Does Structured Markup Help Win the Search Battles?

The online search battlefield is shifting. Large segments of your audience are shunning keyboards in favor of smartphones and smart speakers like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa when they search online for healthcare information. In 2016, 20% of mobile search queries utilized voice.¹ By 2020, 30% of all Web browsing is predicted to be screenless.²

Healthcare professionals, consumers, and caregivers aren’t waiting. DRG Digital reports that 23% of physicians use a voice assistant for professional reasons.³ In a survey of 1000 US consumers who use voice assistants, 70% of respondents said that they had used their voice assistant to inquire about symptoms they were experiencing, 48% had used it to contact a hospital or doctor, and 41% had used it to inquire about health plans or insurance.⁴ 

The impact of voice search on marketing strategy is significant. Screenless voice-driven online search produces 1 spoken winner, not the 10 to 15 winners that a marketer could count on if their Web page appeared on page 1 of an onscreen search result. With current voice-search technology, it’s win, or hope that the user doesn’t select the first response, or the second, or the third…

Winning the Search Battle on Two Fronts   

Marketers have to optimize their content for voice and nonvoice searches. To win on both fronts, we strongly encourage our clients to apply structured markup along with best practices for on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Structured markup is information in plain English that’s included in the source code of a Web page to help search engines understand the meaning and context of the content on that page.

Structured Markup Helps Google Interpret Your Website Content

Google defines structured markup (also known as structured data) as “a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.⁵”

Consider the situation when Google’s search engine encounters the term “voice search.” On their own, Google’s search algorithms would have difficulty determining whether the content deals with search engine optimization or with locating voice-over talent for a television commercial. Including the structured data from the table below in the website source code clarifies the meaning and context so that Google can decide correctly:

The structured markup that we author and optimize for disease-education websites includes information that defines causes, treatments, and pathophysiology — among dozens of other properties related to the medical condition. Schema.org (a standards organization that is sponsored by Google LLC, Yahoo!, Microsoft Corporation, and Yandex NV) defines the properties for each topic (eg, recipe vs disease education). These collections of properties are referred to as “schemas.”

Structured Markup, Featured Snippets, and Voice Search

A featured snippet is a search result that appears onscreen in a prominent box at the top of a search page in a standard search. To appear in a featured snippet, Google’s algorithms must consider the content to be the most appropriate answer for a search query.

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Google+
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Print Friendly

Featured snippets are important to voice search because content in a featured snippet is often the spoken answer provided by a voice assistant.^6,7,8,9 In a study that evaluated 22 industry verticals, 84% of voice assistant responses to health-related questions were taken from content that appeared in a featured snippet.¹⁰ The association of featured snippets with voice assistant answers in other verticals ranged from a low of 66% (sports) to 100% (entertainment). In other studies, the association between featured snippets and voice search answers ranged from 15% to 57%.^11,12 

Including structured data is one of many recommendations^11,13 to increase the likelihood that content will be included in a featured snippet—and ultimately, in a voice assistant answer.^14,15 However, other research suggests that markup doesn’t significantly increase the likelihood of landing content in a featured snippet.¹¹ In one study, 15.7% of featured snippet content came from pages that included markup vs 19.6% for pages that lacked markup.¹⁶ 

Structured Markup and Page Rank  

As with the results for voice search, the impact of markup on page rank is debatable. Recent reports indicate that markup doesn’t elevate rank.^17,18 However, a 2014 analysis of tens of thousands of keywords and more than 500,000 Web domains concluded that sites with markup ranked an average of 4 positions higher than sites without schema.¹⁹ 

Structured Markup and Rich Content

Structured markup enables marketers to include specific, high-value information in search results that appear on a screen. This high-value content is referred to as “rich information.*”

Rich information enables marketers to include persuasive, click-inducing content directly in a search result. In the example below, the team behind tylenol.com marked up their website content with a schema property called ratingValue that enables users to see Tylenol’s nearly 5-star rating.

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Google+
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Print Friendly

Rich information provides direct and indirect benefits. Directly, rich information draws attention.  A search result at position 8 that includes rich information can lure eyes away from higher ranking search results. Indirectly, rich information can send signals to search engines that increase the value of a page. For example, rich information can tell users what to expect before they click. As a result, fewer users will bounce from the page and search engine algorithms will judge the page favorably.

Everything to Gain

The influence of structured markup on parameters that impact voice and nonvoice search performance defies generalization and absolute statements. Arteric recommends to all of our clients that they invest in authoring, optimizing, and publishing structured content. Our internal data suggests that this provides an incremental positive quality signal for all healthcare-related websites and that it increases the likelihood of higher ranking and tighter targeting of search audiences. Structured data’s benefits, such as clarifying meaning and context for search engines and providing rich information that informs smart click throughs, provide an everything-to-gain upside that we encourage brand teams to exploit. Our experience adding structured data to our SEO process produced a #4 rank for a late-entry unbranded website in a blockbuster-filled market.

A quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes summarizes the status of structured markup in search strategy: 

“…the logical form flatters that longing for certainty and for repose, which is in every human mind. But certainty is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.”

The effects of structured data are an area of active research at Arteric and throughout the industry. We’ll keep you informed as the story evolves. 

Work With Arteric

There are several criteria to consider when creating rich markup and optimizing your website for search. Contact me to schedule a 15-minute introductory call so that we can discuss your goals and challenges. 

Call me at 201.546.9902 or EMAIL ME.

RFP Support

If you would like Arteric to respond to your RFP or RFI, please email us at rfp@arteric.com.

References

*Onscreen search results that include rich information are referred to as “rich snippets.” Some authors use “rich snippet” and “featured snippet” interchangeably. To be accurate, a rich snippet is a featured snippet only if it appears at the top of the search result page.