schema.org, it's like the dictionary of schema markup. At the top there's almost like breadcrumbs that help you understand how to get more specific. Thing is the most generic. I don't recommend using that, right? There's probably something more specific.

And then actually if you get to organization or local business, if you scroll to the very bottom of the schema.org definition page, it actually gives you more specific types. And so often people don't go to the bottom, but that's where you can see of the listing of the more specific types. It's also where they hide a bunch of examples. think if you're learning, spend some time on schema.org.

The other thing I've been really encouraging people, especially if you're in content and you're like, "Oh, well I don't need to know schema.org or schema markup. I'm in content, not in technical SEO," it's actually really important for you to understand. Because this is the dictionary that Google and Microsoft, Bing, wrote in 2011 saying, "This is what we want to know about these different topics."

Don't take it as a challenge to fill out every property, but use it to inspire the type of content that you might want to talk about about those different types of things.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that is such a sage piece of advice. For instance, if you go to the local business property on schema.org for instance, it will say that things that we wanted to see: opening hours. Yeah, everybody wants to see that. You can use it like a checklist, really. If you haven't put that on your page, then you can go, "We should have that on their page." If it says things like whether you've had an award, what brand you are, what departments you have, what your email address is obviously, your founding date, your founder, things like that. And so you might go through that and you go, "Oh, okay, actually we can add that information in. Actually, people should know that about who we are. Maybe we should put that on the webpage."

It could give you a guide even from a content point of view. I think that's absolutely sage advice, and I think it can also help you to create which properties or which elements should be maybe static. For instance, I've seen people do this for local business in particular on lots of location pages. They'll make sure that their template has this built into it, and it can make it a lot easier for bots and for people to understand.

Martha Van Burkel:

Oh my goodness, so you hit on something that I really think is so important is enterprise. People think about data architecture. That's a thing. But everyone should be thinking of data architecture in the sense of how am I structuring all these pages? If I can do it in a logical way, just like Crystal said, it allows you to more easily understand things, right?

If you're reading even pages that have a table on it, maybe you're looking at comparing shoes or something, when it's structured in the same way, it's easier to make that comparison and make that decision. Machines are the same by the way. Think about that template. Think about building in those elements.

And then also what needs to be actually separate versus nested in the long paragraph. I think that's another piece that comes into the structured data and in schema markup is really these are unique pieces of content that need to be understood so you can structure them in their own field is what I'm talking about versus in a long paragraph.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that we try to build that into some of our frameworks in Wix. For instance, we have certain things like where your product name, your product prices, whether it's for a gender or whether it's this, that, and the other. We build that into the back end so that we can output that on the front end.

Martha Van Burkel:

Way to go, Wix.

Mordy Oberstein:

Side note, if you're listening to this and let's say you are a local business, if your address is added to your homepage, we'll automatically add a local business market to your page. If you're listening and you're nerding out right now, like, "Why do I do all of this," if you're using Wix, a lot of it's done for you. If you want to customize it, you can customize all of it. But check it out before you freak out.

Martha Van Burkel:

Amazing.

Crystal Carter:

If you're not sure about which properties you sees, I highly recommend Schema App has a great tool that helps you to understand which properties are dependent upon each other.

I don't remember the address off the top of my head, but we can link it in the show notes.

Martha Van Burkel:

Yeah, it's called Schema Path. Yeah, and it's always in our footer is the easiest place to find it. Yeah, Schema Path.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just made my life a lot easier. Thank you.

Crystal Carter:

You found the path to the Schema Path.

Martha Van Burkel:

Yeah.

Mordy, let's go back to your question though because I think it's a really good one, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's my favorite markup question.

Martha Van Burkel:

All right. Let's go Crystal's do's and don'ts, right? What is the do or don't with regards to services pages with regards to what you should do?

I'll say historically there is services schema markup. Services schema markup is awesome because it actually has very specific services, like what the service area is, what the services that you're delivering, who the audience of the service is.

However, about a couple years ago, Google updated the documentation for product to include product and services. And so we actually changed our recommendation. Historically we would say absolutely just use services, now we actually say to multi-type. This is a bit advanced.

