
How to Use Schema in Your SEO Strategy
More and more small businesses are using schema markup to help their websites rank higher in search engine results. But what exactly is schema markup, and how can you use it to improve your SEO? In this episode, Jesse talks with expert Terry Samuels about schema markup and how you can use it to boost your website's visibility.
If you’ve got questions about SEO or digital marketing, reach out to us today and let us know! Whether you’re sending us an email or giving us a call, we’d love to hear your questions and hopefully provide insights for you and other listeners.
Thanks for checking us out, and enjoy the show!
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What you'll learn
- Why keyword density in your schema matters
- How to use schema markup to improve your website rank
- When to use schema in your Google Business Profile (GBP)
Terry Samuels: ...build assets. And that's what a lot of schema will tell you too. Like, gosh, this guy really doesn't have anything, so we need to go out and build this and this and this and this. And at least start getting him some notices out there.
Jesse Dolan: Using a tool that pushes a few buttons, they may generate some code that slaps on your website and maybe be better than nothing, but as whether you're the marketing professional doing it for your own company, or an agency doing it for somebody else, what you just talked about there, the amount of knowledge you're going to build by doing that research about your client, about the competition and where the holes are, or where they're really good and what you need to leverage more.
Hey everybody, got a great episode here for you today. We've got Terry Samuels, schema expert, friend of the show on dropping some nuggets. I had a few questions set up for Terry here to talk about schema, and he answers those and he also goes off script and dives into some areas that I think you're going to get a lot of value on. So if you're interested about schema, how it's going to impact your website and improve your SEO, check this episode out. We got Terry Samuels right now talking schema.
Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I'm your host, Jesse Dolan here with our good buddy Terry Samuels, schema expert. Terry, ready to dig into some schema topics?
Terry Samuels: I am. Thank you for having me back. Glad to be here.
Jesse Dolan: Yeah, this is ... Gosh, I don't know, third or fourth time.
Terry Samuels: I think four.
Jesse Dolan: Love having you on as a regular here. Schema is a big part of SEO, Local SEO, I think we all know that. If anybody hasn't checked out Terry's previous appearances on here, go LocalSEOTactics.com, go to the episodes in there, just search Terry Samuels and you're going to find a number of episodes with Terry. We started off talking super basic, getting a little more advanced and those of you that have paid attention to these episodes have reached out to us, sent in questions, things like that. And so I have a few of them here that I've been collecting. We got a whole notebook of them actually been collecting that we're going to throw out Terry eventually, but we got what? Three or four of them here today we're going to pepper Terry with and see if he can continue to shed some light and drop some knowledge on us talking about schema with your website and to improve your SEO.
So like I said, if you don't know who Terry is, check him out. Just do a Google search. He's pretty good at SEO, so if you type in his name, bet you're going to find him real easy. Terry, let's start off with the first one here. Most of these I paraphrased, these four I've picked because they're very popular in various ways. So I kind of paraphrase, and I'm not going to attribute a particular person here, but all you listen in that have submitted these and if this kind of feels like what you asked who you are and we'll reach out to you, let you know these episodes drop. First one here is, can I use the same local business schema on more than one page? Whether it's site wide or just even multiple pages, more than one. What's your thoughts on that, Terry?
Terry Samuels: If you have an exact match domain, So if you have PlumberInDallas.com, then yes, you can put local schema as your homepage, I would also add plumber. But then you could pretty much put local schema on the whole site because you really aren't going to be able to do much if you want to go into Plano and the outskirts of Dallas so to speak. And that's the challenge obviously with exact match domains, you trap yourself. But if you also have a site like mine or yours, and if I have seven different Phoenix pages, web design, SEO, internet marketing, content marketing, blah blah blah, that I would have that local business schema for Phoenix on all those Phoenix pages. But on my Tucson pages, obviously I wouldn't have the Phoenix global business information. But I believe on agency sites or on national sites or whatever, even state sites. Local business shouldn't be the site-wide unless it is an exact match domain.
