welcome back to another episode of the rank B podcast I'm your host Garrett susman of I rank and I am hyped not only do we have a dude that I recently connected with but respect so much in our industry but he is also a rank bu podcast listener we are going to be talking all about schema like why it's important how it's been around forever what you should do best practices what you should avoid and what's going to happen with all this like sge AI stuff and is schema more important less important semantics today I'm joined by none other than Dave oeta Dave is the owner of Dave oeta Consulting he's been in the industry for like way more than a decade uh 14 years worked in digital marketing helping businesses increase organic leads converting more sales and during the last seven years he's focused on providing the schema markup strategy and designed to help businesses build knowledge grafts working on projects getting their schema in order which shockingly so many websites just kind of ostrich head in the sand don't even think about it Dave dude thanks for joining me how you doing Garrett uh it's awesome it's awesome to be with you and not just listening to you as I on my treadmill daily so I'm excited I'm thrilled and thrilled thrilled for the topic you know it's interesting in in the world of podcast there's so many great SEO podcasts we were just talking before you you want to Rattle off some of your favorites that you listen to plug for all these great people search with cander yes I love that I mean there's so many it's hard to choose because there's always something great that you have like I should like that's a great topic let me listen to that I wasn't even thinking about it but yeah that was worth my time D and I love it you said you like listen to the moment walks I was thinking cuz you and I both work remote like I don't have the commute anymore to listen to podcast T so you need to find those moments like you're walking and you just like you Zone in and just takes you to that that land of SEO voices yep absolutely and you know and it's the way that I feel like I got healthier my mind and my body like that's a that's a double Duo I can't beat dude I mean it it is and it's and it's I I like getting stuck in my own head without anything sometimes but other times I really appreciate just having very smart people talking to me while I'm while I'm exercising well I appreciate you doing these podcasts because they're awesome they help me a lot dude well let's get structured let's talk schema um so schema's been around for a while before we even kind of dive into some of these best practices what what Drew you to schemo what how didd you get involved well um as anything you so I I do work local and organic for clients and it was a time like eight years ago where I mean I'd been doing some of it but really I was like trying to be like I like this idea of connecting the pieces and like how do we connect the pieces like this makes total sense and but you once again back then like no one's even talked about where do I find information so you know doing a lot of research to find the right people at the time which are still um in the industry um to kind of Mentor me and find a product that worked and then once again like like when I found search like this really excites me I really love thinking about this all the time and so you know there you go I probably 80% of my consultancy is is scha Marco at this point I I believe it but it's so interesting because and and we were just talking about this too maybe it's a marketing issue but I don't think enough marketers and even seos understand the value of schema like what is it supposed to do like when you're talking to your clients or or pitching your services like how do you EXP explain the value of schema to people well um usually you know it goes back to like schema markup is two sides of the coin you know what is it's it's your Rich results which is all the bells and whistles your your your rating Stars used to be FAQs howtos you everything else like that so those are something which give you you know a real Roi that you could speak to now on the other side is going to be your entity understanding you know so the key with schema markup in a in not show it's schema markup provides the ability to describe an entity or entity which exists on a page how they relate to each other how they relate to other entities within the site how they relate to the internet as a whole and usually that is through like external vocabulary such as Wiki data Wikipedia where you use that to hone in on that major schema class so you know it's both now as we know as marketers and U you know working with clients is selling the rich results the ROI it's a lot easier than doing entity relationships but I will tell you over the last two years uh there has been a change and change in terms of you the clients coming to me and some of the bigger clients e-commerce and some of the big brands that come to me they're like Dave we like we know how to do rich results we're doing it we got a team but it's like we don't think that we're really pulling together our entity relationships correctly and we need you to come and like do it audit give us some insight to how we can do that and really pull everything together because we we feel and we see a need and by the conversations going on with Google that this is the time to do that or you know we need to do that six months ago a year like what do we need to do to get ramped up dude that it resonates so much because as we were saying like I I started in local as well and I actually worked for review generation software where those stars are so critical and and it was always such a pain in the butt to explain the clients the difference between like service reviews versus product reviews like and the way the Google handles them differently and I remember I think it was like 2018 where Google stopped showing stars as Rich results in a lot of the service businesses and people were pissed yes yep and that in back in the old days that happened and people were like well why did it change you know it changed because as we know things that are given to us as seos we kind of abuse uh hat tip to fa Rich results that happened recently and so it's one of those things where you know you kind of do it as long as it works until it doesn't and then you look at some other opportunities or you push on the other opportunities that you're already doing but you put more time and effort into those yeah exactly and and it that is SEO it's like there's