The reason why you want to sometimes use two types is because it can be two things. Let me give you a more easy example other than product and services. A home. A home can be for sale, but it's also a home. We want to be able to articulate that it has a price, but also that the home has this many rooms, this many square footage, et cetera. A services and product is no different, so the services schema markup allows us to articulate specific things relative to a service, such as service area or what you're delivering. But it's also a product.

Why you'd want to multi-type it is that you might want to also try to get the rich result for product. And so by multi-typing it, it allows you to articulate and disambiguate and be very clear, which is what we want to do with schema markup. While also setting yourself up to be able to get product, whether that be a price or rating, a review, type of rich result.

Crystal Carter:

I think that that also brings up another do and don't. Here's one that people have really freaked out about recently. Should you still use FAQ markup even if it doesn't give you a rich result?

Mordy Oberstein:

First off, to leave aside the premise of that question for a quick second, there's been a lot of chatter about the tools showing the FAQ is back. Who knows?

Crystal Carter:

Okay, FAQ how to whichever.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, let's go back and pretend it's not back. Sorry.

Crystal Carter:

Let's broaden it. Let's broaden it. Here's my do and don't. Should you still apply schema markup even if you don't expect a rich result?

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the question. By the way, for the audience just to explain that term, if you add something like products your data markup to your product pages, it helps you show with additional elements to your organic result.

Google, there's all sorts of markups out there. Some of them are supportive for rich results and some of them are not supportive for rich results. When they're not supported, like FAQ used to be but currently isn't but maybe is because the tools are showing that they are, but Google said officially not, should you edit anyway? Even though you don't expect to get a rich result, will there be a ranking boost perhaps?

Martha Van Burkel:

Oh, ranking FAQs is a fun one.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know I brought up the R word.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, you changed the question. You had the question. You changed it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know, I know, I know.

Martha Van Burkel:

Okay, so let's start at the basics. A rich result is when you see additional data in the search result, I like to describe it to my mother again like with stars, price information, historically FAQs-

Crystal Carter:

Recipe cards.

Martha Van Burkel:

Recipe cards, videos, images on a physician, you name it, right? There's lots of them.

They change often, so we actually have seen a lot of changes recently. I think this is actually important for us to talk about because it's actually what I would say influences my answer to this do or don't, right? My answer is, yes, you should use schema markup even if you don't get a rich result.

Why? Because we're seeing a really big shift from Google. Even Google very specifically articulating that they're not just using structured data to give you that feature, but they're also using structured data for understanding. Mordy. I highly recommend we put a link to John Mueller's October 6th update. It's a search update where he for the first time, so John Mueller is a spokesperson from Google, said, "Schema markup or structured data is data that helps search engine understand your content." He historically has only ever said do it to get a visual change. Only do structured data to get a rich result. This is a pretty big change.

He then said, "There's going to be lots coming and lots going," right? FAQ, what we're talking about, is an example of one that went away. We've also seen six new rich results since October 16th. In my time, I've been doing structured data since 2013, I have never seen this many things reviewed or announced.

Really, and then the other piece that's a bit more technical is we're seeing the technology driving search engines, so Gemini was one of the most recent ones that was announced, becoming way more technical, right? This goes back to my webpage piece. These are large language models that are really smart, and they're trying to make inferences or trying to make decisions in order to give the best result to the user. Mordy, I'm getting to your ranking question. And so the schema markup makes it easier, right? We're translating it into this language of search engines to make the job easier.

Now, I don't know about you, but Bing and Google complain a lot about how much it costs to index our webpages and understand the content. By doing schema markup and being thorough by explaining what the content is about, we're making it easier, therefore cheaper, for them to do it.

They're also getting it right more often. Often when we work with a lot of enterprise and I'm like, this is a control point, this is a way that you can actually tell Google and tell binging exactly what you mean by your content. If you're investing all of this time and effort into writing your content, into managing your website, into filling in all the pieces in your Wix to make sure that it's rocking, let's make sure that it's then getting the best return for you. That's what would be my piece.

With regards to ranking, I think what's interesting is that we're seeing with this evolution of search engines and with people doing robust schema markup, being very articulate about things, we're seeing higher quality traffic come through, which means actually the metrics are changing.

I would say step back. Think of this as metrics are changing macro. Not just with schema market, but people are going to see less clicks and impressions as we see Bard and ChatGPT and other things come through. Why? Because people are going further down the exploratory journey in the chat before they get to the specific content that they want.

