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Homepage FAQ structured data to improve your SEO rank

October 6, 2019 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

Using FAQs on your site to get extra traffic from search results

Google loves a good Q&A, and they’re great for your search engine optimisation.

This is an excellent technique that Google has been responding to very positively recently. It involves a fairly interesting type of structured data.

Structured data is a series of tags and what’s known as microdata that Google, Bing and Yahoo all use to work out what content on your site matches specific, common types of information like phone numbers. It primarily sits in your pages’ code – it’s not something the user sees directly. Although in the case of FAQs you do want them to be able to see them as well – that way your front-end information matches what’s happening behind the scenes. Google definitely wants to see that the information you’re supplying them is also what you’re giving to your users.

You may have noticed little ‘People also ask’ click-to-open sections like this on Google results pages before:

Those questions and answers are being pulled from web pages with ‘FAQ’ structured data on their homepages.

This technique involves adding an FAQ section to your own homepage, and then having the appropriate code added to those so Google can pick them up correctly.

I’ve tried this with a handful of clients and most have seen a 3-4 ranking place increase as a result! Even if Google doesn’t end up using your FAQs on their results page, the effect is the same; they just like to see the code in place.

So this is well worth implementing as part of your SEO strategy.

When writing FAQs for this purpose though it’s best to make them somewhat generic – they should be about your industry generally rather than about your specific offering. (If you take a look at the ones I wrote on my own homepage, you’ll see they’re predominantly about SEO and it’s advantages rather than being about the services I offer myself.)

If you’d like me to implement this for you please just get in touch – and of course I can do it all for you as part of an ongoing SEO campaign too.

Filed Under: Content, Featured, Google, Hints & Tips, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine OptimiSation or Search Engine OptimiZation

September 10, 2019 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney

SEO is SEO, but when you’re advertising the different forms of English can get in the way.

I work with people all around the world, but there’s quite a bit more to achieving that than you might think.

Being able to sell services around the world from the comfort of your own office is fantastic. But for those of us with geographically ambiguous spellings it raises a few issues.

I speak (and write) British English – or as we like to call it, just English. So naturally I list my services using that spelling; in this case Search Engine Optimisation. But a large proportion of people around the world will be spelling that last word with a Z rather than an S.

Google’s John Mueller has tried to say it doesn’t make a difference but I rather think he’s over-simplifying the issue.

We can see in Google Search Console variants based on language are reported as different stats. I simply don’t believe Google’s system is allowing different spellings of words interchangeably. Searching for “Search Engine Optimisation” is much more likely to find my site than the American spelling precisely because I use it more often in my text.

There are ways I try to work around this. When I sell my services on specific service marketplaces (like PeoplePerHour) they have the option to include ‘tags’ behind the scenes – users don’t see those but they help support the sites’ fairly rudimentary search functions. So that’s a nice way of making sure I’m found for both spellings there.

But the second part of John Mueller’s reply is the most interesting. Let’s imagine Google did have some magic way of knowing everything all language variations were referring to and would show results regardless of those differences. The meta information displayed isn’t going to change. I could be found for Optimization but the information in front of the user will still say Optimisation.

That slight language difference could put a potential client off.

The better approach would be to allow different meta settings for different languages. But even that is fraught with technical and other issues – really there is just no simple fix for this.

I’ll continue to sell my SEO services around the world, but predominantly to the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Purely for technical reasons – because when it comes to delivering awesome SEO I can do that for anyone, anywhere.

Filed Under: Featured, Google, Opinion, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

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Recent Posts

  • BERT is Google’s latest update
  • Crawled – currently not indexed
  • Homepage FAQ structured data to improve your SEO rank
  • There are still plenty of SEO cowboys out there
  • Search Engine OptimiSation or Search Engine OptimiZation

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