Thanks to Hummingbird, brands don’t need to be quite as concerned with their search rankings for particular keywords. Instead of fighting over valuable real estate, content marketing should be used to increase overall awareness and visibility…yet it does still matter, to some extent.
While capturing leads is an all-inclusive affair that draws from social as much as it does organic search, one or two SERP positions can still make a difference – let alone four, which is what schema integration gives to web pages, according to a Searchmetrics study .
Markup gives pages SEO juice
As Brafton reported, Searchmetrics already discovered how important schema markup is to SEO: 36 percent of searches results include web content that draw from the programming code. The organization’s follow-up indicates schema helps sites appear further up on SERPs, in addition to helping search engines populate Knowledge Graphs, info cards and carousels. This is an important argument in favor of markup integration, but it isn’t the most compelling by any means.
For instance, Google recently announced yet another semantic search feature. Now, users who are looking for restaurants can filter results by price, rating and hours. While this information is specific to the dining industry, it demonstrates Google’s willingness to give customers contextual options to improve their searches. In the future, search engines could let searchers toggle their desired price ranges, manufacturers or user reviews, the way they already can with geographic location.
Without schema markup, brands won’t see their pages appear on these specialized searches – and they certainly won’t get the four-spot bump Searchmetrics discovered. While it may take some time for the full markup integration to be complete, it’s still a good idea for businesses to customize their web marketing strategies to speak search engines’ languages.