If you're measuring success just on impressions and clicks and you're either the business owner like me or you're just the SEO trying to explain to the business owner, it's okay. What we're really suggesting people look at is the conversion, right? How is it actually impacting your business? Because we are seeing with structured data, when you do it, you're getting more qualified traffic, so a higher click-through rate on the impressions that you're getting. But the volume might be lower, so I think that's a pretty big change.

Mordy Oberstein:

I 100% agree with that. I think that's where the web is heading. I think things like SGE, not to go down that rabbit hole but just really quickly, are more about refinement than they are taking away clicks per se.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's just giving people more intelligent avenues and helping Google to organize the content better based on intent.

Because I think that's the other thing that people forget about with schema markup. You were talking about local business. For instance, with the local business, it's got opening hours, so Google wants to know when you're open, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

24/7.

Crystal Carter:

24/7. Shout out Joy Hawkins.

Yeah, I think there are very specific things that are required for certain types of businesses, which Google can serve appropriately. On a recipe for instance, they need to know quantities, they need to know time, they need to know the ingredients. They need to do all of that sort of stuff. Google knows that there's an intention behind when someone's looking for a recipe that requires them to have this particular type of information, which again, as you said, goes to quality and things like that.

I think that when I think about whether or not, I mean, I don't know if you scribe to this as well, but with schema thing, I tend to take an approach of stay ready so you don't have to get ready. Like you said, they just announced six different types of schema markup things. If you already had that schema ready and then they added-

Martha Van Burkel:

You're rocking. That's right.

Mordy Oberstein:

We've had that before. We've literally had that on the Wix site. I think it was something where they changed something with event market maybe like two years ago. I'm not good with time. Google made the update and we already included it anyway, even though it wasn't part of the requirements for a rich result. We're like, "You're done. You don't anything."

Martha Van Burkel:

This is why you should keep doing FAQ schema markup because we are seeing it come and go, I'll be honest, across different clients.

The other thing I think is if it's on your page, you should structure it, right? And then I would say it's also think of the chat experiences are questions and answers, right? If you have questions and answers on your page, make it clear and make it... Ideally my recommendations with FAQs is not to have a standalone FAQ page, but the questions and answers should be related to something. If it's about your service or about your product and then it's nested under, so it's subject of is often the best connector in order to do that.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's super interesting.

What are your predictions for the next phase in schema markup before we sign off?

Martha Van Burkel:

All right, predictions. Well, I really think there's going to be broader use of schema markup beyond search.

One thing, and I think this is exciting for all types of businesses, is if you think of the advent of all the AI chatbots and things coming up, they all need to be trained on data. They all need to have understanding of content. I really think SEOs are going to be the hero in that all the marketing content, all your website content, is going to be really ready for that.

This is all businesses because it's not just homegrown AI. This is going to be lots of business relative people building businesses that are going to use that. I think that's a really cool evolution that we'll see over the next couple of years as to how SEO plays more a bigger role in customer experience versus just search.

And then my other thing is I think it's going to keep accelerating. I'm hoping that there's additional measures that Google gives us around how we know how the structured data is being used and them articulating the broader value of it.

We're seeing a lot of the structured data stuff coming out actually replacing data feeds that Google previously had, right? Whether that be merchant feed, whether that be car detail pages, whether that be vacation rentals. And so I see that interesting because one is consolidation. Again, if you think of follow the money, Google has to have all these separate teams managing these different data feeds. Well, if it's all structured data, it's coming in one pipeline.

I'm interested to see what else that might look like. How that impacts local I think could be really interesting, so we'll see.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a good point.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's also interesting because basically it is Google giving you the recipe. They're like, "You want this? Give us this." It's like quid pro quo, you want the recipe card? Give us the structured data in that format.

It just reduces the chaos of the web so that it's not just random information. You know that at least whatever you click through, for instance on the recipes for instance, whatever recipe you click through that has the recipe card will have all of this information, bare minimum. Whatever business that has will have that information through, whatever product page will say this, this, and this. It sets a criteria that is good for the web, and I think that we'll see more of that.

I agree that we might see more of that sort of standardization in order to be involved with search and marketing experiences.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and it just opens it up like I do with the merger center feed, right? You don't have to have them actually do anything. It just democratizes a web. It lets Google do what they want to do with the volume of websites that they want to do it with.