Jesse Dolan: And for everybody listening, if you don't know what Terry's saying, exact match. You're have your keyword and even more importantly your geographic identifier, your city, things like that in your domain name. Which is like he's saying, that really locks you into ... That's the area that you're serving. So really Terry, that aside, if your site isn't exact match, you're not tied down to that geographic location. You're saying that the local business schema can be on any of the pages that are about whatever that particular city is, right? That's kind of an easy-
Terry Samuels: Exactly.
Jesse Dolan: Easy rule with thumb then for everybody?
Terry Samuels: For sure.
Jesse Dolan: Nice.
Terry Samuels: So I mean we also do neighborhood pages. So my Phoenix local business schema is probably on 16-20 pages, but just Phoenix.
Jesse Dolan: Okay.
Terry Samuels: And that's what it's called. That's local, right? Local. And you want to treat it that way. One of the mistakes I do see people make is they put local business on every page, like you said, and it's not really local business. Or at least it's not the same geographic location that the schema is about.
Jesse Dolan: For sure.
Terry Samuels: And local business schema is not something to add in a whole bunch of different cities. Phoenix, Tucson, Mesa, all on my Phoenix schema. I would rather break it out.
Jesse Dolan: Local schema is the most important part of it there. It's got to be the right end point there.
Terry Samuels: For sure, yeah.
Jesse Dolan: No, I think that makes sense and should clarify for everybody. I got kind of a follow up question though. Is there any reason you wouldn't want local business schema, let's say on all your Phoenix pages in that scenario? Any sense to not put it on all of them?
Terry Samuels: I mean really.
Jesse Dolan: Or just by default, just apply it.
Terry Samuels: Yeah, by default, we just apply it. I don't really see, I mean I don't see any harm in not having it as long as you have other schema like Plumber or HVAC contractor or something that has the same schema parts in it that local business has. I mean one of the things that we're trying to cautious people a lot on now is the duplication of stuff. So organization schema is on the whole site and then all of a sudden the individual page schema, we're starting to find out that we don't want to mention the same things over and over again. So it's obviously taking us a little bit more time now to do different schema different ways because we do want to mix it up, but at least we're being cognizant of it. I mean obviously things like your Facebook page, Facebook links, and all these different links that don't change, that's not what I'm talking about.
But I am talking about your description for your organization and then your description for your local business. Those two kind of shouldn't be the same. And so we're also finding, and this isn't part of the questions but I wanted to just tell people about it, is that keyword density, your schema matters. So if you're going after a keyword density, and a lot of people will argue keyword density, blah blah blah. But anyway, I'm a big believer in keyword density. So if my target's 3-5% density on my page and I don't include schema, I'm probably going to be closer to 7-8%. And so you really have to be cognizant of that. And a lot of times tools like Pop and Surfer and these things don't really take into account your schema, at least most of the time. So you really have to, again, if you see fluctuations in page content and you have schema on there, include schema in your research of finding out why.
Jesse Dolan: That's a really good tip. You don't think about that being as on page, quote, unquote, because you don't see it visually, but it's still on the page.
Terry Samuels: It's still on the page, it's still in the code. If you look at it from a bot standpoint, it's still there. And to sit there and say that I've got this word nine times on my page, but then I've got it 16 times in my schema, and without even trying to keyword stuff, that's what's happened on accident, right? So matter of fact, I'm talking about this when we're in Florida at Chas' event. And so when I do a forensic SEO, the last one I did was this big lawyer. That's what happened is they had nobody considered their schema with their page content and it really threw stuff off. So I wanted to mention that on this call just to make sure that it is something that we're finding is a negative.
Jesse Dolan: And I suppose that cuts both ways, whereas all that additional schema text can add a lot of content that maybe dilutes your percentage, or the other way if it's just in there a million times it's way out of whack.
Terry Samuels: Well what happened was with this instance is that they had a bunch of ... It's like a little mini mass page site. So they had a bunch of pages with the same construction action attorney block, construction action attorney block. And that's the keyword they got screwed up was they just over density-ied, whatever the freaking comment or whatever-
Jesse Dolan: That's perfect.
Terry Samuels: Over density-ied. Making up new words as we go. But it really threw off if their main keyword for that page was construction accident attorney and now all of a sudden you've got 10 or 12 or 15, I think it was like 27 in the schema that was never counted in the four or five on its page. So now all of a sudden we just took out the word construction, that's how we fixed it, we changed it to personal injury or something else in the schema. So we kept a couple of them obviously, but it's just something that we all have to look out for. Because even page names and links, the anchor text that we put on links, that's all included in any kind of density.
