Is Schema Important for SEO? If So, What Does It Do? | James Dooley Interviews Dixon Jones (James Dooley Interviews Dixon Jones)

James Dooley: Is schema important? Today I'm joined with Dixon Jones. Let's jump straight into it. In your opinion, Dixon, do you think that schema is important?

Dixon Jones: I think schema is a fact of life. But I should clarify that. Uh, schema I think comes from the Greek. So Aristotle or somebody decided that, you know, it would make much more sense if he started organising things into groups. And I think online and on the internet, uh, the word schema has changed, but, but in another way, it hasn't. For those of us that are old enough to remember going into a library and seeing all those little numbers on the back of books, can you imagine going into a library without having numbers on the back of books that the librarian could look up and figure out, you know, here's the book on chess or here's the book on astronomy or here's the book on... So, so this, this idea of schema is, is about organising things into groups and, um, it just makes everything much more efficient. If you want to try and find all the books on astronomy in your library, and, you know, now I'm taking the metaphor of a library being the internet, then it's much easier if you've got a system that has already organised all the websites into categories and then within that into ideas and concepts and stuff so that you can easily go through a database and say, right, I'm looking up all the things that are talking about astronomy and, um, the earth and, um, civilisation all in the same, same breath, bring it all back, and then I can, I can get there very much quicker than going through and trying to crawl all the internet on the fly to find the pages that are relevant. So, uh, schema helps with indexing. It helps with organisation. It helps with retrieval. I think that there is a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding now as to how much, uh, modern machines, LLMs, are reading or not reading schema on the fly. And the truth is they're not reading schema on the fly. So when they, when you ask them to read two pages and compare them, for example, they'll use, uh, bits of code or, um, or tools, uh, within their system that will go and just take the words on the page, the words that you humans can see. They'll rip out everything else, um, and, uh, and then base it, base their answer on, on that. So in that sense, schema at that point is not relevant. But, um, schema is relevant, um, for everything that, that a machine might want to do to try and organise, um, uh, concepts, um, before that point. So it's not good for reading on the fly and then interpreting that and, and matching it all up. At least an LLM isn't, um, on, on instant retrieval. But it doesn't mean to say that the world is not organised around, um, topics and ideas. And Freebase was... So Freebase was bought by, uh... Well, Metaweb owned a thing called Freebase, which was bought by, um, Google back in 2014, so 12 years ago, uh, or more. And, um, and that was a big database. They, and they spent, I think, billions, but anyway many, many millions, and I, I'm not sure if the number was ever disclosed. Freebase never had a, um, a revenue stream. They bought it, they put it in there, and they started to think about the world in terms of ideas and, and, and topics or entities, as I call them. And, uh, and, and schema helps to map those ideas to entities. So, so I think that schema is extremely important. Uh, I think that it will remain important. I think even if machines didn't use it, it is important because the world needs to be grouping things into, uh, into four-legged animals, two-legged animals, and, you know, and, and fish, you know. Um, it just makes things quicker.

James Dooley: Yeah. I mean personally, um, we... I was trying to get my Knowledge Panel and I was trying to connect certain things together and until I actually put the schema in place with the sameAs schema, it was getting me muggled up quite a lot with regards... There was also a musician called James Dooley and there was, like, a mismatch of information where part of my Knowledge Panel had his information, part of it had my information. And was able to categorise and put it all together and get my entity and get my KGM ID. The minute I was able to group all that and they knew with confidence and clarity of exactly who I was, my Knowledge Panel popped up. As my Knowledge Panel popped up, everything else just started to fall into place. All my socials started showing up within there and stuff like that. And yeah, like, from that point of view, I found it incredible.

Dixon Jones: I have the same, the same situation with Dixon Jones. There was an architect firm called Dixon Jones, which was a, a bugbear and a nightmare for me for 20 years. But fortunately they went bankrupt a few years ago. So that, that was helpful. But they still have a Wikipedia page. I mean, they were around. They did design the Royal Opera House and so, you know, they, they've done some, some, some important stuff in their lives. Um, and, you know, and so there is a... There, there's a big mismatch between, you know, at one stage I assume, you know, 100-person-plus company, uh, and, you know, one little guy trying to, uh, trying to promote his .com. Uh, and, and I found exactly the same problem. Jones and, uh, and once we'd got two KGM IDs, uh, you know, we... It was much easier for the Knowledge Panels to separate Dixon Jones the SEO and Dixon Jones the architect. And, uh, and life became a lot easier. And like you, uh, my trick was to, um, uh, well firstly get into Wikidata, have a book, you know, and then, uh, to, uh, uh, to, um, start matching up all those profiles in the schema. Uh, and it, it clicked into place.

James Dooley: The sameAs schema I think is really interesting for sure.

Dixon Jones: Yeah. Another one was, um, I've actually had it where I've worked with a couple of companies that I've invested into and their managing director had multiple KGM IDs. And I don't know of any other way of being able to fix having multiple KGM IDs than wrapping them all in the sameAs schema of saying that this KGM ID and this KGM ID and this KGM ID is the same person. And normally about four to six weeks later it just uses the strongest one and the other two end up getting dropped out and it, and it merges the profiles together. Where I just think it's just... And again, like, they couldn't be... Like, they might have written a book and then they could have got been on a podcast series or whatever it is, and it can create multiple KGM IDs for the exactly the same person. And wrapping that in the sameAs again seemed to resolve the problem.