I think for things like in this particular case, it gets them around like, okay, we need to have more products in the feed if you're really going to compete with Amazon in the merchant center. If we're going to compete with Amazon, I don't want to wait for you to do it. We'll do it. We got you. We'll take this. Thank you.

Martha Van Burkel:

I think the other thing, the last point maybe, is there is a dictionary that tells you what to talk about. In all the things that are very gray with Google and Bing and search, this is something that's very articulate and structured, right? You don't have to scheme in order to figure out what it is.

And so I think when searches, it's complicated, right? I love how Wix is uncomplicating it. But here's an area that's not that it is technical, but it is very straightforward. I think that would be my other piece of the things that you can control that is documented that you can't execute on, this is something that's very straightforward, very white hat.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before I ask where people can find you, I just want to say that if you want to create markup code, you don't necessarily need to know how to code. There are tools that can help you do that. Martha has one of her own, so you can check that out.

But if you want free training around how to think about structured data mark, how to implement structure data markup, definitely check out Schema Markup app. I've gone through their content multiple times. I once had a crazy question about local business structure data markup and local service businesses and how to go about doing it, and your article was very, very helpful. It's probably like a year or two ago already, but it was great. So thank you.

With that, where can people find you?

Martha Van Burkel:

Sure, so I'm the founder of Schema Apps, so you can find me at www.schemaapp.com. That's where Schema Paths is. This is going to help you connect things. Under resources, we have a ton of blogs and things that you can read about.

The best way to know what's going on in the world of schema markup is to follow Schema App on LinkedIn, so you can follow us there. And then if you want to see me, you can either connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter @marthavanburkel.

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll link to all that in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, and thank you so, so much for joining us today. An absolute pleasure to be speaking with you. I've been following you for years, so thank you so much for joining us.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have an admission. We've been doing this podcast for over a year already. It took me more than 365 Earth days, and countless hours of which I do not know because I do not do math, I'm not paid to do math, to realize that we should do a segment about the future of SEO and we should call it Crystal's Ball. I'm ashamed of myself it took me this long.

Crystal Carter:

I mean these are things that we think of, but we got a lot of things going on a of what have you. It's a lot of ins and outs, all that kind of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

My mind is like a busy street. It grows no grass and grows no hair. But still, the fact that I didn't realize it was an obvious... It was right there the whole time.

Crystal Carter:

If it helps you feel better, I knew it was coming. There we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yay. That was so good.

Anyway, we're going to take a look at the future and SEO by looking at the future of rich results, which are produced by structured data markups, so that totally aligns to our previous segment, in a brand new segment we're calling Crystal's Ball.

Crystal Carter:

In this section, we're going to talk about looking forward into the future and how things are developing. We wanted to start with structured data because we're talking about structured data and also because I love structured data.

I think that we've seen a lot of interesting developments across structured data in the last year, and I think that we will see more coming up in the next little while. One of the things that I think is really fascinating is that Google seems to be parceling more and more sections of the SERP and more and more sections of content into rich results with some of those enhancements. They keep adding more enhancements reports to Google Search Console for instance.

We have the video ones, which that's changed around a lot recently, but we also have other ones that have happened as well. We have some new results that are coming through there.

I think that this goes to the way that Google thinks about the SERO, and it also goes to the way that we should also be thinking about the SERP. For instance when you try to connect to get your rich results around product snippets, it sends you to Google Merchant Center. It tells you you should go to Google Merchant Center and you should update those things there, for instance. I think that when you have Google for Jobs, that does the same thing. It's worth thinking about how your content can be better organized going forward in order to adjust to these things.

For instance with the courses for instance, they've parceled them off into a couple of different types of courses with the rich results. I think that you should also be thinking about your courses, for instance, in that way as well. You're learning videos for instance, they're calling them.

And so at Wix for instance, we have a lot of our content parceled into these things. For instance, we can't just pick a blog from any page. We have a blog product, for instance. The blog product is configured with built-in structured data and built-in properties and elements and assets, et cetera, that are specific for the blog. Similarly, we have product pages that are built that way as well.

Good websites are built like that. Good websites have a section of the website that is optimized, including the structured data, including all of the assets, including the variables to help Google to crawl it efficiently and also to help Google to render it with structured data on the SERP. I think that that content by type and structured data optimized by type, which it is optimized by type, but the focus and the emphasis on drilling down into that specificity is going to become more and more acute.

