to measure the performance of a schema

We know that schema can help you harness the power in your content, by making it easier to discover through search results.

In our last article, How To Deploy Advanced Schema at Scale, we covered the deployment and maintenance processes. Next, you need to monitor the performance of your Schema.

This article will cover the KPIs to measure the impact of schema deployments, how to monitor errors in schemas, and the analysis of your content’s SERPs.

Set up the correct metrics and measurement steps

When it comes to measuring the performance of your schema, these two steps are crucial:

• Schema Analysis: Assessing the schema deployed on high-performing assets, such as URLs images videos FAQs etc.
• Determining the KPIs that should be measured: This includes impressions and clicks as well as CTR, saturation of SERPs, and cost savings.

Analyzing deployed schema

Schema analysis can be crucial for large websites to identify the best assets. Schema should be used on all critical assets, such as images, pages videos, FAQs and menus.

Due to the dynamic nature URLs, it is important that you are always checking for schema opportunities. Remember that schemas can only be used if the pages are accessible.

I recommend running a ScreamingFrog search to find all URLs that return 200 OK codes.

When performing a schema analysis on your website, make sure to include all URLs and assets that are essential.

Checking for completeness is a constant process

Schema deployment is not a one-time event.

The schema should be updated as the content of a large website is changed.

To ensure that your content can be found, you should constantly review all redirects, broken links, and missing schema.

Google Search Central has a detailed help document on deployment and maintenance of the correct schema types.

The dashboard below helps you understand the critical stages of schema analysis and tracking.

Identifying and correcting schema errors

Google will not take any action if your schema has errors.

Schema drifts can be caused by changes to the schema vocabularies in schema.org, Google’s rich results guidelines or website content changes.

The schema must be updated if the website content or vocabulary has changed.

It can be useful to analyze content changes, and set up triggers or notification as a reminder of the need to change schema.

After you have analyzed your deployment strategy for schemas, it is time to track the KPIs of your schemas.

Finding the right KPIs for measuring the impact of schema implementation

Here are some strategic KPIs that you can use to measure the performance of your scheme and its effectiveness.

Impressions

Content discovery is easier with schema-influenced rich results.

The SERPs make it easier to find high-value content.

You will therefore see higher impressions on all of your results that are zero-click and other relevant results to the query.

The most valuable content on the page is easily found by searching for long-tail queries.

Clicks

Do you drive traffic to your website or business profile?

The total number of clicks that you received after the deployment of your scheme is a good KPI.

You should assess if your schema helps with content discovery, and if it is delivering relevant results over time.

When your schema generates rich results, your impressions will increase more than your clicks.

You should not be concerned if your clicks do not increase as much as impressions because your content will give the correct results for the query type.

You can see in the image below that KPIs like clicks, impressions and CTR have also increased after schema deployment.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

The CTR is another important KPI. It is the division of clicks that your content received from search results by the number of impressions.

CTR can be high or low depending on your content.

CTR is low if content is created for awareness. CTR is high if content is designed for conversion.

Average CPC

You may be wondering why the cost per click is necessary. This is a measure for paid campaigns.

It is important to know how much you will have to spend on keywords to increase their visibility.

You can calculate the savings your business will make organically by using schema.

Cost savings

Calculate your CPC for those keywords and see if you have saved money by using schemas instead of paid campaigns.

You can use this to gauge the benefits of using schema on your site.

SERPs coverage / rich results

SERP coverage is the number of results that you have appeared in.

The easiest way to determine the impact of your schema is to look at SERP coverage for universal results.

You can measure different types of SERPs, including FAQs, videos, images, and content.

Your content strategy can be influenced by SERP coverage.

The content may not be useful or relevant if it does not appear in certain results.

Imagine you have deployed FAQs and HowTo schema to make conversational content more visible.

If this is the case, it’s important to monitor your FAQ, People also Ask, or even Rich Results Featured Snippets to determine if visibility has improved.

Look at the results that aren’t listed in the SERPs.

Your images, for example, aren’t performing the way you would like.

Formulate a strategy for schema to increase the visibility of these entities or assets.

Performance of all schema types and combinations

Schema types do not all have the same meaning. Some schema types are used for context in search engines, while others can have a significant impact on performance.

You should drill down to see which schemas are the most effective for your content strategy.

Search results can be viewed using Google Search console.

Evaluate the impact of schema deployment in your website

Schema management and performance evaluation go hand-in-hand. It is a cyclic procedure.

After you’ve seen how well your schemas perform, it’s now time to extend their deployment to other parts of your site.

You can refine your schema strategy now that you are aware of which schemas will help you to improve your search engine visibility.

The post How do you measure schema performance first appeared on Search Engine Land.