Hey, everybody. Joe Burnich with Big West Marketing. Today we’re going to talk about Schema. Well, what would it be like if you had a little extra tool that’ll give you an edge over the competition when it comes to ranking in the Google Maps section? Well, Schema, which I’m going to explain, will give you that edge. It’ll give you something that most small businesses, local businesses are not using. Most likely your competition is not using this. Most SEO companies are not aware of this and they are not implementing it yet. Like I said, this is going to give you that little extra edge.
So by the end of this video, I’m going to show you how to implement this step-by-step. I’m also going to show you how to test it to make sure that it is correct on your website. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to use my website here, Big West Marketing, as an example of how to do this for a local business.
So the first thing you want to do is get into your dashboard to edit your website. In this case, it’s WordPress and we’re using Genesis theme. And with the Genesis theme, you go down to simple edits. If you have a website by Big West Marketing, you will have this on your website.
So down here in this little box here, this is where we’re going to edit the footer of the website. Why do we want to edit the footer? Because we want this information, this Schema or markup as some people call it, some people also call it microdata, we want this to show up on every page of the website.
Now I need to mention real quick that if you’re a current SEO client with Big West Marketing, you do not have to worry about this. You do not have to do this. You don’t need to email us or call us because all of this is going to be done for you.
But if you’re not a client, or if you’re not an SEO client at least, then you can do this yourself. I’ll also show you how you can have us do it for you at the end of this video. So stay tuned.
Anyway, basically we’re going to add some code down here to the footer of the website that is going to tell Google that our website is a local business, not just a website on the internet but an actual local physical business within a specific area. We’re going to tell Google the actual business name, the business phone number, and the business address, and we’re going to have it all matched with our Google My Business page.
Here’s my Google My Business page. You should have one of these and be familiar with this, and so that you can copy and paste all of the information from here into something I’m going to show you right now.
So real quick. Before I get into actually adding this code, I want to show you how you can test to see if your website is set up correctly. What you do is you go to google.com and you search for the structured data testing tool. So structured data testing tool. You click on the top result here. It’s going to take you to this tool that Google provides, and this is free, that allows you to test your website.
So I’m going to grab my website here, bigwestmarketing.com. I’m going to put it into Google’s tool and I’m going to run this free test. Now it’s going to show a bunch of code and it’s going to be all confusing. Don’t worry about it.
What you’re looking for on the right-hand side is, under Detected, you’re looking for something that says local business. Right now Google is looking at my website and doesn’t automatically know that it’s a local business and doesn’t know all my local business information. I’m going to show you after we add the code, after we add the Schema code, what this will look like, what it should look like. So right now this is bad. You do not want it to look like this because it doesn’t say the local business under the Detected section.
So let’s go back over to my website here. We’re going to put code down in here into the footer. The way we generate this code, the way we get this code is with a website called the microdatagenerator.com. So go ahead and go to that website, the microdatagenerator.com. You’re going to click on Local Business Generators.
Now the Schema people or website, whatever, they have some business categories loaded up in here, but not all. So a lot of people that are watching this are either water damage restoration companies, carpet cleaning companies, or some sort of service-based business. If you don’t see your business under here, that’s no big deal. Just click on Local Business, NAP, instead. That’s where you want to go.
Okay, now what I’m going to do … Let’s look over here at the Google My Business page again, and I’ve got my Google business name, I’ve got my address, and I have my phone number here. We want to copy this stuff exactly. I mean exactly as it appears on this page so that it can link up with your Google My Business page and help rank you on the Map section.
So like I said, copy and paste the Google business name. There we go. Now I’m going to grab the address. I’m not going to type it in. I’m going to copy it so that it’s exactly how it is on my Google My Business page. I’m even going to copy and paste the city because I don’t trust my spelling ability. Missoula, Montana. I’m going to copy the state. I can’t stress how important this is. Then I’m going to copy and paste the zip code, and then I’m going to copy the phone number.
Now I put my address in here because I have a commercial location. Many of you may be working out of your home, and that’s completely fine. If that’s the case, delete this address part out. Do not put your address in there, because if you’re hiding it on Google, which you should be if you’ve got a residential address, then you also want to hide it in the scheme stuff. So delete that. In my case, I’ve got a commercial location so I’m going to go ahead and leave it in and I click submit.
Now what I want to do is copy this code. So instead of having to type all this code out, I’m showing you guys this website so you have a little shortcut. You just copy it and you’re going to paste it into the footer of your website. Then you click Save.
Now let’s go look at the website on the front-end and see what that did. Scroll down to the footer. Now on every page of my website, it’s got all this information and it’s got all the code that Google needs and all that good stuff. So pretty simple.
Now instead of just assuming that I got it right, I want to go back to the testing tool. Once again, if you go to Google and you type in structured data testing tool, click on the top result, and you paste in your website URL. Click Run Test. Now let’s look at the difference here.
Now you see that it actually says Local Business under Detected. So before it didn’t have that, that was bad. Now it does have Local Business. That is good. I click on that, it’s got all my information. This tool is telling me that I have done it correctly. I’ve added all the Schema code correctly.
So that’s how you do it. Like I said, we’re doing this for all of our SEO clients, so you don’t need to do this if you’re a current client with us. If you are not a current SEO client and you want to have this done, it’s $50. We’ll take care of it for you.
Or you can just simply watch this video, take notes, and do it yourself for free. It just depends on how you want to do it. Do you have the time? Do you want to take the energy? It depends. If you want us to do it, just call 406-493-1881, and we’ll get that set up and take care of it for you.
One more thing I want to mention. So I’ve got a single location for my business, but some businesses have several commercial locations. Let’s say you have five different locations in different cities. I’m talking about very legitimate locations, each with their own Google My Business page, and everything’s registered and fine. You want to have a separate page on your website for each one of those cities or each one of those locations.
Then instead of putting the Schema markup in the footer, you want to do it separately for each one of your locations, and then put it on that specific page. That’s the only difference when you have a multilocation business.
That being said, if you have any questions, let us know. My name is Joe Burnich with Big West Marketing. Phone number here is 406-493-1881. I hope this was helpful. Like I said, it’s going to give you that extra edge to rank above your competition on the Google Maps section, on the three-pack, whatever you want to call it. But thank you guys for watching this. I will talk to you soon.