I think we're going to see more and more dedicated feeds from Google in the next few years, in the next few months, and more dedicated content management from Google in that way.

Mordy Oberstein:

Something you mentioned a while back that I wanted to, if you could please, look into your crystal ball and enlighten us about audio rich results. You've mentioned it to me a few times.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, so I think audio rich results are interesting. I think that we don't exactly see them on the SERP-

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't see anything audio, it's very surprising.

Well, I'll tell you where you see an audio rich result audio functionality, in Google Translate. It'll tell you how to pronounce certain words.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, so what you see, well, in Google Search Console, what we see for instance, so we do this podcast, right? We track this podcast in Google Search Console because it's on the Wix SEO hub at wix.com/seo/learn/podcast, and we track that.

But what I've seen recently is within Google Search Console, you have your tab which says search appearance. And then when you go into search appearance, there are a few different options. Lots of them are things that I've seen before, like translated results or videos or FAQ rich results for instance. But what I've started seeing recently are media actions that are also showing up into the Google Search Console performance report.

All of those they're also associated with podcast pages. I've not looked into exactly why this is triggered or how it's configured. However, this gives me an inkling in terms of my crystal ball that we might start seeing more in terms of audio rich results. There is structured data to give you more information around podcasts. Podcasts for instance are very, very structured in the way that they function. We also have the fact that Google has the ability to add audio onto the SERPS, so for instance, if you go and you say how do I pronounce-

Mordy Oberstein:

How do I pronounce niche? How do pronounce niche? Is it niche or niche? Niche.

Crystal Carter:

Niche.

Mordy Oberstein:

Google will tell you that.

Crystal Carter:

Niche sounds like something you need a cream for. It sounds like a rash. Say niche, please.

Mordy Oberstein:

But it's a good point because there's so much content that's out there that is audio content and it's so useful. For years as a serial podcaster, it's been mind-boggling to me why Google hasn't done anything with that audio content on the SERP. especially as things have introduced around multimedia formats on the SERP. A lot around video, a lot around images, but audio never seemed to make its way in.

At one point, Google was hinting at the fact that they can take a podcast and transcribe it. They know what's there. It's not like it's unstructured to the point where, yeah, we know you have a podcast. We know this is a podcast page. We know there's an episode and an audio file on here, but we can't do anything. We can't parse it. It seems to me that they very much can. What's the difference between taking the audio and the YouTube video and transcribing that and transcribing the podcast audio? It's the same thing.

Crystal Carter:

Right, so I think that they understand the text that's in it further. I think we've seen a lot of developments around AI and machine learning for audio for a while. Screen readers for instance will take texts from a page and they will make it audible. I do use this regularly for large articles. I will put the screen reader on and I will have the bot read it to me quite regularly.

But we also see that there are lots of things like Medium, for instance, started adding listen to this article. HackerNoon added this recently as well. There are a lot of NPR articles are translated, which use an audio element as well. I've seen other ones in different countries as well. I've spoken on this at a few different conferences in the last little while.

Particularly the one from HackerNoon, which they've done for a few years now, that's powered by machine learning. That's machine learning generated, it's AI created, and so it's not impossible for us to see maybe in the future, like an audio SERP. Listen to the SERP, but I don't think that would be impossible.

Furthermore, we have all of the Google assistants, they all have an audio element to them. You say, "Hey, Google," and they say, "Yes, how can I help you?" I think that it wouldn't be outside of the realms of expectation to have a more audio experience on the SERP. Not necessarily voice search. I know that-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no, no-

Crystal Carter:

... the age of voice SERP is coming.

Mordy Oberstein:

... two very different things.

Crystal Carter:

But I think being able to listen to the SERP, being able to listen to answers.

Even with a voice assistant, if you ask Google, "Is it tiramisu a cake," for instance, it will read you the featured snippet from an article talking about whether or not tiramisu is a cake, for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is it a cake?

Crystal Carter:

It's not a cake. It's a dessert. It's not a cake.

Mordy Oberstein:

Same difference.