this whole idea of like you know black hack techniques that that you're not supposed to do and there's always going to be risk of something that you ultimately do get penalized for like pbn's you know the these these blog networks and and linking there could eventually hurt I mean people still do it but like it's frowned upon in in our industry because it's it's man trying to manipulate search results same with the with the star ratings to that point so rich results is one aspect the entities is another and can you explain so and we're going to get into this a little bit in terms of the future of Google but keywords have always been the focus of SEO right like algorithms always understood specific keywords and relevance that way but entities the way that Google algorithms understand the relationships and what things are has become the primary way that search engines work can you talk about that in the context of schema well I the biggest thing you know when I work with people is um you know like oh we want to do schema markup this and that but we have to take a step back we have to take a step back to like what are entities in the first place understanding how they are relating the you know people person place or thing you know and also how they relate to each other and understanding the relationship like this person is an alumni of this person is the same as this on social network you know getting those connections and understanding what it is an entity and then going The Next Step which is okay we know what things are how do we apply that information in a way that is formatted that is standardized to possibly place that on a website for it to be crawled once again we go from understanding entities into using a vehicle well a vocabulary such as schema markup via schema.org to translate entities into the definitions and the relationships of how they do that's where you know that's where we're moving towards for most to that point it's like that that's the thing is I think a lot of people are hoping that Google looks at their website and understands the relationship understands through the content what type of entity they are but the the schema is actually giving the road map it's still like what is the advantage of providing that information to Google compared to a website that doesn't do it just depends on its contents and back links sure well the way I look at schema markup is you know let's let's push Rich results aside for a minute because that's basically bells and whistles it goes back to it's a confirmation layer you know it's a Knowledge Graph over your site but it's a confirmation layer on top of all the hard work you do with title tags H1s H2S the content itself the way the content is formed the way it is linked to basically say Google looks at it and says okay we're unsure what you're trying to say here we're unsure what you're trying to mean in terms of all of these Pages they can look at schema markup and get like okay you're saying this is related to this and it's the same as this okay now I get it now will Google use schema markup all the time 100% no but you are ahead of the game if you have that confirmation layer that there and you allow Google to use it when they need to unlike another site is we don't have it so then as we know when you allow Google to look at something and make a choice and like they're going to sometimes more often not uh choose incorrectly in terms of what your what your best motives are you know as we know title tags you know title tags change you be Rewritten it's because they saw it differently and they did you didn't give them enough signals within the content to confirm that that title tag should be what it is so that's kind of how I look at it and that example of the title tags yeah I it's a great point it's like the same thing with canonical comes up so often in SEO like you're trying to tell Google to do one thing and sometimes it goes a different direction but at least you're providing as much info as you can for them to get it right more often than not so we talked about entities and that's a whole part of like semantic schema Mark of now if you're a marketing team and you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking holy crap okay this is something I need to get on we've never done this before where do you start what's what's the first steps you should do to effectively implement this for your website well I mean with implementing scheme markup obviously you know as we know with marketing teams at big and big companies you have to buy in you have to know that if you're going to create these tickets for whatever you end up with you have to know that there's a Dev team that's actually going to implement this I mean I kind of start with talking to your Dev teams understand like like have you worked with Json before are you familiar with Json are you familiar with structured data do you know what it is to know what level of assistance they will need to perform what you what you want to do which is create scheme markup you know we're looking at Big e-commerce sites like how familiar or how often do you do programmatic SEO do you do deployment um in a dynamic way that is going to allow us to take 500,000 product pages and allow that schema Market template that you build to be pushed across all of them so I mean knowing that because sometimes you'll get everything right which is you know your your in-house or hire someone like me to build out templates and then you get it done and you push your devs are like we don't know what to do with this and as we know with bigger Dev teams we don't know what to do with this you're not explained correctly let's just put that on the backlog and we'll get to the other stuff that we need to do so for marketing teams I think that knowing ahead of like what they can do on the dev side and then going back through the the front end is building those scheme of templates that are consistent and that you know basically well documented it's not about just giving them adjacent document okay take this explain that this is what we're trying to do for these product pages we're trying to relay this information and you know as we know with templating it's about mapping you're mapping what is on the page to what you're going to do in terms of creating Json LD it's interesting like when we speak specifically Al about e-commerce because I feel like that those businesses in that industry are so Prime to take advantage of of schema specifically like semantic and and also the rich results in the Dells and