Sitecore is a leading digital experience platform that combines content management, digital marketing, and eCommerce capabilities into a unified system. It is widely used by enterprises to manage content and deliver personalized experiences across various channels, supporting industries from eCommerce to Healthcare and everything in between.
By leveraging Sitecore’s capabilities, businesses can create, manage, and optimize customer experiences effectively.
Importance of Implementing Schema Markup on Sitecore
Implementing Schema Markup when using a Content Management System (CMS) like Sitecore is critical to your website’s success.
When you implement Schema Markup on your website, you translate your content into a machine-readable format. This can help search engines understand and contextualize the content on your website, leading to improved search performance, increased click-through rates (CTR), and higher conversions from search.
Apart from supporting your SEO efforts, implementing Schema Markup can also:
- Enhance your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through rich results and other enhanced search features
- Result in higher click-through rates and increases in non-branded queries, which showcase measurable results and ROI
- Build your organization’s content knowledge graph, supporting AI initiatives and deep machine understanding of your content and brand.
Within Sitecore’s Content Hub, users have access to a configurable data model, which is a structured representation of the underlying Content Hub database. This includes definitions of entities like assets, products, or projects. However, this can still be ambiguous to search engines and machines.
Therefore, by implementing Schema Markup to describe these entities in your data model, you can ensure that search engines and machines can understand the data in detail and with proper context.
How to Implement Schema Markup on Sitecore
Although the benefits of Schema Markup for your website are clear, challenges can arise when implementing it within a complex CMS like Sitecore. Before jumping into implementation, it’s important to first know your options and what best suits your team’s capabilities and business goals.
1. Implementing Schema Markup Manually
One of the ways you can implement Schema Markup within Sitecore is to manually author your markup in JSON-LD and manually add it to the HTML of the page. You can review Perficient’s “How to Implement Schema.org in Sitecore” article on the exact steps.
While it is possible to implement Schema Markup manually within Sitecore, the process is technical and labor-intensive. If you choose to go this route, potential challenges include:
- Lack of Scalability: Manually implementing Schema Markup becomes impractical when dealing with thousands of pages or multiple domains. The process is not only time-consuming but also costly.
- Maintenance Difficulties: If your organization frequently updates your site’s content, you’ll need to maintain your Schema Markup constantly to ensure it aligns with the content on your page.
IT teams and digital marketers often struggle to find the time to update structured data across large, complex websites. With enterprises that have extensive content spread across multiple domains, manual upkeep can become increasingly difficult and inefficient in time.
An alternative would be to use a plugin to implement your Schema Markup. Most organizations seek a solution that is easy to maintain and can scale dynamically with their content, something that an internal manual approach often cannot provide. However, there are currently no Schema Markup plugins that can automate Schema Markup deployment in Sitecore.
Discover how Avid overcame this plugin limitation by partnering with Schema App.
2. Leverage a Schema Markup Solution
The most optimal way to implement Schema Markup on Sitecore would be to utilize an end-to-end Schema Markup Solution like Schema App.
Partnering with Schema App can simplify the process of implementing and managing Structured Data on your Sitecore website. By using Schema App, you can achieve scalability, easy maintenance, comprehensive reporting, and access to strategic content recommendations and ongoing support.
How does Schema App Implement Schema Markup on your Sitecore Website?
1. Create Your Schema Markup Strategy
When you first partner with Schema App, you’ll be assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to oversee your Schema Markup strategy throughout the engagement.
Your Customer Success Manager will work with you to develop a Schema Markup Strategy for your website. This includes aligning your goals for implementing Schema Markup and scoping your website for appropriate Schema.org types and properties
2. Author Your Schema Markup using the Schema App Highlighter
Once your team has defined and approved the strategy, your Customer Success Manager will start authoring your Schema Markup using the Schema App Editor and Highlighter.
One of the key features that sets Schema App apart from other Schema Markup solutions is the Schema App Highlighter. The Highlighter allows users to create Schema Markup templates by highlighting specific elements on a page and mapping them to the relevant Schema.org property. This template can then be applied to other similarly templated pages (i.e. blogs, recipes, location pages, product detail pages, etc.), ensuring the Schema Markup aligns with the content on the page at scale.