Jesse Dolan: It's all readable back there for the box. So yeah, rewind that everybody, if you don't catch all that, that's some good expanded off that topic right there. Get a little nugget. Thanks, Terry. Okay, so moving into the next one though, schema on the GMB or the GBP, whether it's directly within there somehow, is there a way to inject it, to utilize it or if somehow tracks back to the GMB or the GBP ranking in general? So this one I'm kind of curious. I don't know if you're going to give it a big fat no, nothing, impossible, or if you have some knowledge to drop, what do you think?
Terry Samuels: We've tested this many times and we're still testing it. We could put schema in all kinds of excess data and stuff like that. We all know that Google, they say they strip it out, do the actually read it, do they give us credit for it? That's kind of information that we'll never know. So I think with images and stuff, I think it's just more of a how much time do you want to spend on it for the results that you may be or may not get. So that's kind of the way we look at images. And the GBP is the same thing. We've tried to put schema in through GBP posts, or whatever different variables and that never works.
We're now testing, putting schema on Google news sites. Automated schema on Google news sites, and some of them are sticking. So I mean there's definitely ways to go about doing stuff, but we really haven't test other things than the GMB. I mean one of the reasons why I post press releases as a blog post is because I want the schema. So if I get a press release from Randy Rhodes and I'll take that press release and I'll make it a blog post, I'll iFrame all the links from his press release into the bottom of mine, but then I have schema in the background. Because I know we can't put schema on press releases, but I can do it reverse and do it on my own site and still get schema. But yeah, as far as that goes I didn't want to say big fat, no, because we always test all kinds of stuff. But again, as far as something to say, "Hey guys, this actually works." We don't have anything like that for-
Jesse Dolan: So yeah, technically you can inject it if you will or use it, but does it do anything? Is the question mark.
Terry Samuels: Does it do anything? Does it get seen? We can all see that it gets stripped out, but does Google still read it? A lot of people say Google still reads it. I would tend to agree with that. But what are they reading it for? Is it like, "Oh wow, we've never seen schema data before, we're going to do some great things with this." You know what I mean? So we didn't see anything like that. We have done some schema work with Amazon, buckets and images up in buckets and stuff. But again, it's a time thing. How much time are you going to spend on it compared to return on investments that you see from it?
Jesse Dolan: If anybody watching or listening wants to try it out, it doesn't sound like in your opinion, you're like, "Don't do that, it's going to be a negative thing for you." That's not the case, but it's more of, "Hey, go ahead and try it. If you find it's a benefit and you want to spend that time, knock yourself out."
Terry Samuels: Exactly.
Terry Samuels: I mean, you can I can put image scheme on images, you can put videos scheme on videos. But like I said, it really depends on ... It's even like I said before with blog posts, I tell people that unless you have staff to do it for you, most blog posts aren't, quote, unquote, good enough or ready enough to get schema. So we try to add it to everybody. But again, if it's just a 500 word article about getting your teeth cleaned once a year, how much schema do we want to put on that?
Jesse Dolan: Yeah, there's got to be an ROI on that.
Terry Samuels: So again, yeah, exactly. It's all about time. So when you break out, especially when you're looking at different variables of what can I spend here compared to here, then ... I'm lucky enough, I got staff that'll go in and do the article schema on every blog. But it's also one of those things that, hey, instead of doing that, why don't you do this for me? So I have no problem skipping in a post or two on my website for article schema if I want them to work on a new local business schema that's going to be on a page that I know I'm going to get great results for them.
Jesse Dolan: Yeah I think in that sense, some things are like, "I might as well do it," versus a, "I can't not do it." Right? It's not that critical in that.
Terry Samuels: Okay. Exactly. Yeah, for sure.
Jesse Dolan: That's good. It's really a big takeaway there is use schema for the core things that we, you, others talked about on your site, local business, these kinds of things. If you want to experiment in the fringe, go ahead, track your results, right? Make sure it's working and you're spending your time doing it, make sure it's worth it.