whistles because ultimately as Google starts to implement this this sge which I'm very curious about your perspective on and for those of you don't who don't know SG is a search gener of experience it's Google's integration with their their mum algorith and Ai and Bert and getting very complex in understanding the relationship between your search queries and trying to predict via generative AI the best results for e-commerce it's very much tied to what it's pulling from the website and one interesting um thing that was announced at a recent event was that Google's depending less and less on the merchant center for e-commerce and more on the content on the website including structured data so with advancements and all that stuff Dave what how do you think the importance of schema is going to change over the next year five years so the answer is I don't know but I will I will take a little ride into the past to talk about what's going on so prior to chat GPT prior to the whole thing that happened where we are now is um uh on a and I sent you link on a recent a lot probably a year ago Google off the Record um Ryan Ling who is part of the structured data team um he was on there and there was this question at the end the last four minutes at the end like so Ryan like what do you think the future structured data is and it was interesting what he said I'll read a little piece to you if I could because it's it's really relevant in what he was saying it's such a good podcast this a search off the record with Lizzie sasman and John Mueller yeah I mean it's great and so real quickly so what he said is so I think that that a much cleaner approach particularly for some of our structured data ingestion paths so figuring out a way to get around the actual visual representation and figure out ways to link the structured data with the web page but not necessarily embedded on the web page so I think there's a cleaner way to do data transfer between data providers and Google So reading that as we know data feed how can we split up and provide the separate data feed to structure data so prior to M they were already looking at this and when Ryan says something yeah you you got to believe it so if they were looking at that then moving forward llms as we know here's you know the biggest thing probably within the last two weeks is you know everyone's saying like I don't want you to take my data I like I'm going to block you you're not going to get this data so in a certain way what happens when the LMS don't have access to all this data they have to get this data but they can't get access um as we know Google can give um carrots for certain things like they do for Rich results what about the ability to say okay if you provide us data feeds or open it up what we can do at that point is we will give you something you you will get special preference special you know special insights um from your website so the key is that structured data will be something that is cleaner easier for them to use while they have some difficulty right now with people saying they don't want their data being used can Google give enough incentive to allow you to do it and allow you to do it in a formatted form which makes it easier for Google and give you something in return that's where I see it's going potentially now the other thing is we know that um the search gener of experience right now in its format it's in flux who knows where it's going to end up FAQ Rich results were taken away but if the final format of search G of experience it may be something that doesn't even look like what we see now and I would not be surprised if maybe potentially FAQs come back in some way shape or form obviously scale back but maybe it does if they really don't use the current experience we're seeing with um search gen of experience it is so fun to try and speculate and predict and to your point it's like we we don't know and you see but everything is moving faster this all these changes that we've seen feel different than the past you know five 10 years of SEO I mean SEO is always changing it's interesting that idea between you and Ryan of like a a specific feed because like as I mentioned the Google merchant center for e-commerce is a product feed but that's like independent of structured data and there's also this kind of kind of Duality this this dichotomy between Enterprises that where the structure data feels a lot more important versus like a a very small website right and so I'd imagine that one of the biggest things is accessibility to adding this um to kind of tie it back and kind of get closer to like a practical um sort of takeaway from this what are some of the mistakes that people make and what should they think about going forward like how important to your point is it to get on the board with schema now versus like waiting I think like anything taking a proactive approach even if Google's not using it to the end degree is something you want to do because as we know maybe you have time and budget right now to implement it then go ahead and do it you know because down the road maybe it's you know there are other priorities and this gets pushed aside and suddenly like oh we didn't do that like and we don't have the bandwidth like we're in trouble and once again not every company has time and budget to do these things so I think it's going to be the people that are proactively thinking about doing it are going to be the ones that are going to be headed the end as they as they usually are it makes me think of when during coid and you heard about all of these companies shutting down their their ad spend or shutting down their marketing um and thinking that like they had that was a a time they had to tighten up whereas you had the companies that went all in and went even harder and we're able to jump so much further ahead it feels like it's like analogous to schema where so many you aren't doing this this is almost an opportunity for your business to jump back because it's not going anywhere correct and one thing I think of when we talk about that example of data feeds in in the past that Google said they want to do as well as where they may go is you think about this you know let's go back to amp you know amp was like put put I mean we all laugh about but the the the key piece for me is is put your data on our servers you know Merchant listing was give us a feed it's all about getting used to putting stuff in their hands and I think that that this is what they're getting at is if you could get into our hands in an easier way