Episode 4: More Than You Thought You Needed to Know About Schema Markup

Now, Schema Markup is cool. There’s no doubt about that. Gary Illyes said, “I want to live in a world where Schema Markup is not that important, but we currently need it.” And in Jason’s little trio theory of relevancy, understanding, and credibility, we are looking at understanding - the need to communicate with Google in a language that it can easily understand and digest. And that is Schema Markup.

Here we have the main basis of Schema Markup. Things: CreativeWork, Event, Organization, Person, Place, Product, Intangible, and Action.

Episode 4 of the #SEOisAEO series went deeper into Schema than any single webinar had before, with Gennaro Cuofano, Dave Ojeda, and Ashley Berman Hale joining Jason Barnard to examine what structured markup actually does, why most implementations fall short, and what a thorough Schema strategy looks like for a brand serious about answer engine performance.

The conceptual bridge the episode built is important: Schema vocabulary maps directly onto Knowledge Graph structure. Schema Types correspond to entity types. Schema Properties correspond to entity attributes. Nested Schema Types correspond to entity relationships. When you mark up your Organisation with its foundingDate, its founder, its areaServed, and its sameAs links to authoritative external profiles, you’re not decorating a page - you’re writing your entity’s Knowledge Graph entry in a language the algorithm can process without guessing.

Ashley Berman Hale’s contribution grounded the technical depth in practical implementation: JSON-LD as the preferred format (cleanly separated from the HTML, easy to maintain, machine-readable without affecting visual rendering), the importance of nesting entities rather than treating each schema block as an island, and the common implementation errors that produce markup technically valid but semantically thin.

Dave Ojeda brought the audit perspective: most sites that have Schema have it because someone installed a plugin and called it done. The result is typically surface-level markup - type declarations without substantive properties, islands of structured data with no relationships between them, and sameAs fields either missing or pointing to the wrong external profiles. The difference between perfunctory Schema and substantive Schema is the difference between telling Google you’re an Organisation and telling Google exactly what kind of organisation, who runs it, what it does, where it operates, and where to find corroborating evidence on third-party sources it already trusts.

Gennaro Cuofano connected Schema to the business context: the brands investing in thorough structured data markup in 2018 were building an entity profile that would compound in value as Google’s entity-based systems matured. That prediction has held. The Schema work done in 2018 contributed to Knowledge Graph entries that AI systems draw on in 2026.

Published by: Semrush. Host: Jason Barnard. Guests: Gennaro Cuofano, Dave Ojeda, Ashley Berman Hale. September 25, 2018