There's something about it. I don't know what it is. For example, Google Podcasts, they're going to shutter that by the time this episode comes out. Maybe it already is shuttered. It's like they have a weird, there's something about podcasts and audio. It's just not firing on all cylinders. It's funny because if you look at some of the numbers around podcasts, I'm looking at from explodingtopics.com, they have listeners at 275 million of them in 2019. And then in 2021 it comes up to 384 million and 424 million in 2022.

There's just a lot of people who are looking for the audio content. You would expect, just like Google went down the video wormhole to provide video on the SERP, it would meet that demand for audio on the SERP. But it hasn't, but who knows.

Now, if I'm going to look into my crystal ball and wonder who might we be covering for the SEO news this week? My crystal ball might tell me it's coming through now outlook is murky. Oh. Sorry, Barry.

Crystal Carter:

That's an eight-ball.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, sorry. I got very confused. Let me look at these cards here and see what they tell me. Some bones.

Crystal Carter:

I see in the future something from Barry. That's what I see.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, yeah, it said image is emerging. I am seeing a face and it has a goatee on the face. It is Barry. Here is this week's Snappy SEO News.

Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news got three for you this week. First up from Search Engine Journal's very own Matt Southern, Google's SEO starter guide set for a major update. It's a Google update, but it's not a Google algorithm update. It's an update to their official SEO starter guide as mentioned on Google's podcast Search Off the Record.

They're looking to revamp their starter guide. I think they're actually looking to cut it down to half, basically. What they're looking to do is take out a lot of the jargon around it and modernize it so that the concepts that make sense for people to focus on around SEO are clearly digestible by people who are not SEO experts.

A lot of the beginner content out there for SEO really does target beginner SEOs but doesn't speak to the average person, the average business owner. I think it's great that Google's trying to do something like that because I think that most people can actually do some great SEO stuff on their website on their own.

Now, obviously there are things that are super complicated or more advanced that the average person who's not an SEO professional will not even know about, won't know how to start with, won't know how to process. However, there's a lot out there that people can do, and I think democratizing SEO is something that's very, very, very important. I'm glad to see that Google's trying to make their beginner's guide a little bit more digestible and translatable to the average person and business owner who can do some great things on their own.

Next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Round Table. This kind of relates to our episode today is about. Barry writes, "Google may penalize recipe collection pages using recipe structured data." You can add a recipe structure in a markup to your pages, but they should be the actual pages where the recipe is found. There is a practice that has gone on out there where people are adding it to their collection pages. SEO goes, "Ah, we'll just add data a markup to all the pages and that will improve our rankings. We'll just do it indiscriminately."

Google's like, "No, it should be the markup that actually correlates to the content on the page." Google's basically saying that they're going to look into this. Danny Sullivan who is Google Search Liason wrote: “We're aware some do this, i.e. Referring to adding the markup to the collection page and not to the actual page. Again, we're aware some do this against our guidelines. I wouldn't recommend doing it. It passes on to the team involved before. I'm hoping that will lead to this type of behavior being curbed.”

Again, please add the markup. The guidelines says add the recipe structured data for content about preparing a particular dish to that page, meaning it's a dish-level markup. It's not a collection-level markup. If it's a dish-level markup, it should be on the page where you are talking about the recipe for that dish. After, of course, you described that dish with four pages of irrelevant content. I'm just kidding. Don't do that either.

Last up from Search Engine Roundtable, which means that, again, coming from Barry Schwartz. Barry is doing some fearmongering with this one poll. 60% of SEOs are worried about the impact of SGE. Okay, Barry's not fearmongering. He's actually reporting on a poll done by the very fabulous Aleyda Solis. Make sure you give her a follow.

Aleyda ran a poll on her chat.seofomo.co, which you should also check out. Great forum for interacting with SEOs and getting some SEO knowledge. I'll link to that in the show notes. The poll is basic. Are you worried about Google's SGE? 60% said, "Yes. I'm not worried." I've talked about this before on the podcast and I advocate that you shouldn't be worried. The web is constantly changing. Content is constantly evolving. How people consume content is constantly evolving and constantly changing. If SGE is the next evolution of the SERP, it probably has a lot to do with people's already ingrained content preferences more than Google ticking away traffic, that sort of thing.

Also, I very much believe that the SGE you see now a year, two years down the line will not be the SGE of the future. I don't see the novelty in a text-based output. I can get it into featured snippet. I do see the novelty in Google offering unique search experiences that help you explore topics uniquely via the SGE. That's a facilitator versus going to, say, provider of the actual answer itself.

