Martha van Berkel is the CEO of Schema App, which is a platform that does structured data and schema at scale. She worked at Cisco for 14 years starting at the beginning doing customer support, then to product management and then doing higher level things there. Then she left Cisco to start her own thing and has grown that company to a team of 16 people and growing.
The market is finally ready for structured data she said. Google keeps pushing it, and it is no longer something that site owners are putting on the sidelines. It is an important piece of all web sites that are getting attention and resources from site owners. We discussed a bit about the earlier days of structured data adoption and how exciting it is now to see things explode with it.
Martha added that similar to BERT, it is about providing enough context for not just searchers but your web site visitors to improve conversions overall on your web site. Driving better, more relevant traffic, that converts.
While Google said structured data does not directly help with rankings, she said based on her data and her clients, it does help her clients get ranked. In one case, it was an average nine-position improvement. But she won’t argue with Google on that.
She would also love to see improvements with the service structured data. Also she would like to see the review rich snippets come back and reverse their stance on that. Martha would also love to see voice search data in Google Search Console. We then talked a bit more about the review schema change. She said the intent behind it is good but she feels there should be more of a middle ground for that.
You can follow Martha on Twitter at @marthavanberkel and on schemaapp.com.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