Furthermore, the Highlighter will dynamically update your Schema Markup whenever content changes are made. as your content changes. This means that your Schema Markup evolves in real time and always reflects the most current version of your content.
Within the Highlighter, you’ll also find our Omni Linked Entity Recognition (Omni LER) feature. If you want to build a knowledge graph and disambiguate entities on your site, Omni LER will automatically link your entities to external identifiers from authoritative knowledge bases. This adds clarity and context, making your content more precise and authoritative in search.
3. Deploy Your Markup on Sitecore
Once your Schema Markup has been authored using Schema App’s authoring tools, we will work with you to set up the integration between the Schema App platform and Sitecore.
At Schema App, we typically use JavaScript to deploy Schema Markup to Sitecore. This method is both efficient and scalable, requiring the implementation of a JavaScript tag in the HTML head or the setup of a tag manager. You can learn more about our JavaScript implementation here.
Once the initial integration is set up, any Schema Markup authored by your Customer Success Manager for your website will be deployed seamlessly to Sitecore.
4. Perform Ongoing Maintenance and Monitoring of Your Schema Markup
Schema Markup is not a one-and-done process. Similarly to how your content will change and be updated over time, factors outside of your control may also change, demanding shifts in your Schema Markup strategy. These changes could include:
- Changes to Google’s structured data documentation
- Required properties for rich result eligibility may change
- Updates to the Schema.org vocabulary
- Shifts in your organization’s goals
Whatever it may be, staying current with these changes is essential. To ensure the long-term success of your Schema Markup strategy, your Customer Success Manager will work with you to manage and optimize your Schema Markup deployment. You can read this article to learn about the ongoing services offered by our Customer Success team after the initial implementation process.
In addition to implementation and management, your Customer Success Manager will also provide strategic content recommendations that are invaluable for both existing and new pages within your Sitecore CMS. These recommendations will help you:
- Tailor your content to a specific Schema.org Type or topic
- Identify opportunities to enhance your Schema Markup for better search features and rich result eligibility
- Create a more robust content knowledge graph
Read our case study with Sharp Healthcare to see how Schema App’s content recommendations supported the success of their CMS migration.
5. Measure the Performance of your Schema Markup to inform Future Planning
Performance measurement is crucial to the long-term success of your Schema Markup strategy. When you work with Schema App, you’ll get access to our Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) platform where you can track the performance of your Schema Markup.
In addition to having access to SPA, your Customer Success Manager will also perform Business Reviews to help you understand the impact of your Schema Markup strategy and areas for improvement. This ensures ongoing improvement in your Schema Markup processes and outcomes.
As SEO trends and best practices evolve, your schema strategy must adapt to keep pace with these changes.
Implement Schema Markup on Your Sitecore Website With Schema App
Implementing Schema Markup on Sitecore can enhance your website’s search visibility and user engagement. On top of providing search engines with greater clarity about the content on your site, implementing Schema Markup can help you achieve rich results, higher click-through rates, and ultimately, drive more conversions on your site.
While Sitecore’s powerful customization capabilities make it an ideal platform for large enterprises with dynamic content, this complexity can pose challenges when implementing Schema Markup at scale. That’s where partnering with an external solution like Schema App comes in.
Schema App enables you to implement and manage your Schema Markup with agility, ease, and minimal time investment. Our combination of semantic technology and customer success simplifies the Schema Markup process, allowing you to concentrate on creating great content while enjoying the benefits of improved search performance.
Contact us today to see how we can help you implement Schema Markup on Sitecore.
See how Schema App can help your team implement advanced Schema Markup on Sitecore
Martha van Berkel is the co-founder and CEO of Schema App, an end-to-end Semantic Schema Markup solution provider based in Ontario, Canada. She focuses on helping SEO teams globally understand the value of Schema Markup and how they can leverage Schema Markup to grow search performance and develop a reusable content knowledge graph that drives innovation. Before starting Schema App, Martha was a Senior Manager responsible for online support tools at Cisco. She is a Mom of two energetic kids, loves to row, and drinks bulletproof coffee.