Terry Samuels: Exactly, I mean, like I said, schema is very time consuming, especially the way we do it. That's why a lot of people ask us to do it for them. And again, it just says web designers, SEOs, agencies or whatever, you always have ask to ask yourself. And again, I had a guy argue with me the other day that he's got no schema on his website and he's fine. I'm like, okay, that's fine, no problem. I mean he's like, "Well it's better than nothing." I'm like, "Well, that's also debatable."
The whole idea is if there's certain things that schema does, and I believe the search engines are looking for in schema, and it's like I said, it's bringing all the different variables into one spot. All the different mentions, all the different abouts, all the different ... People call them nodes, people call them all kinds of things out there. And that's the stuff plugins and schema builders can't do, and they can't do that. If you tell them that this information's out there and they can put it together in a nice little text file for you, but to actually go out and do all the research for Jesse Dolan out in the internet, they're not going to do that. And that's the power of schema.
Jesse Dolan: No, our human minds are still pretty powerful in certain ways in gathering and processing. And yeah, this is labor intensive. That's why you're our resident expert coming on this show, is because this is a knowledge base to develop. It takes time, it takes labor, it takes experience. It's not easy. If there was a tool that did everything Terry does, everybody would be buying that tool.
Terry Samuels: Oh yeah.
Jesse Dolan: You know what I mean? And we wouldn't be talking about it, that's just not it.
Terry Samuels: And then don't think I haven't and even continue to think of how to build one. I mean it's something we talk a lot about and it's something that we have built tools to take our text file, our templates and make changes very quickly.
Jesse Dolan: Assist the process, right? Yeah.
Terry Samuels: Assist the process. But we still can't find a way to go out and automate the research. You can do some. You can go out and automate the research on Coke, but might be able to automate some research on the founder of Coke and all the different variables that you want to bring in. But still, it's just ... Again, how much do I want to spend on it compared to how much is it going to help? Is it going to be accurate? Is it going to give people false sense of security like rank math does? Rank math comes out and says, "Yeah, this is all the schema you need."
Jesse Dolan: It's all you need.
Terry Samuels: And that's the whole thing. I won't release anything unless it's perfect. But right now we haven't found that, but the research is there. We know we have instructions and teach people how to do research, we teach people how to work in the templates, we teach people what they need to look for. And it's different from a brand new 25 year old plumber compared to a plumber that's been in business 40 years. So the amount of information you're going to find is just what it is. So some people have a lot of information out there, some people have none. So if we-
Jesse Dolan: And the buckets we need to fill for each case might be the same, but the amount of data in each one, or how far you might have to dig in certain parts to get to it.
Terry Samuels: And you might have to dig. But then it also gives you a snapshot of what you need to build. I mean a lot of people say, "I want to build, I want to be number one plumber in Dallas," but they don't think about building the brand, building the owner, building the other stuff. The trust, the authority, all the stuff that we should be building is all part of that. Go out and do personal pages. Get yourself out there, buy yourself a personal name domain and redirect it to your website. There's all kinds of ways to start building authority and you don't want to forget yourself. Because when you go to exit, you're not selling Bob's Plumbing, you're selling, Bob Davis' I've got a plumbing company.
Jesse Dolan: Right, yes, that's itself, yeah.
Terry Samuels: And so that's the whole thing, build assets. And that's what a lot of schema will tell you too. Gosh, this guy really doesn't have anything so we need to go out and build this and this and this and this. And at least start getting him some notices out there. Some mentions, some abouts. So it's pretty interesting.
Jesse Dolan: If you're using a tool that pushes a few buttons, it may generate some code that slaps on your website, and maybe be better than nothing. But as whether you're the marketing professional doing it for your own company or an agency doing it for somebody else, what you just talked about there, the amount of knowledge you're going to build by doing that research about your client, about the competition and where the holes are, or where they're really good and what you need to leverage more. A machine's not going to spit that back to you and say, "Oh by the way, you might want to dig in here."
Terry Samuels: I think I told you a story here, but I didn't know if I did, but if I did, stop me. But I mean my team found, we got hired to do a law firm. He had 17 lawyers, I think. But my team found one of his lawyers had been disbarred a year before that and the owner didn't even know it.