James Dooley: That's really interesting. That's a really interesting fix. So I had the same problem. I had two K... Two IDs. Uh, and so what I did was on my About page I said you can also find me on Google here or here. So I linked to both the, the, the, uh, the KGM IDs, um, on, on in the same paragraph saying the same. But I said it in words. I didn't think to put it in the schema on that one. Uh, but I think it's had the same effect because one of them's dropped out.

Dixon Jones: Ah, that's good. Maybe I'm just not important enough for both.

James Dooley: [Laughter] Yeah, we just did it in the, in, in the sameAs and that seemed to work as well. Um, so obviously there's quite a lot of people within the... I, I know a couple of things for myself is that I've seen directly impact with regards to e-commerce websites when I've gone and add review schema and the stars showing in the actual Google SERP, that's increased CTR. Now, is it the... Is it the schema that increased, um, the rankings, or was it that it showed up with the stars and the stars got better click-through rate, which then led to higher rankings? Whatever way people can decide who's watching this. Was it the schema that there was the ranking factor, or was it they pulled in nice stars and that increased the CTR and that was the ranking factor? But again, the schema for reviews helped with higher rankings. And then back in the day, it doesn't do it anymore now, but where you had, like, FAQ schema and you got the dropdown boxes and you ended up getting, like, a Google result that was, like, this big as opposed to this big and people's clicking on, clicking through. We had links within it and that was all helping the CTR, which also seemed help. But my... I've got a question for you. Why is it you feel some people have just got a pet hate against... I just don't understand why some people just, they call them schema lowlifes and they're against schema. I'm like, why not just... It, it takes... It takes minutes to do. You're, you're pulling everything together in a nice concise manner and categorising it. Why do you think there's some people out there that say, "Oh, it's not a ranking factor, so there's no point in doing it," where we've just given some examples of where it definitely helps? Why, why do you think there is this kind of pet hate against schema?

Dixon Jones: I, I think it is fair to say that for a lot of people there's other things they should be doing before they worry about the schema. So, uh, all through... All through SEO, it's not about doing one thing, is it? It's about doing a lot of little things well to have a consistent story that you are an authority on this subject in this space and this time. So, um, so I think that, uh, for, for a lot of people schema might be coming, you know, a long way down the list. But also when they start to try and run their idea of tests or they, they're sitting there seeing that, you know, uh, schema isn't being pulled out if it's kind of in JavaScript. They don't necessarily know the technical wherewithal as to how the JavaScript is generated. Um, and if it's, if it's generated in JavaScript, that's going to make it harder for a lot of machines to, to, to pull it back. If it's going to be rendered server-side, that's going to be better. Um, but I think, uh... You'd have to ask them. But for me, schema is a sensible thing to do. But I will accept that I think Google has relied less and less recently on using that schema in the actual visible results. So I can't remember the last time I saw the customer reviews, but you're absolutely right. It was, it was, it was, you know, prevalent. And, and I think that that improved the click-through rate and that improved your, your ranking, um, as long as... As long as Google didn't think that that customer review was just put on the page with no, um, with no backing, if you see what I mean. Uh, because otherwise everything would be five-star. Um, and, uh, but it doesn't mean to say that, um, schema itself is, is a, is a bad idea. Schema is a very interesting way of reducing the amount of, um, of processing power needed to communicate an idea to, uh, to a machine. Um, whether it's taken up or not now doesn't mean to say it won't be taken up more again in the future. So Schema.org is a, is a, is used in so many different areas of life and not just SEO. Uh, and, uh, you know, in the medical industry there's whole sections on medical profit... Uh, medical, um, you know, uh, issues and, and, and types of schema and stuff. So, uh, it is used. It's used not just in search engines. Um, and it, it makes sense to use it wisely. Um, I do think that sameAs schema is particularly useful. Um, uh, and I do think that a schema about your own self and, or your own business, you know, organisational schema or Person schema, I think are also useful for getting Knowledge Graphs, for example, um, and for a Knowledge Graph understanding, you know, what you say about you. Not what you say... What, what, you know, not what the rest of the world says about you, but what you're saying about you. So it gives clarity to a machine, providing it reads it. Um, and I think clarity is the important thing. I think that a lot of SEOs just want more traffic and, uh, that's not really the goal. What they... [Snorts] ...want is more business, and what, what they need for that is more clarity. But as soon as you make it clearer what your product stands for, that also by definition means you're saying it is not... Does not stand for this. So you may start losing traffic because you're losing unre... Irrelevant traffic. The clearer you make an information to a, to, to a, a person or a machine, the more you're going to get a more targeted person coming through. And for me, less is more. If you're trying to get banner ads and sell banner ads by impression, then maybe schema is not for you.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's listening to this, leave a comment in the comment section. Do you think that schema is important? For me, it resolves disambiguation. It builds that confidence and clarity, which I think is very important for defining who you are and what you do as being an entity. But let me know in the comments section. It'd be interesting to see what your thoughts are.

Dixon Jones: Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing those as well and feel free to disagree with me.

James Dooley: Yeah, cheers, Dixon. It's an absolute pleasure.