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By Emilia Gjorgjevska

2 years ago

Learn why first-party schema markup data is important for your business and how you can use it to improve your SEO.

Table of contents:

  1. The Problems With Second and Third Party Data
  2. What Is First, Second and Third Party Data
  3. Digital Marketing Challenges
  4. How Does Using First Party Schema Markup Data Software Help
  5. Conclusion

The Problems With Second and Third Party Data

For years, digital marketers have relied on data collected by partners or data brokers in the process of analyzing their potential audiences and crafting strategies to win customers online. However, the truth is that today, in the modern world when the competition is exponentially increasing on a daily level, it is more important than ever to demand better data. Better data is the path towards more intelligent and customized customer experiences online – there is nothing more powerful than utilizing what you have on your side in the first place.

First party schema markup data is a way of using your data to provide more context to your business online. And while it is not easy to do it on your own and it might seem costly sometimes, you should never forget that second and third-party data are complex and do not give an insight of the whole customer purchasing journey online. Yes, that is right. Whoever claims something different, is lying to you. It is the first party data that matters or the first party data schema markup that has the hidden gem in the SEO world.

What Is First, Second and Third Party Data

To go straight to the point, first party data is something that you directly collect from your customers, online searchers and own completely on your side. You have a full control on this data, especially when it comes to first party schema markup data. This includes customer surveys, analytics data, log file data, CRM systems, call centers, social media, website and your content too.

Second party data and third party data are owned by somebody else and you need to pay to get access to it. In simple terms, it is not something that you can directly access and may not fit your business case fully.

Digital Marketing Challenges

We understand the challenges that digital marketing professionals are facing because we have been present in the digital marketing world in the past two decades and we have seen from practice that the power of this data is not fully utilized. There are many different reasons and complicated culture architectures and relationships that impact this. If we need to sum it up, then we would say that the first party schema markup data is largely untapped because of the following most prominent reasons:

  1. The management does not want to invest in marketing because they see it as a spending rather than an investment. Usually, this is happening as a consequence of having very little knowledge of the marketing world and having the prejudice that “marketing is easy to do” and “the magic will work by itself”.
  2. There are not enough allocated technical resources because devs do not want to deal with “marketing stuff” since it is not formally part of their everyday work. You might learn that devs do not want to deal with it because they do not consider it to be “technical enough” – automation and digital transformation are still getting their way in the marketing world (yeah, even after corona, hmmm).
  3. Previous experiences in working with marketing agencies has proven to be ineffective due to lack of a strategy on how to report the findings in a more data-driven way. First party schema markup data definitely requires this, so be sure that you have the right professionals with you alongside.
  4. The vast amount of rich and reliable data like emails, contents and SMS is hidden in plain sight because there is a lack of technical understanding on how to combine this data together to form a data-informed strategy.
  5. SEOs do not understand the real reason behind the existence of schema markup and therefore are not utilizing it enough as they should. Linked data principles and publishing to LOD is still new to them, so there is a lack of established strategy on how to reuse knowledge graph data.
  6. The list goes on.

How Does Using First Party Schema Markup Data Software Help

Now, while it is fine to use SEO software that helps with SEO analysis on a more basic level (full disclosure, we also use other SEO software to enable our work), things can change when you need to report to experienced managers or C-level executives. Why? Because they demand a clear understanding of the data collection process. Sometimes, they also want to know all the nitty-gritty details behind the SEO strategy behind. Why is this happening?

SEO software is absolutely needed in order to find a way to report back to management but if you do not use first party data and especially first party schema markup data, you will risk your credibility as a true SEO professional. We all know that management wants everything to be simple and have reports showing only one line which either goes up or down, however, this cannot be useful if you are not using your first party data trend line. Keyword data is useful when planning your content strategies but what can be more useful than actually understanding  your own content data in the first place?

Second and third party data is misleading and unreliable. It can guide you in the wrong way, thinking that you perform well when you actually do not and this can be easily detected when the revenues simply do not match the SEO wins that you are claiming. We had a situation in the past when some of our partners thought that they were underperforming when doing analytics by using second and third party data tools, when in fact they were actually doing great when using Google Search Console data and our own knowledge graph data. Differences are easy to spot when you understand the nuances and the differences of both.

Conclusion

To sum up, everything that is not first party data is questionable. How will you justify your strategy in front of top management then? You cannot – the reality of the SEO strategy behind simply does not match what is happening in practice. It is full of data gaps, little sampling and lack of unified metrics – it is hard to report on something when you do not understand the data collection process and metrics formation behind it.

First party schema markup data increases relevance, authority and reliability. It is something that you own and can organize. What is even better, it is reusable because you can work with graph databases and knowledge graphs to power up your internal enterprise system while empowering your SEO at the same time.

In business it is all about having a clear understanding of what you own and how you can “play it” to its full potential. The same is in the SEO industry – use software that eases your work but make sure that you know how this software collects your data and how it distributes it further.

We at WordLift are proud to work with Google Search Console data (first party data tool) and provide expertise using first party schema markup data too. We form and use structured forms of your own text, audio or visual data to enrich knowledge bases like DBpedia or intelligent assistants in the process of information analysis and distribution. We care to make sure that you work with the most clean and reliable data possible and that is our premise: doing clean and open business for everyone. What is even better, first party data cannot be lost overtime while you can lose second and third party data if you stop paying for it. 

There is nothing more powerful than utilizing what you have on your side in the first place. Do you want to learn how you can bring your business to the next level? Book a demo.

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