Jesse Dolan: Oh my gosh.
Terry Samuels: The main guys who hired this guy. This guy Had been working for him for 10 months and he was disbarred in that state. And so my schema person said, "Hey Terry, this might be a problem." And I contacted him and I said, "Is this a problem?" He's like, "Well F yeah, it's a problem."
Jesse Dolan: Oh my gosh.
Terry Samuels: I don't think anybody would've ever found it unless ... We were just doing research on all the different attorneys. So we want to go out and find their colleges and did they pass the bar? When did they passed the bar. All this stuff-
Jesse Dolan: Is this legal or not even? Yeah, yeah. That's crazy.
Terry Samuels: All the stuff you look for, for doctors and lawyers. But yeah, and that's the whole thing. That's why research is so important. People say, "Oh you got to do keyboard research." And I'm like, "Yeah, you got to do a lot more than that." Our research is massive and we put it all in a folder, it all belongs to the owner. This is all the stuff that we found for you, your company, your keywords, your competitors, and then we just start building out the schema to make it match, so to speak.
Jesse Dolan: Yeah, if that client doubted that you actually did that research and like, "Nah, he just uses a tool." That was some good proof right there, right?
Terry Samuels: I think this is a client for life, we call them.
Jesse Dolan: I would sure hope so, man, that's incredible. That's a great story.
Terry Samuels: Yeah, for sure.
Jesse Dolan: Do you have anything else to add on that? Otherwise I'm going to get into the next question about DBpedia, Wikipedia.
Terry Samuels: Yeah, no. Like I said, if we find something that works, we will definitely be telling people about it. Obviously not public on Facebook, but we will be telling people in our circles about it. But like I said, we find things that'll work some days but not the next days. And so unless we get something that tests out right and it tests out positive, we're not going to tell people to look at it.
Jesse Dolan: No, that's good. And again, proof why this is ever evolving, ever testing, nothing's ever static.
Terry Samuels: Got to.
Jesse Dolan: Hey everyone, just a quick message about our free SEO audit tool on LocalSEOTactics.com and we'll get right back to the show. If you haven't taken advantage of it yet, go on out to LocalSEOTactics.com/FreeSEOAudit or look for the yellow button up on the top right corner, click that. And it's going to take just a couple seconds. You enter in the page that you want to optimize what you're looking for the audit to score against. Enter in that page, enter in the keyword you're looking to get optimized for, and enter in your email address. Click the button and it's going to take a few seconds and then it's going to send you off a PDF report via email.
It's a great report. It's going to kind of give you an overall score of some vital SEO areas for that page and for your website at large, even though it's auditing this page, that's going to tell you some of the good things that are happening, some of the bad things that are happening too. And give you basically a checklist of some things that you need to sure up and what you can do to improve your SEO for that page, for that keyword that you're auditing. Now you can use this as many times as you want. You can do multiple keywords, multiple pages, multiple keywords on the same page. You can even use this to check against your competitors, right? If you want to do a little reverse engineering, see how they're scoring for a certain keyword, what they may be doing good that you're not, and some things you improve there. So lots of different ways to use it, completely free. Again, go on to LocalSEOTactics.com/FreeSEOAudit or look for the yellow button in the top right corner of the website.
All right, let's dive into this next one here. So paraphrase in a couple here, I kind of mash them together, but should I use DBpedia, Wikipedia, Wiki Data and Google's knowledge graphs all in the same as areas? I don't know if that's the exact same one I sent you. But basically for the same as, what kind of references do you want to use even more broadly or what do you want to avoid? Any updates, anything to that? We talked a little bit about that in one of the previous episodes, how to use this, but what's your thoughts on that one?
Terry Samuels: Well, and same as is something that could be very, very powerful. So I tell people to try to keep same as around the service, the person, the company, whatever's on that page. And Wikipedia and DBpedia and all these other ones are fine, but I try to get them ... Don't be afraid to put the number one competitor. Neil Patel's in my SEO knows about. So he's there, Google knows he's there, why wouldn't I use his name?
Jesse Dolan: Interesting.
