Alright, let’s bring this Schema series to a close. I’m going to bring it all together for you, starting with what we’ve covered:
- Week 1: Essential Domain Schema (Organization, AboutPage, ContactPage)
- Week 2: Essential Individual Schema (Author/Person)
- Week 3: Helpful Connecting Schema (sameAs)
It’s been a bit heavy and deep, but hopefully helpful. TLDR? Then watch my newly released YouTube video! It goes through the entire 4 week series (including today’s blog post) with visuals!
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Your Business
You have a website which is, in essence, a business. No matter how small of a niche site it is, or how big of an authority it is, it’s basically a business.
That means you should treat it like a business.
Businesses have customers that they service. These customers have ways of communicating with the business. Businesses have hours of operation (to some degree), they have email addresses and phone numbers. They have people who work at the company.
As such, we can use schema like Organization to tell Google all about our business (website). We can identify the important pages for them, such as the About Page and Contact Page.
We can also tell Google important information like our address, phone number, email address, hours of operation, etc.
Watch: How to Build Topical Authority in SEO with Silos
Your People
The New York Yankees are a popular baseball team. And, they are made up of a collection of players, many of which are also popular.
The Yankees are popular because they have a deep history as a franchise. They have won a lot of championships. They are based in a really popular city. They have a lot of fans.
Individual Yankee players are also very popular too, for their own reasons. They have their own individual stories and come from their own unique colleges and high schools. They won their own unique championships previously, perhaps at a different baseball team.
The Yankees are better when they have better players.
Your website (business) and the people associated with it operate in much the same way. The people (authors) associated with your website have their own unique backgrounds and expertise.
As such, we use Person schema (as a part of ProfilePage schema) to tell Google all about each person. We validate their history and expertise through this schema, sharing things like social media accounts and other authorship.
SameAs schema helps here too. By adding authoritative profiles and online features, we can further distinguish the individuals and business in Google’s eyes.
Connecting It All Together
From a high level, it kind of looks like this. There’s more to it, obviously. But hopefully this visual helps to paint a broader picture.
There are so many different ways we can gain authority and trust in Google’s eyes. The business can provide it, but so can the authors that make up your website.
It’s important to focus on building authority and trust for your website. Links, mentions → these are all great contributors (as we know).
But oftentimes, we don’t bother with connecting the dots from our business to our authors. And we don’t lean on author authority and trust.
Or, perhaps even worse, we have authorities as authors, but we don’t connect the dots enough for Google to clearly distinguish that.
Building Personal Authority
Building external links and generating third party mentions of your website is hard, and somewhat out of your hands. But you have a lot more control of your personal brand.
A few months ago, I set out to connect the dots with my personal “brand”… in other words, how Google saw me and understood me.
It started by prioritizing my personal “home base”… which I quickly identified as https://jaredbauman.com/.
You see, my agency 201 Creative, my blog Weekend Growth, etc… these are all businesses. They aren’t ME.
So, my personal website became my hub. In November, I built out my schema accordingly.
And, this process made me realize I had work to do. A lot of the Notable Profiles for Jared Bauman have been built since I embarked on this exercise. I have a lot more I didn’t include in the graphic.
I also built out a few pages on my personal website to substantiate all the things I am an expert in.
From there, it became a lot more clear what to do with my website(s). We don’t have as many properties on 201 Creative…
So as you can see, I need to build more Notable Profiles for 201 Creative. And my other businesses.
So, what has the impact been on https://jaredbauman.com/? Nothing major, to be fair. But I’ve now cemented myself in the #2 spot.
But I’m also glad to see all of my Notable Profiles, Author Profiles, and Social Profiles ranking. Here are a few:
- #2: personal website
- #4: personal Twitter
- #9: personal Linkedin
- #10: personal Instagram
- #12: Weekend Growth website
- #14: 201 Creative author page
- #16: Creative Live author page
- #17: My book on Amazon
- #18: Weekend Growth YouTube
- #20: Pro Edu course #1
- #21: Pro Edu course #2
- #24: Creative Live course #1
- #34: Search Engine Land author page
- #40: IMDb profile
- #42: Crunchbase profile
- #45: Previous photography business
- #47 Weekend growth author page
- #48: Sprout Studio podcast interview
- #50: Shooting Spaces podcast interview
In the long run, ALL of this will help all of the websites that I am associated with.
I’ll be sharing a lot more in the coming months on how this progresses on Twitter – make sure you’re following to see the results!
What About You?
I hope this series on Schema has been helpful. If you missed any of the blog posts, or are more of a visual learner, watch my 19 minute video showing all of this in detail.
As we continue to wade our way through a post-HCU SERP environment, the more trust our website can showcase, the better.
Schema isn’t a magic bullet… you need all of these entities, social profiles, etc, FIRST. Watch one of my previous videos to see where you stack up in Google’s eyes.
But then, once you have these elements, you can use Schema to help tie it all together.
Think of it as the ribbon and bow on a present. The present is what we’re all there for, but the ribbon and bow tie it all together.
Do you need help with your schema implementation? Here is a list of some recommendations from me:
- I use Rank Math Pro to add the bulk of my schema. You can see my in-depth tutorial on it here.
- You can use the Schema.org Markup Validator and/or the Google Rich Results test to make sure you implemented everything correctly.
- We can implement essential Schema for you if you want, or look over your current schema implementation to make sure you aren’t missing anything.
- Many site owners would just prefer to have a Website Review by us. Not only do we look at your Schema, but we look over your entire website as a whole (including technical components, site speed, content evaluate, backlink analysis, E-E-A-T components, etc).
