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By Francisco Nardi

1 year ago

Learn how to use structured data for your personal branding to stand out from the crowd and gain more visibility for your business.

Table of contents:

  1. Structured data and E-E-A-T
  2. Linking data with Schema.org Person
  3. Author property for personal branding
  4. How you can add structured data to your content
  5. What Featured Snippet you can get using structured data

It is a fact that structured data helps search engines to understand web content. Thanks to linked data, search engines can relate topics to each other and understand the relationships between entities (things, places, events, companies, and people).

With all the data in the knowledge graphs, search engines can quickly contextualize a person’s role in our society and understand their range of interests and expertise; in other words, they understand a person’s authority on certain topics.

An excellent personal branding strategy should include structured data for three reasons:

  • Help search engines disambiguate homonyms.
  • Help search engines understand the relationship between a person and other entities (events, institutions, companies, things, topics, and other people) and provide additional information for a broader context of a person.
  • Add amazing features in SERPs, such as Google Knowledge Panel or Answer Box.

In this article, we will focus on disambiguation and building relationships between entities, two critical approaches to a personal branding strategy related to the concept Google expresses with the acronym E-E-A-T.

Structured Data And E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) is a complex concept part of Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines, indicating the quality of a page, content author and domain

Following Google’s guidelines:

  • Experience is the practical experience the content creator has on the topic;
  • Expertise is the knowledge of the content creator on a particular topic;
  • Authoritativeness is the awareness of the content creator, the website, and the main content:
  • Trust is the reliability of the page. Scam pages, fake news, and fraudulent pages are considered untrustworthy.
The above image is a Venn diagram part of Google’s quality evaluator guidelines. We can see that the Trust is at the intersection of the E-E-A.

Using structured data on a web page can help search engines understand the E-E-A-T of content authors on a topic. How? Not directly, but it can help search engines recognize the data and relationships between the content creator, the website, and the main content to other entities around the world.

For example, we can use Author within a BlogPosting or Article schema class to specify name, age, nationality, occupation, education, relatives, company ownership, and many other attributes about the person who wrote the article. This allows search engines to recognize or create a new entity based on the information collected via structured data.

Linking Data With Schema.Org Person

The above image is a snapshot from the official Schema.org website. It shows a type of structured data for a person. Many properties describe a person’s personal information and help search engines to capture this information and store it in their knowledge graph.

In addition, several properties establish a relationship between entities, e.g., the university where the person studied or the awards he won during his professional career. Let us dive into Person’s properties and use cases to understand the potential of linking data for E-E-A-T purposes.

alumniOf

The Schema.org property alumniOf describes the relationship between an individual and an academic institution from which they graduated. This property can be used to describe a person who has earned a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree, for example.

Usage example in JSON-LD:

The “alumniOf” property is a property of the “Person” class (type), and its value is an “EducationalOrganization” class or a subclass thereof, as shown in the example.

The value of “alumniOf” is an object of type “CollegeOrUniversity” with a “name” property to indicate the name of the academic institution. A degree that is relevant to a particular subject increases a person’s authority.

award

The Schema.org property award describes an award or recognition received by a person or organization. It describes awards received for work, art, science, technology, culture, education, solidarity, etc. The award property is a property of the Person and Organization classes, and its value is a text string that describes the award or recognition received.

In this example, the “award” property describes that John Doe received the award for “Best Developer of the Year 2020.”

Information about awards and recognition you have received can be helpful for your personal branding because it shows your expertise and success in your field of work or interest. “award” can help you stand out from other professionals and demonstrate your experience and unique accomplishments.

hasOccupation

The Schema.org property hasOccupation describes a person’s current or previous occupation: a full-time job, a part-time job, self-employment, or a general career. The hasOccupation property is a property of the Person class, and its value is an Occupation class or a subclass of it.

Usage example in JSON-LD:

In this example, the “hasOccupation” property is used to describe that John Doe has the occupation of “Software Engineer.”