Terry Samuels: So don't just limit yourself to Wikipedia and DBpedia and these other ones out there, especially if you're doing medical. You got WebMD,, you got these things that same as that you can use for your different services that just brings it in more powerful. And then if you use a tool like Topical Relevance that I've talked about, a lot of times you'll even get the machine IDs for those. Whether WebMD has their own machine id, Salterra does, Local SEO Tactics, we all have our own machine IDs. And that's kind of the link you want to use as far as same as.
But yeah, so we try to get very creative with same as, especially if it is relevant to that page. That's why I have a page that I put all my citations on as same as, it helps me index citations I think. But I have a page for all my different maps that has all my ... I call them my local business references and I put them all just on a page. So I got one page that will have a thousand citations and then I have a tool that'll tell me once those links break. And I like that. And I like to know when citations break so I can either try to get them reestablished or get a new one, because I build links to those, especially the powerful ones.
And that's the kind of thing that I try to use for knows about and same as. Same as is, like I said, same as you want to make sure that you stay within the realm of whatever your page is talking about. So you can do same as far as ... And we try to personalize it. A lot of people say, "Well geez, I'll do a same as for Phoenix's Bank One ballpark with a Diamond Backs play. And I'll personalize that with a slogan saying, "Salterra has season tickets to the Arizona Diamond Backs, this is where we go and watch them play." So again, I'm tying in, not only am I tying into the different variables, but I'm personalizing that variable to the same as. That's kind of showing why it's the same as, you know what I mean? So I just don't list a link there. I try to get a little bit more into it on the same as, at least for the good ones.
Jesse Dolan: So you're showing Google ... I mean, whatever reads it. But you're showing Google. This is the thing and this is why it's related to me or associated with me. And when I've explained this to people too, so just think about how power ... Just step back and think about how powerful it is. You get your website, your entity, all these things. And if you can help Google connect the dots on these trusted resources and all this, imagine if you have that power. Yeah, that'd be amazing. Well guess what? You have that power.
Terry Samuels: Yeah, for sure.
Jesse Dolan: And you can just put that right into your webpage.
Terry Samuels: And when we're here in Phoenix, well guess what I'm doing right now? I'm going after the Super Bowl, because the Super Bowl's here this year.
Jesse Dolan: Nice.
Terry Samuels: So we are writing a ton of content around the Super Bowl on my website, my schema, because I want people to go through my website to click a fricking button to buy tickets. So it has nothing to do with anything that I'm involved in except for traffic.
Jesse Dolan: Right, Phoenix traffic.
Terry Samuels: Local geo traffic's a powerful thing that people seem to miss. So not only do we need to be an authority in our space as far as our services, but we also need to be an authority in our space as far as geolocation. So I tell people if you've got a state fair coming up, if you've got a rodeo coming up in your town, write about it. Start writing about it a couple months ahead of time. Write sub articles about it. You know what I mean? Just start writing about pricing structures and rules and what's going to happen at the event. Become a resource for the Super Bowl. Can you imagine that? I mean it's just like, yeah, I need tickets to Super Bowl in Phoenix. Oh, there's Saltera. Has nothing to do with it.
Jesse Dolan: They're number one spot in Phoenix, yeah. I mean really at the end of the day, I mean even Google's core original algorithm, I've always told people it's kind of like if you come into the school halfway through the school year and you want to be cool, well you got to go sit down at the table with the cool kids. You have to have that association. And at a fundamental level, that's kind of what we're building in Google always is just we have the authority, that trust, whatever labels we want to put on. But you're trying to associate with things to help your own personal stature. And this is such a powerful area to do that. And you can communicate it directly and not have the human beings on the page be like, "What is all this crap that I'm reading?" This has nothing to do with, whatever, within the schema parts and stuff.
Terry Samuels: For sure.
Jesse Dolan: So yeah, super interesting. Again, posing Terry with a question here and you're taking it eight different ways. I hope people rewind, take some notes here. You're dropping some related slash slightly off topic bombs here that tie all this in together. And just really, I say again, appreciate you coming on and sharing this stuff, because-
Terry Samuels: Oh, for sure
Jesse Dolan: This is gold, man, for everybody out there. So okay, so that's short answer also using Wikipedia, blah blah blah. Yeah, do that. Use it and don't be afraid to use it.
