A world of structured data promises us an incredible future. But most websites struggle to even implement basic schema.org markup. Fewer still represent and connect their pages and content in sophisticated, structured graphs. We can’t reach that incredible future without increasing and improving adoption. To move forward, we need to make constructing rich structured data as easy as writing a recipe. This isn’t a pipe dream: at Yoast, we think we’ve solved schema for everybody, everywhere. We’d love to share our story.

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Schema, Google & The
Future of the Web

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“71% of consumers begin their journeys by using a search
engine to discover new products and services (initiation)”
“74% reported using a search engine for consideration
and purchasing (research, comparison, transaction).”
Forrester, 2016 [link]

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Hello!

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I see a theme

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The past and the future

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They crawl the web

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Once upon a time...

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But that was just the beginning

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The new normal

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This is their endgame

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However...

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The limits of crawling & of ML

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Content is poorly structured

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That makes it hard to do shiny things

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Like voice search

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They need (more) structured data

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Microformats & schema.org

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The next generation

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The web is more than pages

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This is JSON-(L)D

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All of this bothered me greatly

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1: How can we enable everybody to have rich graphs,
which represent their content, business, products, etc?
2: How can we do it all automatically and invisibly,
based on the users’ content?
3: How can we make the solution scalable, and
interoperable (beyond Yoast, beyond WordPress)?

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Some of the challenges

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Schema.org has limitations

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Google’s rules are finicky

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(they don’t support cross-page IDs)

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One primary entity per page

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No defined implementation logic

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Websites are made of multiple systems

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No consistent or predictable IDs

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Content changes the graph recursively

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WordPress had the answer

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Fast-forward...

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It looks like this

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Blocks = structure

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It’s dense

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We extend a “Base Script”

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Woohoo! What’s next?

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Beyond Google...?

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Thanks!