Helping SMBs leverage website data for stronger SEO

From search results to listings to social media profiles, the digital landscape is becoming more integrated than ever. Yet search engines still rely on primary data sources, such as the company website, to deliver relevant search results. What’s more, search engines are relying more on the prevalence of schema.org mark up on company websites to accurately identify business data, and more quickly deliver search results to users. For digital service providers servicing small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), there is a huge opportunity in helping your SMB customers leverage schema.org.

A new world of structured data

For anyone not familiar with structured data or schema.org mark up (you can read more here!), it provides a structured approach for common business data, such as name/address/phone number (NAP), opening hours, reviews and more, and makes it easy for search engines to understand the content on a webpage. This makes it easier for search engines to “read” and identify the information that a user is looking for on a website. 

To put it simply, SMBs can gain an advantage in the digital world by ensuring that their existing website content is marked up according to schema.org standards. Not only does this help search engines identify the content as authoritative, ultimately it also gives business owners the opportunity to more actively influence search result snippets, and overall better optimize their digital presence for search.

Structured data is becoming more prominently reused across the web, such as the recent example of offers being reinstated as a more prominent part of Google My Business profiles, as well as reviews gaining a more influential role on local SEO. And it’s important to take structured data into consideration, because the use of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and voice-controlled technology are all on the rise.

These technologies provide us with answers to our questions (or even solutions to our problems), they are all driven by data, and yet many small businesses owners don’t take into account where that data comes from and therefore fail to keep their business data updated online. As such, there is a real opportunity for digital service providers to deliver more value to their SMB customers by helping them to leverage structured data to garner a broader online reach, and more effectively gain visibility.

How Mono’s Global Data works

Structured data has always been an innate part of the Mono Platform to make it fit for scale but also to ensure consistency and accuracy for SMBs. It automatically marks up structured data for schema.org with what we call Global Data to ensure that it is easily identifiable and reusable across the internet. This feature makes it easy for small business owners to add their key business information, and reuse it across their website, saving time when adding and editing content.

Global Data on the Mono Platform is designed to ensure that an SMB website receives maximum visibility, reach and exposure on the web and includes everything from key business information (name, address, phone number) to media (logo, photos, videos) to more engaging content (reviews, offers and opening hours).

Check your website

Want to see if your website leverages structured data? Run it through the Google Structured Data Testing tool to see what data is marked up with schema.org on your website.

This blog post was written by Line Juliussen, Project Marketing Manager at Mono Solutions. Line has dedicated focus on product marketing and market research to ensure that the ultimate experience for SMBs using the Mono Platform.