In the vast landscape of SEO strategies, finding ones that deliver measurable returns on investment (ROI) can be challenging. However, there is one strategy where you can confidently and tangibly gauge your success: Schema Markup.
When you optimize your web pages with Schema Markup and begin to achieve rich results, you can use tools like Google Search Console or Schema Performance Analytics to see the impressions and clicks that have resulted directly from your Schema Markup efforts.
The fact is, you can measure the impact of your Schema Markup implementation, tying your strategic efforts and investments directly to your broader business goals.
In this article, we will dive into the steps for calculating the ROI for your Schema Markup, empowering you to track and evaluate the true impact of this powerful SEO strategy.
Step 1: Understanding the Business Value You Want to Achieve Through Your Schema Markup Strategy
In order to calculate the ROI for your Schema Markup strategy, it’s crucial to gain a clear understanding of the business goals and objectives you are hoping to achieve.
At Schema App, we prioritize conversations with our customers prior to starting the engagement to ensure that their Schema Markup strategy is aligned with the goals they are trying to achieve. It’s important to be clear on the desired outcomes and related success metrics prior to starting your Schema Markup journey.
We ask questions such as “What has to happen in order for you to see this project as a success? ” and “How will you measure this success?”. This approach ensures that our customers have a clear understanding of their objectives, enabling our Customer Success Managers to tailor their Schema Markup strategy accordingly.
Why are you investing in Schema Markup in the first place? Answering this question can inform the right metrics to measure ROI, and ensures that your Schema Markup strategy is designed to meet these goals.
For example, one common goal from implementing Schema Markup is to drive more traffic to your website. Another would be to improve click-through rates (CTR) from the search engine results page (SERP) to your website. When developing a strategy to achieve these objectives, the focus lies on maximizing traffic and CTR through rich results.
Other, less tangible objectives could be to increase brand awareness by using Schema Markup to stand out in search, or future-proofing your page content for generative AI search. In this case, the strategy revolves around establishing connectivity and leveraging the semantic nature of the content on your website.
Being clear on the desired outcomes for your business determines the direction of your Schema Markup strategy.
Let’s take a look at a couple of client case studies to illustrate the alignment between desired outcomes, business goals, and the value of Schema Markup.
Baptist Health’s Goal
One of Baptist Health’s business goals was to fill job vacancies, and they recognized the potential of Schema Markup to enhance the visibility of their job postings on Google search through rich results. By achieving a JobPosting rich result, they managed to attract more qualified candidates and increase their hiring success.
Excel’s Goal
Excel’s overarching business goal was to improve overall organic search performance against competitors, and they identified Schema Markup as a valuable tool to achieve this objective.
By implementing Schema Markup strategically, they were able to achieve unique rich results that enhanced their online presence and drove more targeted organic traffic.
Understanding the desired outcomes and connecting them to your business goals is vital to assessing the true value and return on investment that Schema Markup can bring. In the next step, we’ll explore ways to assign measurable value to your business goals and how Schema Markup can contribute to these metrics.
Step 2: Attribute Value or Metrics to Your Business Goals
Once you have established your business goals, it’s time to identify the metrics that will help you measure the progress towards those goals. At Schema App, we strive to provide both tangible and intangible results that demonstrate how Schema Markup contributes to your organization’s desired outcomes.
Attributing to Tangible Values
Schema Markup is typically used as a top-of-the-funnel strategy, aimed at increasing brand awareness and improving impressions, clicks and click-through rates from the search engine results page (SERP) to your website.
It’s important to note Google states that Schema Markup is not a ranking factor. However, we know Schema Markup helps search engines understand your content better, which may potentially enhance your ranking and how your content is displayed in response to search queries.
When attributing metrics to your desired outcomes, focusing on monitoring metrics like Impressions, Clicks, and CTR is key. Before we can identify the best metrics to monitor, however, it’s important to consider how different types of rich results yield different outcomes.
For example, FAQ and How-to rich results typically reflect a relatively lower click-through rate than Review Snippets or Product rich results, because you are presenting answers directly in the SERP. When targeting brand awareness as your desired outcome, however, this still provides strong value as a priority rich result.
Good news! Schema App has strategies to get clicks to your website using these rich results. This is a great example of how rich results, and strategies within the content of a rich result, support the greater business goals.
Let’s look at the measurable results based on unique goals for the previously mentioned case studies.
Baptist Health
Goal: Fill job vacancies
With Baptist Health’s goal of filling vacancies, implementing JobPosting Schema Markup on their job posting pages should result in higher click-through rates for pages that achieve JobPosting rich results. In this case, the focus is on monitoring CTR, as clicks and impressions may fluctuate depending on the number of live job postings on the site. CTR provides a comparable measure that remains relative to the number of live postings.
Measurable Results
Through the ongoing implementations and support provided by the Schema App Customer Success team, Baptist Health was able to maximize its investment in Schema Markup to drive tangible value for their business.
When the JobPosting Rich Result was awarded, it increased the CTR by 1194%.
Excel
Goal: Increase Organic Search Performance
Aiming to enhance overall organic search performance, Excel should observe an overall increase in clicks, impressions, and click-through rates for pages that achieve rich results.
Measurable Results
After the first year of working with Schema App, Excel saw an incredible increase in traffic to their lead generation sites. This growth could clearly be attributed to Schema Markup and the rich results they were able to achieve.
