Omnichannel Content Marketing FAQs

Omnichannel marketing is the discipline of operating integrated campaigns in all digital channels to generate communication synergy and better cover the the buyer's journey with targeted messages.

Yes, ‘FAQ Page’ schema type can be used for FAQ content as well. However, as per the guidelines, it should be used in cases when the FAQ is written by the site itself or written to support a product page and there is no way for users to submit alternative answers.

Milestone doesn’t stop at just helping our client create trustworthy FAQs or add schemas to their website content, but by being a thought leader, we ensure that our clients get the best of both these entwined worlds and emphasize on the brand’s visibility on search results and be the pick of voice search assistants. Our FAQ Manager does more than just being a platform to author business content, but on a single platform, our clients can:

• View customer reviews from multiple channels and location, crowdsource questions and ideas using various tools and arrange the most apt questions and answers for your business and even bulk upload questions
• Bulk publish FAQs on multiple channels ensuring content is managed efficiently and accurately
• Create FAQs wrapped with schemas with the right intent and publish verified answers for it to be picked by voice assistants
• Our FAQ Manager tool comes with multi-channel support and integration – Milestone CMS, Chatbots, Voice Apps – Alexa and Assistant, Google My Business (GMB) and Yelp

Though schemas are influential for content to be displayed as a rich snippet or featured snippets, only a small portion of websites across the globe have schema tags and a miniscule amount of those websites have advanced schemas – which set the platform for the content to be picked as a voice search answer or displayed as a featured snippet or rich result. Milestone’s Schema Cloud aids clients through the whole process of tagging schemas and lots more to ensure the process is not a burden anymore. It carries out the following functions:

• Auto discovery of Page URLs that need schemas tags. The tool can auto discover up to 1 million URLs
• Point at the website content and click to tag with schemas
• One-click validation and deployment of schemas
• Continuous health check of schemas added with error and warnings notifications. Raises alerts for deprecated schemas and ensures that the schema vocabulary is up to date
• Powerful Recommendation Engine to assist clients when adding schema tags using auto suggest and predictive methods
• Bulk application of schemas to similar pages even by the thousands
• Integration with any CMS across the globe, Google Tag Manager, Adobe Tag Manager, and E-commerce Integration as well
• Top-notch reporting to check performance and impact. Clients can check impact by page/data type, rich result growth, universal saturation, and segment reporting showcases schema impact, errors and warning

Both these tools are in complete sync with Google direction to optimize for entities rather than keywords, which they made clear with the BERT algorithm. The FAQs will help your business create conversational and relevant content, while schemas will function in entity recognition as it gives search engine bots a clear context of the website content and relationship between entities.

There aren’t any guidelines that specify the number of FAQs you should have in a section, but ensuring the quality of the content is crucial if it needs to be displayed on SERPs or picked up as a voice search answer. In addition, FAQs need to be categorized well enough with relevant FAQs in each category to improve the experience for website visitors to ensure that they do not leave the page without getting the information they were looking for.

There are a number of FAQ tools that work well to create self-authored questions and answers reflecting the details of your product, services and organization such as Spiceworks, Inkling Knowledge, Tettra, Helprace, SupportBee. In addition, Milestone Inc has its very own FAQ Manager as well, that does more than just give you the ability of authoring Q&As about your business. Before we get into what are the perks of the Milestone FAQ Manager, keep in mind that FAQs have gained traction over the last few years as Google now creates rich snippets of Q&As online and more importantly, FAQs are now being the pick of voice search answers. That said, take a look at what Milestone’s FAQ Manager will take care for your business:

• View customer reviews from multiple channels and locations or crowdsource questions and ideas from SemRush, GSC, Answer the Public (ATP), chatbot unanswered questions, industry specific Q&A library, etc.
• Using the plethora of connections to fetch the most relevant questions for your business, you can create questions and answers on the tool and the one-click publish will ensure that your FAQs (which are verified) are published on multiple channels. You can also choose to bulk upload FAQs and bulk publish FAQs across multiple channels.
• Optimize for voice search answers, as the content will be created with the right intent and in a conversational and relevant style. The content will be wrapped with relative schemas to give search engine bots recognition of the context of the FAQs.
• Ensures consistency in managing FAQs and determines deletion of obsolete information about the organization or its product and services to ensure customers are up to date with the latest.
• Multi-channel support and integration with Milestone CMS website FAQs, AI chatbots, voice apps – Assistant and Alexa, GMB and Yelp.