instead of us crawling you think about like if they could reduce Crawling by 2% 3% across the world through structured feeds and having like you know wow you you talk about dollar signs in terms of what they would save by giving someone a couple carrots telling them to do a feed of you know as we know Google with even Rich results they tell you what they need that works for them not necessarily for the enti entity relationships across your site but I think that's something that moving forward they would want to do because I mean what a huge benefit that would be for them it's G to be so interesting the internal conversations among teams about this debate as you mentioned about whether making your data accessible to llms or Google ultimately or not and deciding of for instance e-commerce is it worth it to cut yourself off from these search engines where you're going to get a lot of visibility by giving them access to your data versus not it's that incentive I can imagine those conversations of the valuee the way that you're presenting it how those are going to play out and some some companies are going to just decide that it's not worth it and I feel like they'll probably lose out yep I think that I think that you know thinking from like a scarcity mentality there be like okay we're going to keep this in but I think that you know those are going to be the ones that you know when they see what they're missing out are going to be pushing everyone oh we got to get this out there now it's like now is six months it's like no no I need I need it next week it's like it's six months and I'm lying to it's really eight months or a year um so I think there's going to be some good conversations now and I think there's going to be some very rushed conversations in the future that that's a great Point especially if we know with Enterprises everything takes to point to five 10 times longer it's like if you're not having them now it's going to be too late okay are you ready for some rapid fire rankings sir I am ready okay before we even dive in I have to ask what can you explain that awesome graphic behind you for those of you who are listening to us uh via a podcast stream Dave has this incredible G not a grid it's just a circular entity relation I'm going to let you explain it what do you got it it it's a link data graph and it showing entities that are connected and it's one of the things like you know do I want to show do I want to show my the back behind my office no I want to show this cool graphic that everyone knows and that and I use this always U when I work with clients stuff like that because I mean honestly I look at all day I'm like like that's really cool but once again we're geeks so we're like that is cool yeah I like that so I was G I was gonna ask is there any specific one in general like I was hoping you were saying like that's my personal like social would be very busy if this was mine I don't think I would even have time for the podcast that's amazing okay let's do this rapid fire rankings turn some music on turn on the clock here we go first off Dave rank your top three of something anything that you love most in the world cool movies Star Wars Jaws close and counters of the Third Kind oh my gosh all so I this is always tough because I want to react every single thing a show we'll talk anyway rank your best SEO marketing win marketing win was a weird one it was years ago I was brought in because um a client was losing rankings Pages were Pages were getting dindex what we realized was the pages were ended up being um from a certain group that controlled a certain area of the site and it ended up being a disgruntled employee that was randomly making changes um to the site that forc it to have bad rankings my gosh she fixing that that's that's nuts okay rank your top three SEO tools SEO tools schem schema app for schema markup keyword insights for anything with clustering and keywords and of course sight ball for my audence love it rank your best SEO trick or tactic trick or tactic is really live in the serps really don't trust the tools use the tools as a guide but live in the Surfs and look and see what is out there that's the most important thing to me and even with schem marup yo what pages are getting FAQs work page get rich results or not yep and inspect is your best friend rank what you love most about SEO it's always changing so true it is but I mean hence this this conversation rank your best learning SEO resource is conversations you know a lot you know you can read you can read and do YouTube videos but in the end having conversations whether it's DMS or phone calls and chats I mean that's really where you get the mind working and you start thinking about things I mean for me I try to have as many as possible with people monthly just to kind of brainstorm yeah that's why I do this podcast to be able to talk and learn from you and all these amazing seos okay rank the this is the hardest question I always ask rank the top one to three seos or marketers that you most admire and look up to okay so U First is a combo it's Martha and Mark Van burko scheme app who were doing schema workup 9 10 years ago before anyone else was um Jess Joyce is one of the incredible seos but a talented incredible Dev uh and she's been a mentor for me for a while and then uh jov vreo which is another person schemo markup had you know in the days for forever and he's one of my mentors and uh I I learn every day from him amazing amazing people and and finally rank the number one cause or charity that you want to promote well that's going to be habit Habitat for Humanity it's one of the things that's been part of uh my wife's family for years participating in and we do as well uh so we love it I love that Dave this has been awesome obviously it's such an important aspect of SEO that I feel like is so underrated you and I were talking about how we just need to continue to get on social and shout it from the rooftops more people need to know if people want to find you online what's the best way to get in touch uh best way to get touch is my website which which is Dave o.com uh you can also hit me up on Twitter LinkedIn shoot me a DM Happy to chitchat and talk about schema markup till the cows come home there you go I'm I'm gonna say here for nicest guy in schema there I said it I said it thank you so much for being my guest man I really appreciate it thank you I had a great time awesome my name is Garrett susman of IO rank we will catch you soon for another episode of the rankable podcast peace out