Customer Story
Avid Technology specializes in digital media creation tools and platforms for film, video, audio, broadcast professionals and individual content creators. The company connects content creation with collaboration, asset protection, distribution, and consumption for the most prestigious and award-winning feature films, music recordings, and television shows, to live concerts and news broadcasts.
Founded in 1987, Avid Technology has continued to evolve its business to meet the current needs of its users. Like many other successful businesses, Avid had an e-commerce store and shifted from a one-time payment model to a subscription model for its digital media creation hardware and software.
However, Avid’s journey wasn’t an easy one. Its e-commerce platform was built at a time when there wasn’t great support for subscriptions and had poor search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. As a result, the company had a hard time communicating key information about its product to search engines.
For example, its software subscription products would always be in stock because it’s software. However, Google didn’t seem to understand that and would often show Avid products as “out of stock” on search.
This was one of the many issues that Matthew Heeb, Director of Digital Optimization at Avid Technology, had to solve. With a ton of tech debt and a website that wasn’t configured well for SEO, Matthew and his team focused their efforts on improving the technical side of their SEO.
Furthermore, Avid knew that it needed to implement a Schema Markup strategy to help search engines clearly understand the content on its site.
Most organizations will often try to implement Schema Markup internally and Avid Technology was no exception. Matthew wanted to find a way to implement Schema Markup without having to take away resources from their development team.
However, as Matthew started researching ways to implement Schema Markup, he started to realize the amount of effort needed to do it properly.
He found an article online that provided a step-by-step guide to adding Schema Markup to Avid’s use of Google Tag Manager. However, this solution would require the company to manually add the Schema Markup to each individual page on its site and update the Schema Markup if it were to change the content on any pages.
At that point in time, the Digital Optimization team at Avid consisted of Matthew and one other team member. With thousands of pages across multiple sites, he knew that they couldn’t implement the Schema Markup at scale with what limited resources they had.
Furthermore, Avid was using SiteCore as its content management system (CMS) and even though it was a great CMS, it wasn’t configured with SEO in mind. There were also no other plugins that Matthew and his team could easily use to add the Schema Markup on their site.
Upon further research, Matthew chanced upon Schema App and found that the Schema App solution checked the two key criteria.
The cherry on top of the cake was the fact that they would be assigned a Customer Success Manager from Schema App who knew a lot more about Schema Markup and was going to help Avid build and manage its Schema Markup strategy.
None of us are Schema Markup experts. Schema App wasn’t just selling us a tool. They were giving us someone that was a Schema Markup expert to help us build our strategy and that was a huge benefit.
This marked the beginning of Avid Technology’s partnership with Schema App.
To start, Matthew and his team shared their desired outcomes for this partnership.
Avid’s assigned Customer Success Manager first customized the Schema Markup strategy before implementing it at scale through the Schema App Editor and Highlighter to achieve the desired outcomes.
To help Avid Technology grow its revenue and product awareness from organic search, the Schema App Customer Success Manager created and deployed Product Schema Markup to the product detail pages on their e-commerce site using the Schema App Highlighter tool.
One of the main complexities with Avid Technology’s product detail pages was its multi-pricing subscription plans. The Schema App Customer Success Manager simplified complex subscription pricing by using the lowPrice property so that the Product rich result would reflect the starting price of subscriptions.
Within 3 months of working with Schema App, most of Avid’s e-commerce product detail pages were achieving Product rich results on the search engine results page. As a result, Google was able to clearly understand the company’s pricing, which meant Avid’s product pages saw a 21% increase in clicks and a 19% increase in impressions from the previous quarter.
As the Avid Technology Digital Optimization team continues to rework the content on the company’s site, their Schema App Customer Success Manager equips them with content best practices.
Some of the best practices include ensuring all content is visible to users and key information that has to be included on the page to satisfy the required properties to achieve a Product rich result. By doing so, any new content created by the Avid team is automatically optimized to achieve a rich result.
By using the Schema App Highlighter to deploy their Schema Markup, any new content that follows a set of specific parameters would automatically have the right Schema Markup types and properties mapping to specific content elements on the page. The Schema App highlighter then generates the JSON-LD based on the content in those elements and deploys it for Google to read.
The Schema App team also provides training to select Avid Technology team members to help them gain a better understanding of Schema Markup and how they can maximize the return from the company’s Schema App Subscription.
As they continue to develop their in-house team, they also know that they can always fall back on their Schema App Customer Success Manager for any complications that they are unable to solve.
Product Rich Result with stacked regulated results
Product Rich Result
FAQ Rich Result
Within a year of working with Schema App, Avid Technology’s e-commerce pages grew by 243% in clicks and 290% in impressions.
The company’s product pages also achieved a higher CTR when a Product rich result is achieved compared to when it isn’t achieved (with Product rich result = 6.2%, without Product rich result = 1.82%).
These results have also provided the Avid Digital Optimization Team with the justification needed to grow the SEO team. They were able to showcase Google’s preferences for new types of content like FAQ, as well as the importance of good content to provide search engines with greater clarity.
“After working with Schema App, we are seeing more impressions on these product pages, which is fantastic. Google definitely understands our pages better and our rankings are also improving. When we achieve the review snippets, we also see the clicks and traffic to those pages increasing by at least 46%.”
Matthew Heeb
Director of Digital Optimization
Avid Technology