This is my personal theory that by the way, as I've talked about before, but I'll say it again because I'm on a soapbox, that will indeed impact traffic. It will make traffic more focused. It will make it harder to cast a wide net with head terms or that sort of thing. But that's where the web has been going over the last couple of years anyway. You see Google doing that with all the filters they've added. You see Google doing that talking about hidden gems. You see Google doing that trying to rank very specific pieces of content for very specific queries.

But that's a general trend of content. People don't want to consume some top-level piece that doesn't really relate to their very, very specific need. Google's going to, and it has been doing this, facilitate trying to get the user in front of a very specific piece of content to answer the very specific question.

Will that impact traffic? In a sense yes. It'll make traffic much more focused, but that's just the natural evolution of what people want. There's no way around that in my personal opinion. But again, 60% of SEOs are worried. So, hey, what do I know? 60% of SEOs out there disagree with me. I'm worried what you think, Barry, are you worried about SGE? Are you worried about anything?

Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News.

Thank you so much, Barry. Barry's always a good sport, too. We'll probably get a tweet about a little intro there once Barry hears the episode, Barry Schwartz, international treasure to SEOs and digital marketers of all kinds.

Crystal Carter:

Friend of the SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

While we're recording this, let's break the fourth wall. I put out a tweet there. Barry was covering an article about something like chatter in the SEO industry about the quality of Google results and whatnot, whatever it is. I'm like, no one would actually cover this. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, they wouldn't cover it. But Barry's covering what other SEOs are saying in a much more minute way.

I'm like, this is the biggest news story of the week. Without Barry, would never have known about it if you weren't on Twitter kind of thing.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and I think it's also really, really interesting because a lot of these things are evolving as they go. I think that the way that Barry covers the news is really conducive to that. The things might change and then it changed back, and then it moved around and then it went like this and that sort of thing.

I think if you were to try to be like this is this, and it's a static event that happened, then I think that it would be much more difficult to cover. I think also the fact that he gets so much insights from different people helps us to realize that search is a many dynamic thing. Lots of people in different places will be getting different results, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it's great.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like we need another segment on this podcast called Waxing Poetic about Barry.

Speaking of people we're going to wax poetic about, time for our follow of the week. This week's follow of the week is none other than Gray Dot's own Sam Torres, who you can find over on Twitter @samtorresatl. It's like Sam Torres Atlanta.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. Yes, and she's fantastic. Fantastic SEO who's great at all of the technical stuff and does some amazing stuff with the team at Gray Dot. Yeah, big shout out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which brings us to our second follow of the week. Oh, I got you. A little curveball there. Tory Gray from Gray Dot.

Crystal Carter:

Tory Gray from Gray Dot.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, so both of them. Tory's at Tory, T-O-R-Y-L-Y-N-N-E, Lynn over on X.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, they're both fantastic. See them at speaking at different events and around. They've got a great podcast and they do some wonderful stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

They put a video series also, so check that out.

Gray Dot on their blog, they put out some really, really nice articles. It's not fluffy at all. It's really in depth, really. Well-written. Definitely check out their blog.

Crystal Carter:

They get really technical, but in a really approachable way. Tory recently published something that was really interesting about the SGE and user-generated content, which I think is really fascinating. Do head over to the blog and check out what they do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, we're done waxing poetic about people. Barry is always our perpetual follow of the week, Sam and Tory.

Crystal Carter:

There you go. Follow them all and make your world better.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Well, we try to structure it for you. We put all of the people at the end of the podcast. It's Barry, then the follow of the week, and that's how we organize our content for you. That's very structured that you know to expect, and you're able to consume it far easier than you would've been otherwise.

Crystal Carter:

You see? You see? It all makes sense, and we put it all into segments and section.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. See, it's all segments. It's all marked up for you. And some other dad jokes about structured data markup.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Well, I think this might be the type of segue that ends the podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, is it time to end the podcast? I didn't have anything clearly delineated in my notes to know this is where we're at now. If only it was more structured.

Crystal Carter:

Right. We can do closed bracket. We're done.

Mordy Oberstein:

Closed bracket. Thank you for joining us on the SERPS Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with another new episode as we dive into what clients should you take and which clients shouldn't you take. That sounds juicy.

Look wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great resources and content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.