Be The Fastest SEO Performer with Structured Data Automation in Play

Table of contents:

1. What is This Post About and Who is it For?
2. The Importance of Structured Data Automation
3. What Dealing With Over 4000 Companies In The Last 5 Years Has Taught Us
4. Why Content Processes Are a Total Mess
5. Learning To Use Structured Data Automation In Order To Become The Marketer Of Future
6. Always be Testing, Always be Validating

What Is This Post About And Who Is It For?

Today’s session is dedicated to all innovative technical marketers, SEOs and marketing technologists who have established a foundational knowledge in technical SEO, structured data (schema markup) and data automation in their work and have collaborated closely with developers to scale their content operations in the past.

We anticipate that this may be useful to those who face the challenges of structuring content on a large scale. So we truly hope that our thought processes and tools logic can aid you in the content automation & distribution process.

The Importance Of Structured Data Automation

Artificial intelligence and structured data automation are paving their way to the content world and slowly dictating the future of content strategy. We have seen it everywhere: no matter whether we speak about an image, video, the metaverse or text in general, AI virtually touches every aspect of this content world: creation, maintenance, ideation or content management and content analytics – all these areas are impacted by AI at scale. It is more than clear – those who choose to ignore these trends are already left in the past. You as well.

If you want to set the standard for content strategy, then it will be inevitable to include artificial intelligence and knowledge graphs in your regular work. They have the power to help you explore what is happening on a page level but also on a page type and category level, up to the gaps and opportunities that you can tackle to win new audiences online.

What Dealing With Over 4000 Companies In The Last 5 Years Has Taught Us

We have spoken to over 4000+ businesses in the past years and one thing that all of them cared about is how they can improve their internal content processes, especially if you are in a constant content production process. You don’t need to be a large publisher to apply automated principles to your work – as long as you create content regularly, this will apply to you too. Chiefs of content, content architects, digital practitioners and SEOs have asked us how they can organize their content in a way that is reusable, structured, easy to distribute and above all, easy to understand. 

The key question was not only how to do this at scale and in a data-driven way but also in a way that it is cost-effective given the value that AI can produce for the business. The answer: use structured data automation.

Why Content Processes Are A Total Mess

This might look irrelevant for you if you are just starting out in the content world, but things will become complicated if you plan to stay in the market in the long run. Blogs can easily get overstaffed with articles that do not drive user value and are:

1. Hard to organize by categories.
2. Tricky to be used for training new natural language processing models.
3. Difficult to navigate around, especially if you are doing some basic tag management.
4. Tough to understand and analyze, especially when doing cross-checking with your competitors.
5. Almost impossible to establish proper content analytics due to inability to categorize at scale.
6. Challenging to follow all different restrictions when it comes to schema production for separate page types & edge-case scenarios.
7. The list goes on.

AI-powered content management is here to stay. Being AI-native and emergent, not just AI-driven, will be the superpower of those who are visionary and want to set the course of tomorrow by using the latest trends to approach their content processes in an intelligent way. That is what digital innovators and martech pioneers like you do.

We are practically speaking about a whole world of redefined roles where the casual marketer no longer exists. We will see new specialties being developed: knowledge-native content writers, information architects, marketing technologists and data analysis automators will drive the content architecture of tomorrow. Given this fact, you might ask yourself: knowing this (and no matter my background), how can I aid my content writers of today so that they can become the content marketers of the future?

Learning To Use Structured Data Automation In Order To Become The Marketer Of Future

Content practitioners can superpower their content strategies by including AI in their everyday work. One way to do so is to use machine learning algorithms for content categorization and smart tag management. Another way is to use prebuilt plugins which can help you organize your content on an entity level, so that you can see which entities drive more organic traffic and produce more revenue back.

This does not come as a surprise. We have known about these “superpowers” in the computer science and engineering world but it seems that now they managed to advance even more when cloud computing and improved linguistic analytics took the lead in the recent years. They have become guiding principles and also very interesting for content practitioners because they are easily accessible to every individual, not just for big content teams. 

The key thing that transformed industries is maybe not AI itself, but the fact that advanced technologies have become more accessible and democratized than ever. Accessibility has changed all – what looked like science fiction in the past is becoming the present and the future.

You might think, “Wow, wait a minute” and feel like everybody who’s approaching you is giving you a typical sales pitch but just think about your established content practices for a moment:

• You have writers just for the sake of producing content;
• You have SEOs who optimize this content to be more search-friendly so that people can find you online;
• You have content managers who care about the whole CMS management and making sure that everything works properly;
• You pay data analysts to analyze the data you’re producing, so that you can know what to invest in in future.

It will be easier if you can help your team of 5+ people to speed up their work and without internal training, especially when on-boarding new people in the organization. Let’s not even talk about all these meetings in between that are needed for your content and data-related people to consolidate between themselves in order to prioritize their work. We are talking about hours and hours of time that can be saved on a monthly level. Your internal search technology also depends on this. Why wait?

To be more specific, here is how the exact process of structured data automation works:

1. You need to perform an in-depth analysis of your SEO efforts;
2. Structure your outcomes and define key performance metrics (KPIs) for your structured data automation process;
3. Start automating your SEO efforts and see the results in just a few weeks;
4. Scale your SEO by using AI, knowledge graphs and machine learning for content creation.

Always Be Testing, Always Be Validating

Scaling is not easy when you are doing it alone, no matter your team or company size. In fact, we tend to underestimate scale in real life. We’ve learned from practice that structured data small teams tend to think that a good template would do the magic: you have a product page, you have attributes for your products – why can’t you just add the markup at the template level, right? 

The reality is that efficiently scaling the markup requires continuous testing and improvement. You might have the image for your product but you can also invest effort to produce multiple images for various resolutions. You might have the right price for your product but you might have forgotten that there are places where you cannot ship it. It is hard to obtain this information easily if you do not establish the basis for your knowledge graph to be created and maintained regularly. We have so many practical examples where improvement at scale is applied to thousands of products by using a knowledge graph that can blend data from different sources and some NLP in between.

We’re telling you this because we have tried-and-tested marketing strategies that drive growth and we have seen the people’s excitement when they can do what they are best at, while using the power of AI and knowledge graphs to help them speed their content efforts. That’s what we’re most proud of at WordLift – enabling people to do their best work and not forcing them to have a deep dive into the latest technological trends because that is what we do best -> remaining tech-savvy, visionary, focused, research-oriented and practical.  

Another showcase of @wordliftit #food api, sending “Spaghetti alla Carbonara” 🍝 and getting back the JSON-LD of “bacon” 🥓 5 stars #linkeddata #seo ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ pic.twitter.com/by4UWBpLu8

— David Riccitelli (@ziodave) July 4, 2022

Start with us today. Book a demo with one of our experts and learn how to leverage the power of structured data automation.