- 777% YoY Growth in Clicks
- 308% YoY Growth in Impressions
- 115% YoY Growth in CTR
Attributing to Intangible Values
Implementing Schema Markup can yield benefits beyond SEO, generating intangible values for your organization.
For instance, you can provide customer service directly on the SERP, reducing internal spending on customer support. Customers can easily access the information they need through FAQ or How-To rich results, minimizing the need for additional customer service interactions and shortening the customer journey to finding the answer they are searching for. This provides a brand impact that, although intangible and hard to measure, “wow”s your customers and delights them in a way that provides value to your organization.
When considering return on investment, it is also important to consider what costs are saved from the investment, as reduced spending can also be reflected as a form of ROI.
As an example, by hiring an external provider such as Schema App to strategize, deploy and manage your Schema Markup, your organization can save greatly on IT and salary costs of alternatively managing this in-house.
By attributing value and metrics to your business goals, you gain a comprehensive understanding of the impact and benefits of Schema Markup implementation. In the next step, we will dive into how to track your ROI based on these identified metrics.
Step 3: Tracking Your ROI
Tracking your ROI is an essential part of the Schema Markup journey. Once you’ve deployed Schema Markup on your website, it’s important to keep a close eye on its performance and make regular assessments.
At Schema App, we believe in providing our customers with the tools to measure the value, namely Schema Performance Analytics, matched with insightful Quarterly Business Reviews to delve into how their Schema Markup is performing and where there may be opportunities for improvement. Through these dashboards and reviews, the value in the results we are getting tend to become most evident.
To track the ROI of your Schema Markup implementation, there are a few key aspects to consider.
Baseline and Measure
First, it’s important to establish baseline metrics before deploying Schema Markup. Assessing initial metrics like clicks, impressions, and click-through rates (CTRs) from Google Search Console provides a starting point for measuring the impact of Schema Markup once deployed.
Once you have your baselines, you can start comparing them to the results you observe after deploying Schema Markup. This ongoing analysis helps you identify any incremental changes that can be attributed to Schema Markup.
One of the clearest indicators of ROI is the number of incremental clicks your pages receive from the rich results achieved through Schema Markup. By comparing the clicks generated from rich results to what would have been achieved without them, you can assign a clear dollar value to these clicks.
Assigning a monetary value to the clicks can be approached in a couple of ways. If you have a way to connect website clicks or sessions to appointments booked or items sold, then the value becomes quite clear.
If you do not, you can estimate the dollars saved from paid advertising by multiplying the cost per click with the number of clicks generated from rich results. This calculation demonstrates the ROI of Schema Markup by highlighting the increase in organic traffic and the savings on paid advertising costs. It’s worth noting that our customers often see an ROI greater than 10X when using this method.
# of Clicks from Rich Results X Avg CPC = Value of work done with Schema Markup & Schema App
See how Capreit achieved a 386% increase in clicks through the implementation of Schema Markup
Tracking ROI for Schema Markup is about evaluating incremental clicks, assigning a dollar amount to those clicks (CPC), and comparing the results to your baseline metrics. This process allows you to measure the value and effectiveness of your Schema Markup implementation accurately.
It is important to note that Schema Markup is an ongoing process. In order to maximize the benefits of its implementation, it is crucial to monitor and manage the results regularly.
Search engines continually evolve, and their updates play a vital role in determining the ranking and display of web pages in the search engine results pages (SERPs).This necessitates an agile approach to management and the ability to adjust your implementation strategy as needed.
Monitoring your Schema Markup on an Ongoing Basis
At Schema App, we prioritize staying informed about rich result fluctuations and search updates to effectively manage our customers’ strategies. A recent example highlighting this commitment occurred after a Google update triggered significant changes on the SERP, particularly impacting FAQ rich results.
In May 2023, a noticeable decline in the performance of FAQ rich results was observed across our customers. Google had reduced the number of FAQ rich results they were awarding.
Over the course of several weeks, Schema App’s Customer Success team closely monitored the situation for their customers and started looking for solutions. Upon further digging, the Customer Success team discovered that pages would no longer be awarded an FAQ rich result if the frequently asked question on the page did not align with the user’s query.
Armed with this insight, they recommended that customers update their FAQs, targeting the keywords they wished to prioritize. This presented an opportunity for FAQ re-optimization, particularly for the more targeted queries that Google now prefers.
By staying attentive and adaptable, you can optimize your investment and ensure your content continues to perform well in the ever-changing landscape of search engine updates.
Achieving Value with Schema App
Finding SEO strategies that deliver measurable returns on investment can be challenging. However, Schema Markup offers a tangible way to gauge success. By partnering with Schema App, businesses can align their goals, track key metrics, and attribute measurable value to their Schema Markup efforts. Read our customer success stories to see the results we’ve helped our customers achieve.
Schema App provides the tools and expertise to help you track and optimize the ROI of your Schema Markup strategy effectively.
Are you ready to start getting results from Schema Markup?
Martha is the CEO and co-founder of Schema App. Schema App is an end-to-end Schema Markup solution that helps enterprise SEO teams create, deploy and manage Schema Markup to stand out in search. She is an active member of the search engine optimization community, and the work that she does through Schema App is helping brands from all over the world improve their organic search performance.