As for personal branding, the hasOccupation property can describe your current or past employment and help make your experience and skills known to potential clients, employers, or business partners. It can also help establish your reputation as an expert in your field and increase the visibility of your brand. HasOccupation can be used in conjunction with jobTitle.

memberOf

The Schema.org property memberOf describes the membership of a person or an organization in another organization or group. It describes membership in a professional association, club, non-profit organization, volunteer organization, alumni association, etc. The “memberOf” property is a property of the “Person” and “Organization” classes. Its value is a class “Organization” or a subclass of it.

Usage example in JSON-LD:

In this example, the “memberOf” property is used to describe that John Doe is a member of the “Association of Software Engineers.”

The “memberOf” property can be used to describe your memberships in organizations or groups, and to demonstrate your professional relationships and expertise. This can help establish your reputation as a professional and increase the visibility of your brand. For example, if you are a member of a professional association.

performerIn

The Schema.org property performerIn can be used to describe the participation of a person or organization as a performer in any type of event. It can describe a concert, a stage show, a movie, a TV show, a business event, etc. The “performerIn” property is a property of the “Person” and “Organization” classes and its value is an “Event” class or a subclass of it.

Usage example in JSON-LD:

In this example, the “performerIn” property is used to describe that Jane Smith was a performer at the Digital Marketing Summit conference.

Author Property For Personal Branding

The “author” property is one of the most important in determining the E-E-A-T of content. Because it allows you to associate the entity of the content with its author, you can add “author” to schema types within CreativeWork or Review, especially in Article, NewsArticle, MedicalScholarlyArticle, and TechArticle SD.

Usage example in JSON-LD:

This property serves as valuable markup for the author line, providing both readers and search engines with information about the author of a particular piece of content. For Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content, it becomes an important structured data markup that must be included in the page code to strengthen the trustworthiness of the content. YMYL refers to content that has the power to influence an important decision regarding a person’s money or life.

The last property we would like to introduce is the sameAs property. We have already written in our Academy about sameAs, one of the most valuable properties for linking data. SameAs indicates to search engines a unique relationship between a person and a specific page on another platform or website, such as a social network profile, a website profile, another author page, etc.

How You Can Add Structured Data To Your Content

We have seen all the structured data useful for personal branding, but how do we implement it on our website? Nothing easier than that with the WordLift tool. With a few clicks you can create structured data of all the types easily and intuitively.

WordLift also generates structured data useful for personal branding, such as Person (with sameAs), Articles and CreativeWork (with Author). WordLift’s strength lies in the technology behind it. Thank you to AI and machine learning, your website content is analyzed and understood. Once WordLift comprehend your content, you can structure the information by creating new pages as if they were entities of your knowledge graph.

This way, both search engines and users can understand the value of your content and, why not, of your personal brand.

What Featured Snippet You Can Get Using Structured Data

By providing all the information and details we have previously seen, Google and search engines know exactly what users can find on your site – and what it all means. This allows them to present your content in search results in an eye-catching and visual way.

Here we show you 2 important features in the SERPs that you can get for your personal branding with structured data in your content.

Google Answer Box

In the Google SERP, we can see the attribute value of an entity when we search for specific information. “How old is Barack Obama?”, “How tall is LeBron James?”, “Where was J.K. Roling born?”, etc. Search engines like Google can respond directly to these types of queries.

This SERP snippet is called Google Answer Box and takes data directly from the knowledge graph! An entity in the knowledge graphs can contain attributes that come from structured data and other sources.

Google Knowledge Panel

The knowledge panel is the ‘rich result’ that summarizes the most important information about a particular entity or topic.

Appearing in Google’s Knowledge Panel is a great opportunity for you and your business. It allows you to gain more visibility and reach more people, which increases traffic and conversions on your website.

Adding structured data to your content allows Google to have consistent and complete information about you and provide users with these types of results when they search for your name.

We asked Jason Barnard, the Brand SERP Guy, to show us how to set up WordLift to enable a Knowledge Panel. Watch the video and start using structured data for your personal branding now!

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