While you can’t directly co-relate schemas and voice search answers, schema help you optimize your website content to displayed on SERPs as a rich result and featured snippet – which are generally picked up as voice search answers. Considering that a good portion of the voice search queries revolve around ‘Ask for’ directions, ‘Near me’ searches or research on product or services, having quality content wrapped with the right schemas will improve the chances of your website content being picked up as a featured snippet or rich result, and voice search answer. In relation to the common queries, utilize the following schemas to boost your chances of being picked as a featured snippet, rich result or voice search answer:

• Spekable schema
• Local Business and its specific types
• Product Schema
• FAQ Schema
• How-to Schema

To mark the shift of indexing entities, Google rolled out the algorithm. The BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a deep learning algorithm that is rooted with natural language processing to help search engines understand the nuances of languages and not merely deliver results based on keywords. Following the roll-out, Google immediately stated that there isn’t anything that a website can do to optimize for BERT, but if the content is conversational, answers a query online directly, and relatable, it will be picked up. To sum up, content has to be of quality, conversation and straight to the point.

Google rolled out BERT towards the end the 2019 and called it their biggest algorithm update in almost 5 years, since RankBrain. BERT was basically the stamp that Google had moved past indexing pages based on keywords, and juggernauting to index entities rather, as entities are language agnostic - giving search an overhauling. With the focus shifting to entity optimizations, schemas play an integral role as they function in entity recognition by giving search engine bots context of the website content and the relationship between entities on the website.

With regard to schemas, reviews and ratings go hand-in-hand, and while the Review schema has to be added, the aggregateRating property has to be included in the script.

Emphasizing on quality content as a key factor for websites to rank on search, Google rolled out the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework and has since become the guidelines for SEO experts around the world to ensure their pages rank on search. Getting to the whether schemas help in EAT scoring, yes, they do. In the words of Google, schema mark-up offers clues of the relationship of entities of the website and as it helps search engine bots understand the context of the content. In short, schemas help Google’s EAT scoring process easier as they help the search engine reduce ambiguities between entities, create connections between them and provide additional information about an entity that Google might not have picked up when indexing a page.

To display your reviews section as a rich snippet or review snippet on Search Engine Results Pages, you can use the Review schema. However, it is not possible to add a review without rating and thus, for individual reviews, the Review schema has to be added and for products, services or organizations, where average rating comes into play, the aggregateRating property has to be added. Apart from the aforementioned, based on the context you can also add schema properties such as itemReviewed, reviewAspect, and reviewBody.

YoastSEO is a popular plugin used in many Wordpress sites. It offers both free and paid versions. The paid version (Yoast SEO Premium v13) of the tool includes support for about 20 of the approx. 800 schema types. If you are a WordPress site and have no plans to move to an enterprise CMS now or in the future, YoastSEO is a nice plugin. However, when you are making a decision, do keep in mind that - while WordPress is a wonderful hosting platform for blogging sites, mid to large-size businesses consider other enterprise-focused CMSes, such as Adobe AEM, Sitecore, Drupal or our very own Milestone CMS too. So, if you have scalability in mind, do consider a schema markup product, such as Milestone Schema Manager that support all major CMSes and lets you deploy schemas at scale across hundreds and thousands of pages with ZERO coding expertise. Milestone Schema Manager comes with support for all 800+ schema types and is a self-updating software that updates itself for every schema vocabulary change. It is an easy to use schema tool that offers schema tagging, validation, deployment at scale as you can bulk-apply schema to all pages that share the same structure. The Schema Manager also comes with powerful analytics on schema impact helping you quantify the usefulness of the software. Learn more about Milestone Schema Manager.

Very few! Schemas drive 30-50% more search impressions, organic traffic, and clickthroughs. But if you are thinking that, with such a powerful value proposition, every website would have already implemented them – you are in for surprise! Just 40% of the websites in the world have schemas and of them, only a handful-10% have advanced schemas of 8 types or more, and only 4% have advanced error-free schemas. When it comes to schemas, it is not just about ‘doing or not’ – it’s about ‘doing it RIGHT or not’. And only a handful of websites manage to do schemas the RIGHT way. Why? While schemas are great to have, they are tricky to implement and require coding experience, and IT knowledge. Having continuous updates, nested architecture–all these make schema implementations challenging. And that’s where tools ,like Milestone Schema Manager can help deploy schemas with no-coding. Another reason for the low adoption of schemas is that it’s difficult to understand the impact of schemas with very few tools, such as Milestone Presence Cloud quantifying it. But remember one thing–schemas are getting more important than ever as voice searches continue to grow. So, if you do not have schemas – do implement it RIGHT now, in the RIGHT way.