Terry Samuels: Part of your question was how do I get in the knowledge graph, right, or the knowledge panel? And the knowledge panel, all it is a bunch of different node information that Google collects around the internet and builds a panel. Our job as schema is to put all those nodes and everything into the same website so that Google doesn't have to search. So we know Google-
Jesse Dolan: Yeah, putting it all together.
Terry Samuels: Will go out and find a Facebook image to put it in a knowledge panel. We know Google will go out and find a title from your website and put it in the knowledge panel. They might even put some content in there, and a lot of knowledge panels that we see, you really can't figure out where it comes from because there's ... You're like, "Wait a minute, that's not how it's written on my website." So we all know Google will change our titles and descriptions to suit themselves.
But I think where Schema comes in, again, it just brings in a whole bunch of different variables Google's already looking for and it gives us a better opportunity to actually have our brand name and the knowledge graph. But the knowledge graph is something I tell people don't spend a lot of time and effort on, because they can be there one day, gone the next. A lot of keyword terms don't even have enough knowledge to have a knowledge panel if that makes sense. A lot of searches. So it's like a GMB, not every search has a GMB popup, or GBP.
Jesse Dolan: ABCXYZ.
Terry Samuels: Yeah, exactly. And so I tell people the knowledge graph is great, I'll even show it off but I tell even my clients, look, this thing could be gone tomorrow, it could be back next week. A lot of people say they don't like the knowledge panel because it does give people information, who says they're just going to click on that to go to your site when they can go below it. So the knowledge panel I think is nice. It's a goal but I don't think it's a goal you should just, "Gosh, dang, why is not-" Don't spend a lot of time on why you can't get the knowledge panel. Just make sure that everything about you, your service, your company, your ownership or whatever is on that page for that query and leave it up to Google to show it.
Jesse Dolan: If you're doing best practices it should show if it's going to show, right.
Terry Samuels: Exactly.
Jesse Dolan: I mean, generically speaking.
Terry Samuels: And if somebody's up there that you want to knock off and you want to reverse engineer it, we can do all that stuff. Again, I'm more going to be number one organic and number one in the maps and I'm good. But again, it does pop up. I had one pop up yesterday and I was like, "Oh wow, we have the knowledge panel." It was kind of cool, but it doesn't really get that many searches. It's not really a huge money word. It might get a couple leads but it's not roof repair, hail damage in Dallas type of keyword. Yeah, so that's the biggest thing about the knowledge panel is just ... Just do what you need to do and if you show up, great, but just focus on being in the top three and the map and organic and it's really all you have to do. Everything else going to come.
Jesse Dolan: We just said something like that in a previous episode. The goal isn't the knowledge panel. If it pops, it pops. Get number one GMB, get number one in the naturals. And if there's no knowledge panel like you feel like there should be, whatever man, you're number one. That's the goal, is we're trying to get that.
Terry Samuels: Yeah, exactly.
Jesse Dolan: Hey man, that's good stuff.
Terry Samuels:It's not like you're going to get fired for not being in the knowledge panel if you have number one in graphs, number one in ... They might say, "Oh, hey, this asshole's competition, why is he up here?" Well, let's kind look and see how many leads you're getting compared to him. Because he's not in the maps, which is typically what happens. So if they got a knowledge panel, don't get too excited because you're probably not doing well some other place. I mean they used to have a time if you were in the knowledge panel, you actually weren't on the first page organically. They actually would kick you at number 12 or something just because they gave you the knowledge panel. I'm like, "Can I switch that? Can I request that change?" I don't want the knowledge panel, I want to be number one.
Jesse Dolan: It looks like some obscure ad over on the right hand side here. People are clicking at now the number two result, which should be mine. I agree with you.
Terry Samuels: Exactly, exactly right. And try to get into the people also ask. The people also ask is where we spend a lot of time to try to get in there with the FAQ schema.
Jesse Dolan: Nice.
Terry Samuels: So we're always constantly updating our webpage's FAQ schema to try to get into that people also ask, that's a powerful spot. Because Google will give you credit.
Jesse Dolan: That might be a good next episode, just as a little placeholder for us. We talked about it maybe before a little bit, but things you can do to maybe enhance results, or pop, right? And get more exposure right along those lines.
