Dear CMO: Why Schema Markup Matters for Your Brand

To the SEO strategists of the world — we know how hard it can be to get buy-in on Schema markup from decision makers. It's hard enough to explain what Schema is, let alone keep up with all the changes.

We understand. We employ an entire team of engineers just to keep our easy-to-use Schema tool, up to date with Schema best practices. That's why we created this letter.

You can cut and paste this letter into an email, fill out the names, insert your brand and get one step closer to having approval for perfect Schema markup on your website.

Dear CMO {FILL IN NAME, TITLE, ETC}….

We're a restaurant brand. We have a menu, operating hours, locations all over the place and are kid-friendly {FILL IN IMPORTANT ATTRIBUTE}.

You know that and I know that, but Google and the other intelligent services are having trouble understanding this.

It's easy to think that they would, because these details are on our website, but the thing is, we haven't optimized this information in a way that makes it easy for search engines to read. Search engines speak their own language, and if we want them to tell the people who are searching for restaurants about our locations — we're going to need to translate for them.

The language search engines speak is called structured data. Schema markup is a type of structured data that some of the biggest search engines speak (it was created by Google and Bing), and it's constantly evolving to help them understand all the important facts about a business better and faster — especially relevant, location-level information.

Here is its definition: "Schema.org is a joint effort, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema supported by major search engines. On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results."

How does that help us? If we add Schema code to our website and location pages, we can send a clear signal out to the major search engines, letting them know facts like:

• We serve amazing pizza {INSERT RELEVANT MENU ITEM},
• We have handicapped-accessible entrances and bathrooms {INSERT RELEVANT ATTRIBUTE}
• Are closed for lunch on Monday's {INSERT RELEVANT ATTRIBUTE} and
• Have stores in [INSERT CITY 1], [INSERT CITY 2], and [INSERT CITY 3].

The speed bump here is that the Schema language is constantly being expanded and improved upon, and we're not given proactive alerts. Some third-parties offer integrations to help manage this. It requires a small budget to secure and maintain, but frees our programmers and SEOs from having to watch and implement.

Once it's set up and coded into the website, we don't ever have to do any more coding on this item. We would be free to update those important facts about our brand whenever something changes, like when we add a new menu item. Those changes would be implemented through an easy-to-use interface that we could train anyone to manage.

This will help customers find us, and give our online marketing efforts a powerful foundation.

Bonus: Perfect Schema markup on a website will power correct information about our business to digital assistants, which would give people using voice search perfect answers about our restaurants, too.

Can we talk about this soon?

Signed

DKM