JSON-LD should be used. Over the last few years, JSON-LD has become the most preferred structured data. Why? JSON-LD is well-implemented. It can be embedded in "script" tags in the head of a document (moving out of HTML body), separated from the data it describes. This makes JSON-LD a format that can be templated, easily implemented and a great option for adding, deleting, or updating purposes. Other formats like Microdata or RDFa are neither that flexible nor easy to use options for adding, deleting, or updating purposes. RDFa are inline markups applied to HTML documents and define attributes that are added to the HTML. Above all, search engines prefer JSON-LD and thus JSON-LDs are more picked up and displayed in the SERPs. Here is what Google has to say – “Google recommends using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible”. Period. Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data

With the roll-out of BERT and the previous algorithms by Google, they made a clear indication that rather than index keywords, they were moving towards indexing entities, in short, entity optimization as entities are language agnostic and hold universal significance. On the other hand, schemas play an important role in entity recognition as they give search engine bots a clear context of the website content, thereby enabling the content to be indexed as a rich result on SERPs.

As per Schema.org, listed below are some of the most common schema types:

• Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries …
• Action
• Event
• FAQ
• HowTo
• Product
• Person
• Review, AggregateRating
• Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
• Organization
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
• Health and medical types: notes on the health and medical types under MedicalEntity
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant

Schema mark-up helps search engine crawlers understand the components of web page content better, thus offering richer and better results to end-users. With proper mark-up, the likelihood of search results displaying rich snippets goes up. Example: HowTo schema type explicitly explains the search engines that the content includes step-by-step answers to a ‘How–To’ question. The search engine is thus able to render the steps in the form of a rich result. Therefore, an immediate benefit that schemas drive is increased CTR or click-through rate. In fact, Milestone Research found that schemas drive around a 30% increase in traffic as users find richer and useful search results. But it is not just clickthroughs that improve with schemas. As search engines map content to more relevant searches, searchers end up clicking the results more, thus increasing organic traffic (and higher quality traffic!) as well as search impressions. At Milestone, of the 9400+ schema projects executed, we have observed a 25-60% increase in search impressions and organic traffic post schema implementations.

Schema is not a direct signal to rank but works in entity recognition for the content on your website, enabling it to displayed as a rich result on SERPs and conclusively, betters your visibility, impressions, and traffic for your website content.

You can put as many schema types on your website as there are no limitations.

By validating the schema markup on Google Structure Data Testing tool, you can check for errors and warnings in the structured data code.

Schema error is basically if an invalid character is included in the schema markup or structure or order of the file is incorrect. If there is a schema error then the markup cannot be validated, hence fixing the error is of importance. Schema errors usually cause drops in visibility and traffic.

There are a number of tools you can use to validate the schema code, but the most popular is the Google Structured Data Testing tool. Run the code on the tool and it will flag warnings and errors in the schema code.

While there are no limitations as such of how many schema types you can put on a page. To give you an example of what Google prefers as per the latest schema guidelines released by Google regarding FAQs, if a website has the same FAQ (same question and answer) across multiple pages of the website, schema markup has to be added for one instance of that FAQ across the website and not for every instant.

While search engines have made it clear that adding schema tags to your website code isn’t a direct signal to rank, it favors recent Google Algorithm updates like Rankbrain and more recently, BERT. Schema gives search engine bots context of the website content and in turn, the content is featured as a rich result on SERPs which even gives online users answers to their queries even without having to click. This helps boost the impressions of the website content on SERPs and possibly the Click-through-rate (CTR) as the answer to a query is directly displayed.

Schema attributes are basically information in JSON code that make up the schema property. While the attribute is simplistic, the combination of attributes is complex and help define the schema property and its relationship. There are generally two types of attributes–default attributes and fixed attributes.

Schemas are basically a set of topic types, and each type has its set of properties. As defined by search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex, schema types are arranged in a hierarchical structure and there are 818 Types, 1326 Properties, and 289 Enumeration values in the schema dictionary or vocabulary.

Schema markup is an advanced SEO approach as it gives search engines context of the website content (as it is semantic vocabulary categorized on Schema.org), and in turn, paves way for the content to be displayed as rich results on SERPs. In 2011, the Big Four search engines at that point – Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex – collaborated to create Schema.org in order to classify and categorize entities online in the form of microdata or tags which came to be known as schema markup.

Using schemas tied to quality content gives search engine bots a clear context of the content and in the process, following indexing of the page, the content is more likely to be featured as a rich snippet. Now, the bonus of appearing as a rich snippet is that it gives searchers the most relevant answer and attracts clicks from users due to its relevancy and attractive nature. Depending on the schemas that you use and the content, you could show up as a rich snippet for the location of your business, reviews, and ratings, breadcrumbs to your website, as a description, video, photo, event location and timing, recipe, price range of your product, etc.

The ‘FAQ Page’ schema can be used in cases when the FAQ is written by the site itself or written to support a product page and there is no way for users to submit alternative answers. However, in the case of the ‘QA Page’ schema, it can be used in the question and answer format when multiple answers by users are eligible for a single question in a community forum setting or a product support page.

There is no dedicated schema type for Help content, however, if the content is formatted as FAQs then the ‘FAQ Page' schema can be used.