Terry Samuels: Exactly.
Jesse Dolan: We're up and around about a half hour, Terry, a little longer than I promised you. We've been through the questions I had set up. I think all is good there. Do you got any other closing thoughts or anything else you want to share with anybody?
Terry Samuels: No, just like I said, I love coming on this show and just have me back whenever you want, and I'm happy to answer your guys' question. Reach out to me if you have issues or challenges. As long as it's not going to take too much of my time and kind of give away the farm, I'm an open book.
Jesse Dolan: Terry does this for a career. He gets paid. So if you want to hire him or hire his agency, that's the number one thing. If you're looking for a ton of free support, keep it short and sweet. People of course, if they don't have your info ... What was that, Terry?
Terry Samuels: Or come to one our events, we do mean of them every year. Or come to one of our events, we do many of them a year.
Jesse Dolan: So if people want to find those events, find you, why don't you share some of your contact for how people might track you down?
Terry Samuels: My website is SalterraSite.com and that's our main agency site. And then our conferences and masterminds are all run through SEOSpringTraining.com. So you can kind of keep up to date with what's happening there. We'll be in Florida in week and a half for our mastermind there, and then we're doing our big conference in April in Phoenix. So we always have stuff going and I always encourage people, even business owners to go to these things because you kind get an idea to watch your butt of what other people are doing and then to get a better understanding of ... So you don't have to call Jesse and I and say, "Man, I hired this company for two years, they're not doing crap." We're going to teach you how to not go two years without saying they're not doing crap.
Jesse Dolan: Yep. Get some education on the topic, absolutely.
Terry Samuels: Yeah, so I've got ... One of my roofers is going to be in Florida, or excuse me, one of my moving companies. And he just wants to learn, and so no problem. That's what these events are for and these are events to see, I'm hoping he sees how hard it is to work, do this. And then just understand that it's not just as simple as changing some titles and descriptions and some header tags and calling it good. There's a lot more to what we do and to get the results that we get, so to speak.
Jesse Dolan: And it's always changing. Always changing.
Terry Samuels: Always changing, yep.
Jesse Dolan: All right, Terry, appreciate the time. If anybody is having trouble getting a hold of Terry, obviously you can reach out to us through Local SEO Tactics and we'll connect you two. Terry is a rockstar and you'll be happy that you made the connection. All right, I think that's a wrap, Terry, thanks for coming on, everybody. Hopefully that was some good knowledge for you and we'll catch you on in the next episode. Take care.
Terry Samuels: Thank you very much. Thank you everybody.
Jesse Dolan: All right, everybody, hope you enjoyed that episode. Again, that was the great Terry Samuels, love having him on. Every time we have him on, we end up talking about the topics that we've prepared, and then Terry also expands on it and drops more knowledge. So the area of schema for your website is pretty intimidating if you're new to it. We do have a number of episodes where Terry has kind of started off on a more basic level, as I mentioned during the course of the episode. Go on out to LocalSEOTactics.com, click on episodes. You can either pick one from there or click the link to search and just type in Terry Samuels and it'll show you all the episodes where we are talking with Terry Samuels and breaking down some schema. If you want to reach out to him, SalterraSite.com, Google Terry Samuels, or reach out to us here at Local SEO Tactics and we can connect you. Terry is our number one resource for Schema. We lean on him heavily and he's a guru, so check him out.
If you found value in this episode and our show in general, we'd love to hear from you. I'm going to read a five star review here from Oak Spring Farm information. The review says, "The podcast is so helpful. I started at the first podcast, I am working my way through. I'm a farmer, so SEO isn't my thing and I'm learning so much. Thanks guys." Thank you for the review. If you are listening and found value, we'd love to get a review from you too. If you leave one, we're going to read it on the show. Go on out to LocalSEOTactics.com, scroll down to the bottom, click on the link for reviews, whether you want to leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Google My Business, Google Business Profile, I should say, Facebook, whatever it is, we make it easy for you. All the links are there. Click, send us a review, we'd love to hear it from you, and it lets us know that we're doing a good job and you enjoy the show. Again, hope you like this episode and we'll catch you on the next one.