Structured Data and New Brands: In the Beginning, there is the Word Search

Velocitize welcomes our newest contributor, Australia’s StewArt Media and its community of “rankers” —professionals focused on digital marketing and SEO. Jim will be sharing posts from his weekly video blog on Velocitize at regular intervals.

[Transcript]

Hi. Welcome back, Rankers!

There’s been a few changes this week. I’m not going to get too much into reading the tea leaves of Google’s core algorithm change last week, but it’s still rolling out. So if you are seeing fluctuations in some of your traffic from Google, it could be that.

The change from it, though, I’ve seen some odd things. But this could also be because it’s still rolling out. Certainly in Australia, not seeing a lot of change.

But in some of the searches that I keep an eye on in the U.S., I’ve seen some move-ative positions and some sites that were on the front page are no longer there. Those sorts of things.

Google Rewards

Google has said that this algorithm change is more about rewarding sites that were previously undervalued. So that’s great if you’re doing great content.

I helped a mate out during the week that was looking to launch a new brand and needed to rank for the exact match domain that he had. Now he is ranking for it, but one of the things that he could rank even better for, which he hasn’t done, is his structured data.

This is so important. If you are someone who is out there building a business and building a brand—whether it be personal or at a business level—you need to use structured data, so you signpost to the rest of the world who you actually are and what you’re doing.

And the phrase I’ve got searching for here is, “marketing speaker.” Those of you who have been following at home will know that it went to number one when we started to get more volume of search on my name, not on the phrase “marketing speaker,” and we went up.

The Importance of Structured Data

Our theory behind why those two things were correlated was because of the structured data attached to this page. And the structured data says this page is about me, specifically. We think that’s why this page ranked higher when spikes in my name search started to happen. So, here’s what this looks like.

You can go to the Structured Data Testing Tool, put your URL in here, and this will tell you what structured data is on this page. So we’ve got the normal things like postal address and this is all just wrapped up in this code so Google and other machines know that this is actually an address.

If we go back to top level we can see here, this one is the one that says, “This is about me.” So I’ve said here, “Look, this person, this name, they’re also the same one on LinkedIn. This one of Google Plus. This one of Twitter. This one of Facebook.” I probably could have put a few more there, but they’re the only ones I could think of that regularly get used.

So it helps to use things like structured data to tell the machine what this piece of content is about. And if you keep doing those sorts of things with a new brand and you’re also getting publicity on that new brand, when the search volume starts to increase for that brand, Google and other search engines will know that is the webpage that they’re talking about. So that whole site or that page starts to rank higher through the signposting: “This is the thing that people are searching for.”

So when you’re doing your PR, even your television advertising, radio advertising, it pays to use structured data, especially in the cases where it is a brand new brand. So that Google and other machines can make that link between the volume of search that’s happening, all the chatter, all the citations out there on social, and the actual page, if you like, that relates to the thing that people are searching for.

Hopefully that’s useful and we will see you all next week. Thanks very much, everyone. Bye.

Stay tuned for more Aussie wit and wisdom when Velocitize Talks posts our series of Australian interviews, coming soon!